Can You Forget How to Read and Write
Once we have successfully learned how to read, it continues to be easy for most of us. But for some people information technology tin can exist an immense challenge. In developmental dyslexia, the process of learning to read is disrupted, while in alexia – or acquired dyslexia – brain damage can affect reading ability in previously literate adults.
Patients with pure alexia lose the power to read fluently following injury to areas in the rear part of the left hemisphere of their brain. The curious matter is that they tin can still walk, talk, think, and even write similar they did before their injury. They just can't read. Not fifty-fifty what they have written themselves.
Some patients lose the power to recognise letters and words completely, but more commonly, patients with pure alexia tin can recognise single letters and will spell their way through words to identify them. As a result, some researchers prefer the term "letter-by-letter reading" to pure alexia.
Pure alexia as a syndrome was start described more than 120 years ago, but researchers still disagree on the cause of the reading issues. They agree that a lesion in the brain causes the problems, simply they can't agree on which cognitive mechanisms may be responsible, or fifty-fifty how the disorder should exist defined.
Not a linguistic communication problem
Evidence from functional encephalon imaging has led to the idea of a brain expanse that is specialised in recognising words and letters, chosen the "visual word grade area". It is this expanse that is ordinarily damaged in pure alexia. However, the role of this area in the way we read is highly debated and there is disagreement about whether it is reading-specific, or important for all sorts of visual recognition, such as looking at images or even faces. The aforementioned questions are discussed regarding pure alexia: whether the disorder is specific to reading or a more general deficit in somebody's visual processing ability.
In most, if not all cases of pure alexia, other visual perceptual functions such as recognition of numbers or objects are affected, while other language functions, like speech comprehension and production – as well as writing – may be intact.
So it makes sense to look at pure alexia equally a visual disorder; if it was a language trouble, we would at least look writing to besides be afflicted, and it's not. It is also articulate, however, that the deficit in pure alexia patients primarily affects recognition of complex visual stimuli. This is because patients with this disorder may perform commonly in perceiving elementary patterns.
Pure alexic patients have difficulty recognising numbers too every bit messages, and also show problems in perceiving more than than a few letters or numbers at the aforementioned fourth dimension. And so information technology seems that patterns must be either visually complex, or demand to be linked with pregnant – such as words – for pure alexic patients to be impaired. On this ground, we accept suggested that the core problem for pure alexic patients, is that they see "also little too tardily" to exist able to read fluently.
Equally yous read the words in this article, y'all demand to perceive and integrate multiple messages at a fourth dimension to admission the significant of the words and the text. Very few other visual tasks demand the aforementioned speed and span of apprehension for successful recognition, which is why patients with pure alexia rarely complain of whatsoever problems other than in reading.
When letters come easier than words
For normal readers, integrating messages into words is a very simple task that we perform automatically and effortlessly. It may actually be more than difficult to focus on a unmarried letter within a discussion than the word itself.
This is also known as the "word superiority upshot" – that people are better at identifying words than single messages, even though words consist of letters that must be processed for the word to exist recognised. This upshot probably arises because of two things: beginning, normal readers can process messages in parallel past identifying multiple letters at a time and second, our noesis of word meaning and word spelling helps u.s. to place the word.
The word superiority effect is non nowadays in pure alexic patients: they actually perform ameliorate recognising single letters than with words. For instance, when they are asked to recognise something that is presented to them for a very short time they would recognise the messages, rather than the word itself. Perhaps it's no wonder that many of them resort to letter-by-letter reading.
In evolutionary terms, reading is a very recent skill which takes time and instruction to learn. If a dedicated brain surface area is responsible for visual recognition of words then this function of the encephalon must have been created in each of the states equally we learn, rather than through evolutionary mechanisms and evolution.
Simply although the "visual word form area" may be specialised for reading, and this specialisation is created through learning to read, the area itself is non new – the brain hasn't grown in any way. That is one of the intriguing things well-nigh the brain: fifty-fifty if all we learn is stored in there, the brain doesn't grow much bigger when we learn. Instead, it seems to be reorganised, so that new skills may relocate or at to the lowest degree slightly displace older skills.
This has been referred to as "neuronal recycling" by the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, the man who likewise coined the term "the visual give-and-take course surface area". It seems that the visual word form area, in addition to beingness crucial for visual give-and-take recognition, continues to contribute to our recognition of other visual stimuli such every bit images of objects. Exploring this relationship between reading and other cognitive skills is a new avenue in research on reading and the encephalon where there is nevertheless much to acquire.
Source: https://theconversation.com/alexia-what-happens-when-a-brain-injury-makes-you-forget-how-to-read-43811
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