Visual Spatual Learner

Her next clue was something she noticed when she was demonstrating drawing to a class, and trying to give a verbal explanation of the methods she was using. She found that she often would "simply stop talking right in the middle of a sentence. I would hear my voice stop and I would think about getting back to the sentence, but finding the words again would seem like a terrible chore -- and I didn't really want to anyhow. But pulling myself back at last, I would resume talking -- and then find that I had lost contact with the drawing, which suddenly seemed confusing and difficult. Thus I picked up a new bit of information: I could either talk or draw, but I couldn't do both at once."

~*~*~*~

A part of the answer is that, from childhood onward, we have learned to see things in terms of words: we name things, and we know facts about them. The dominant left verbal hemisphere doesn't want too much information about things it perceives -- just enough to recognize and to categorize. The left brain, in this sense, learns to take a quick look and says, "Right, that's a chair ...." Because the brain is overloaded most of the time with incoming information, it seems that one of its functions is to screen out a large proportion of incoming perceptions. This is a necessary process to enable us to focus our thinking and one that works very well for us most of the time. But drawing requires that you look at something for a long time, perceiving lots of details, registering as much information as possible -- ideally, everything....

Symptoms of Dyslexia

Dyslexic people are visual, multi-dimensional thinkers. We are intuitive and highly creative, and excel at hands-on learning. It is sometimes hard for us to understand letters, numbers, symbols, and written words because we think in pictures but learning to adapt this hidden talent can lead to success, particularly in creative and inventive fields.

Reading:

· Fluctuating memory problems with letters, words or numbers -- including sequences such as the alphabet.

· Skipping over or scrambling letters, words and sentences.

· Reading is a slow, tiring process often accompanied with head tilting or finger pointing.

· Reversal of similar letters (such as "b" and "d"), words (such as "saw" and "was") and numbers (such as "6" and "9").

· Letters and words blur, move, double, scramble or are omitted or added.