What is Alexia? Is This a Disorder that Writers and Readers Should Care About?

What is alexia? Why should we care? How does it affect me? Well, it can affect readers and writers from all walks of life so that is one of the reasons it should matter you if you are a lover of the written word. First off alexia is a form of dyslexia. Alexia is a type of brain disorder where someone can suddenly lose the ability to read.

The scary thing is that these people previously had such ability. Other names for this include word blindness or text blindness. This is typically caused by severe damage to the left side of your brain. The occipital and temporal lobes are those that are most affected. This really can go along with and it is a cousin to agraphia which is the loss of the ability to write.

Now how do you combat this? Well, there is very little you can do about it. The reason for this is there is very little scientific research that has been able to pinpoint what exactly is the root cause of it. The first time I’d heard of it was in a psychology class where the professor was showing a tape of a tape of a PBS special hosted and narrated by Alan Alda. As intelligent as Mr. Alda is (you know you loved him on MASH and the West Wing too) It was a video about how our brain can be so unpredictable.

Unfortunately I think the tape was flawed in several areas because it tended to focus too much on the memories of a little girl who can recite the Declaration of Independence and a guy who was really good at counting cards. Some kind of world champion at the number of cards he can remember. Unfortunately they kind of glazed over the portion about alexia to focus on the card counter. I did however find something about it on several other academic sites.

As far as I can tell there are four different forms of alexia. Pure alexia makes it difficult to recognize words. Most folks who have this do retain some reading and spelling skills. Your brain basically goes haywire so it is hard to distinguish letters to put it in easier terms. It is believed that pure alexia may be caused by big lesions that cut off your visual cortex.

Surface alexia is where people go strictly on the pronunciation of words in order to define them due to their visual struggles. If words sound the same then this throws off the person’s ability to understand what they are reading. Surface alexia is also caused by a lesion, but in a different area that affects the brain.

Phonological alexia deals with the other side of the coin of surface alexia. Basically a word can be identified with this form of alexia, still sounded out, but not read well. For some reason people with phonological alexia are more likely to be able to read concrete nouns as opposed to abstract nouns. I guess the visual of seeing the item in front of you potentially does help.

Then deep alexia deals with the inability to identify and read synonyms. I apologize for the brevity of all this, but this is a disorder that desperately needs attention because it is robbing our youth of their literacy.

Reference:

• gumc.georgetown.edu/departments/neurology/friedman/alexia.html