In a recent TIME piece researchers found that past research techniques on individuals with dyslexia wasn’t the best approach.
Until recently, researchers assumed the challenge could be traced to language difficulties, including problems processing printed words, and they focused their attention on the language parts of the brain.
But in the latest research published in the journal Neuron, scientists led by John Gabrieli, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that dyslexia may be due to a much broader difference in brain function. After analyzing functional MRI brain scans of people with and without dyslexia, they found that those with dyslexia were less adept at something called adaptive learning. When the brain sees something new, whether it’s a word, object, voice or experience, it expends a lot of neural energy to gather as much information about the novel stimulus as possible. But if it does this every time it hears the same voice, or encounters the same dog barking, for example, that wouldn’t be efficient. It’s therefore able to adapt and quickly triage new encounters from familiar ones.
This is an interesting step in learning more about the root causes of and potentially cure for dyslexia.
Read the full article here.
