NLPhilia Blog

A recent article in discovery News indicates that there are neurological differences between the experience of dyslexia in native readers of Chinese and native readers of English:

Dyslexia affects different parts of children’s brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese. That finding, reported in Monday’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, means that therapists may need to seek different methods of assisting dyslexic children from different cultures.

Read the rest at Discovery News from the Discovery Channel.

(Hat tip to BoingBoing!)

Additional note: I read an interesting book by a former dyslexic. It is called “The Gift of Dyslexia”. Check the author’s Web site for more information.

Over at Interesting Thing of the Day there’s a nice article on Synesthesia:

There are at least 50 different types of synesthesia, involving various combinations of senses both as the triggering stimulus and the secondary response. Some forms of synesthesia are experienced as multiple modalities of a single physical sense. For example, seeing a number might evoke a certain color for one synesthete, while in another person the same number might cause a different visual sensation, such as a pattern or shape. One sense may also trigger another, as in a tactile sensation that has a taste. But not all synesthetic experiences are restricted to the five senses. In some synesthetes, a word or sound might evoke a sensation of motion, or even a kinesthetic response, inducing the person to assume a particular physical position. There are also cases in which abstract concepts, such as days of the week or months of the year, cause the sensation of shapes, colors, or other experiences.

Go read the article or listen to the podcast (9:26, 8.64 MB, mp3).

The New York Times reports on a study that shows that training your memory improves your overall intelligence:

Until now, it had been widely assumed that the kind of mental ability that allows us to solve new problems without having any relevant previous experience — what psychologists call fluid intelligence — is innate and cannot be taught though people can raise their grades on tests of it by practicing.

But in the new study, researchers describe a method for improving this skill, along with experiments to prove it works.

Go read the full article.

(Thanks for the heads-up, honey.)