What Is Dyslexia?

A Right-Brained Learning Difference

The brain is divided into two hemispheres: the left and the right. The left hemisphere thinks and expresses ideas in terms of letters, words, and numbers. It coordinates information in a computer-like fashion, giving it structure and sequence. It is linear in operation. Most importantly, it understands abstract words and ideas. It is the location in our brains where we work out cause and effect and learn to intellectualize.

The right hemisphere thinks in whole concrete images and pictures. It provides learning awareness grounded in the three senses: auditory, visual and kinesthetic. As the right brain thinks in whole concrete images, it does not like to break its visual images down into their component parts to understand or learn them; for example, breaking words into their phonemes (sounds of individual letters or groups of letters). These only confuse the right-brained person who thinks in whole concrete pictures. Phonetic sounds have no meaning on their own, so they cannot be understood, and therefore, cannot be easily processed and stored as images in long term memory. Storing information depends on having all the parts present in a whole context such as the complete image of a printed word or a complete lesson or assignment. Through memorizing whole words the right brain understands what the letters in the words represent. This enables them to read or write the words correctly.

Unfortunately, most of our teaching and learning depends on reading, listening and writing in abstract words and numbers that cannot be turned into whole concrete pictures. As a result the dyslexic student not only has learning problems the left does not have, but it learns very differently from the left brain, and so must be taught differently.

How the Right Brain Thinks

The Dyslexia Victoria Online approach to being right-brained or dyslexic offers new alternative teaching methods, insights and explanations for the many learning problems classified as dyslexia. Our most important realization has led us to stop treating it as a learning disability or neurological disease. Our research studies, classroom and tutoring experiences, assessment and evaluation program, and our work with parents who are homeschooling their children have shown us that the right-brained student is generally very intelligent, but often held back by a number of learning differences that are overlooked by educational systems.

While left-brained people understand and learn about the world through printed words and number concepts, an increasing number of right-brained people among us understand it through whole concrete visual images that are complete in all their details. But they are not taught how to use these learning skills to their advantage. These traits include being more observant, artistic, spatial, creative, inventive, organizational, reality-based, intuitive, intelligent, innovative and multi-dimensional in their thinking.

The Right and Left Brains Work Together

However, to be able to use these learning traits in the modern world and find jobs compatible with their intelligence and abilities, predominantly right-brained persons still need to be able to spell, read, write, and work with mathematical numbers and concepts that allow them to reason, analyze, keep records, work out cause and effect and intellectualize.

The difference between being right-brained and left-brained is that the right brain has to work through an area in the left brain that can think logically, step by step, using abstract words and numbers. To make this transition of thoughts from concrete images in the right brain into the “language” of the left brain, the right brain must first change its stored concrete images into the language of the left brain which is through words, letters and numbers. When it has learned how to do this, it can then transpose the information through the neuropathways of the brain to an area in the left brain specially developed for thinking, learning and analyzing cause and effect.

The Teacher´s Job: Training the Right Brain in the Skills of the Left Brain

The teacher´s job is to teach the left and right brains how to work together. The teacher must first assess and evaluate the learning problems of the dyslexic students, then provide them with the appropriate learning skills that enable the right brain to change its stored images of information into the words and numbers it can send off to the left brain for intellectual learning and thinking.