What reading is like for me

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I have problems reading. Somehow I 'read' the grammar, the structure of the sentence and the shape of the words and lose the content/meaning. The general point of the book or trend of the argument only appears very peripherally and I usually forget what the book was about even while I'm still reading it. There are books I have read 3 times and now only have the vaguest idea what they are about ( mostly by guessing from the title).

When I get to the end of each sentence I read it again, whether or not I've understood it at the first attempt. If my mind has wandered I read it a third time. When I reach the end of the paragraph I go back to the beginning and repeat the paragraph. It often takes me an hour of concentrated effort to read 4 pages.
However I think some of this may have to do with the fact that I nearly always read books in foreign languages and that this is my main form of repetitive action. Books in my own language I don't like because then I have to pay attention to the content rather than the words and for some reason the content is not as interesting as the words, but then the words aren't interesesting in my own language because it's my own language.

When I was at university I could never consult a book for information but had to start with the first sentence and read on until the last sentence, regardless of what I was reading the book for.

Reading is almost a religious ceremony for me, which makes it a totally dysfunctional way of getting information.

Probably the ideal book for me would have no content at all, just words.

I had problem reading in the past, in the exact manner Jory describes it. I lost attention, didn't understand what a sentence was saying even if I was reading it for the tenth time, and it drained me of energy.

Another thing I remember in particular was how objects nearby the book itself could easily annoy and distract me. I'm talking about such a simple thing as my own finger! Usually I would put the book on a large empty table...

But I simply kept going and pushing, taking small steps even if it sucked And I can say most if not all of these problems are gone now.

I feel the only way you can get in term with this problem is to keep pushing Jory. Also you should be able to obtain professional help if you/your parents can afford it.

There should also be a lot of material about this on the internet that can offer advice and the road ahead

//Arash

Jory

My issues with reading are very similar to yours. I've read about 10 novels in my entire life (taking 6 months and more to complete each one, except a select few). That para in your post reminds me of when I tried to read 'The Hobbit'. I read the first page over and over and still never took in a single thing. To date, I have not read that book.

But, it's also very confusing as I can read very well. I even help out at my daughter's school with kids who are struggling with reading and I am really confident in my abilities to help them. Also, I started to read properly when I was 3yrs old. My parents don't even remember teaching me, they think I was mostly self taught. I can also read upside down, as another poster says (almost as well as I can the right way up).

This was the only thing that I struggled with at school and caused the teachers a lot of confusion. They couldn't work me out at all. The main problem for me was that I couldn't study, but I got my degree nonetheless.

I'm pretty certain it's a focus/distractibility thing. I'm almost certain that ADHD traits are a factor. There are a couple of books that I have read and didn't have a single problem. But, I loved them from start to finish and they made a big impression on me.

Question - When you read, do you hear your own voice in your head (or made up voices of characters). I do, but I've been told that this is not not the way it's done normally. Others see words and register their meaning, without having to hear them (either out loud or as a voice in their head).

Have you ever heard of hyperlexia?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlexia

It seems to describe me somewhat. My comprehension is good, but I can't say for sure what it was like as a child. And I was speaking at a young age, but have been told I was conversing and not just repeating what I'd heard. Although some of the things I've been told about make that seem unlikely. My mum says I was sitting in my high pram in the garden (obviously under a year) and called to a neighbour, 'Hello, (her full name) are you going to the Co (a local store)?' The woman told the assistants at the Co and they said that the fact I was speaking was old news. Could a baby say that and know what it meant? I also have an intense fascination with numbers and letters (I do this embarrassing thing whereby I convert words into numbers and do calculations on them, for no purpose, all the time).

As for my reading, I should have gone to school at 4 1/2, but went at 3 1/2 instead, because of it. My mum was advised by a health visitor to get me into education, so she found a little private school and they were happy to take me early.

I'll read a bit more about it. Thanks

Me again; starting to obsess about this.

Until I read this thread, I was a little disheartened that my daughter hadn't inherited my reading 'super-power'. She's like me at that age, except she doesn't do as she's told and is reading at the expected level. As her dad's dyslexic, I worried that she might be more like him in that respect. I had thought that reading early was one of my positives (or an indicator of intelligence) and would help her through school life, if she had inherited this trait. But now I'm beginning to realise that it's probably associated with my other problems and not related to my intelligence at all.

Listening to my daughter reading last night was great. She has an amazing understanding of the story, despite her concentration difficulties (and I can't help comparing her with the kids that I assist). She was even changing the words slightly to make it funnier (odd sense of humour, but I could see what she was doing and why she was doing it). She has already developed a love of books, which I've never been able to have.

This is a very interesting thread, I hope I haven't killed it.

I have problems reading too. Earlier this year I had my depth perception tested and my doctor said that if 20 was "normal" and 100 was the worst anybody could possibly have, I would be in the 70's, so my depth perception is pretty bad. He also said this can cause problems with reading, like switching words/letters around, skipping words/letters, adding words/letters, which I do pretty much every time I read. An old psychologist tested me for Dyslexia by having me spell words and read a short paragraph, but I did well, not even one mistake, so he said it was impossible for me to have it. I'm going to get retested by a professional, just to be sure, because I match so many characteristics.

Tonight I tried some reading.

An hour into it, I hadn't flipped a page yet.

This is getting ridiculous.

I have Irlen syndrome and my tinted overlays/tinted glasses really help.

I still find dense tracts of black text on white paper hard to read.

I have a plug-in on my Adobe PDF called PDFAloud, which reads out PDFs for me, which helps a lot.

Have you been tested for a convergence insufficiency (it is a different test to 20/20 vision). Someone with a convergence insufficiency can have trouble absorbing what they have read, lose their place when reading, misread words etc. Words can appear to jump or move on the page. In some cases a person can also be clumsy, have depth perception issues, diplopia and may have trouble with 3D vision (ie I cannot see 3D movies...they look like blurry 2D movies to me as I don't have good binocular vision).

I also have to read things over and over again to absorb them even though I wear glasses with a prism in to help.

What happens is that the eyes do not converge properly. Normally, when converging on a singular point, people will see two slightly different images that the brain merges into one. If the divergence is too great (the eyes are not focusing on the same singular point) the brain can have trouble merging the two images and all sorts of symptoms pop up such as blurry vision, headaches when reading, difficulty absorbing what you just read (causing you to reread sentences over and over). Over time the brain can start a process called suppression where it ignores one of the images from the other eye (although you can see through the eye, the brain just suppresses the image) and this can cause problems with hand-eye coordination, depth perception, loss of binocular vision and problems with judging distances (you can be clumsy basically lol).

I have convergence insufficiency as well as an intermittent exotropia in one of my eyes (lazy eye that comes and goes). If you have not been tested for convergence issues it may be worth nipping to the opticians. It's a fairly common and under-diagnosed problem.

I point it out as I get similar reading problems to yourself. Although my actual reading ability is very good and was always advanced, my eyes tend to slow things down and mess it up lol. Same with my typing. The typo fairy loves me!

Last edited by bumble on 22 Nov 2011, 7:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

Did the optician test you for convergence problems as the symptoms you are having can result from a convergence insufficiency.

I have this at close range. I am vy nearsighted, but sometimes have trouble reading with the glasses on. When I take my glasses off, after a spell, I have to close my left eye to be able to focus on the page.

Other than that, I'm a great reader though. Read 22,357 pages in 3 months this summer.

I have 20/20 vision (almost) but my convergence issue is so large that I have to have a walloping great prism in my lenses (talk about thick glasses!) and even that doesn't help sometimes lol. I can find it easier to read by covering an eye as well (usually my right, which is my weak eye).

22,357 pages in 3 months!! wow!!
It took me longer than that to get through just a 1000 pages of LOTR.

Reading is incredibly frustrating for me. The bigger the block of text the worse it is.
My eyes get lost in the page, instead of scanning left to right, they bounce all around up, down, right, left. I'll get distracted by the spaces between words. Or see the patterns one letter will make. My brain is very visual, letters are just shapes. But I can read text no matter what the orientation, upside down, backwards.

I miss a big chunk of what is said on these forums because so many people write these huge walls of text.

I have a similar problem to what the OP demonstrated, except take those repeated sentences, and scramble the words.

To make matters worse, I have a lot of "floaters" in both eyes that distract from what I'm reading.

Jory,

I'm not sure if I understand what you meant by your OP. Did you mean you have to read things multiple times to understand the meaning of the sentence, or does you brain just automatically read the same sentence over and over for now apparent reason?

This makes me believe that it's the former. Allow me to possible shed some light as to why your brain does this. I have the exact same problem. Basically, when you read a sentence, this is what happens in your brain (normally):

- You process the meaning of the first sentence.
- You holds that into your memory.
- You process the meaning of the second sentence.
- You process the relationship between the first and second parts of the sentence.

When I read that I was like (couldn't find a lightbulb lol). People like us have a problem in the processing department. I have a feeling that you can memorize information, but when someone asks "why is that?" you can't answer. Of course I could be wrong because I'm speaking of my own experience. The more convoluted the sentence, the less is makes sense to me. For example:

"X does Y" is simple for me to get.
"W does X by Y feels that X is also Z" is too much to process in the time it takes to read.

What I've been doing to remedy this is, instead of reading the sentence at a normal speed several times, I read the sentence very slowly. Instead of finding the relationship between two halves of the sentence, I process the relationship between two words. If I can, I imagine X doing Y as a picture.

I hoped this help, even if just a little. If this isn't what you were looking for, I'm sorry for making you read all of that.

Shadewraith, I believe I process reading completely differently from what you describe.

When I read nonfiction, I often have the same problems as Jory. therefore, I rarely ever even attempt to read technical nonfiction.

But when I read fiction, esp science fiction (special interest, priority #2!), I do not see the words or comprehend their meaning at all. Unless the writing is horribly overwrought: the writer trying to show off their vocabulary, or if the writing is overly descriptive, like Tolstoy taking 15 pages to describe what's on the dinner table. Some authors, I cannot read. Period.

I skim the page in a random, star-like, pattern, and my brain absorbs the words subconsciously and creates a hallucinatory image in my head of what is happening. It takes me about 40-50 seconds to "read" a page in a typical paperback novel. Speed reading uses a similar technique of scan-and-absorb-subconsciously.

It's like watching a movie. I don't see the words. I see the characters, hear their voices, smell the flowers and feel the sun on my face, and so on. It is only after having finished the book that I can contemplate the meaning at all, sometimes months or years later.

I used to think this was completely insane, but I am given to understand that it's actually rather common with avid fiction readers.