Abstract
Somehow a super-laser of insight, launched presumably from my subconscious, finally penetrated and burst my traditionalist bubble. I was suddenly able to look at the clinical reality of dyslexics with fresh eyes and a new perspective. And I was finally capable of thinking nontraditionally—relatively resistance-free. Accordingly, I reasoned in a seeming atypical or nontraditionalist fashion:
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Notes
- 1.
I still had not fully recognized that dyslexia was a complex syndrome, not just a reading disorder. That’s because I had not yet fully escaped from the traditionalist bubble. And didn’t realize it. Complete escape from misassumptions isn’t easy. As they say, you can take the kid out of Brooklyn, but you can’t take the Brooklyn out of the kid—Brooklyn being, in this case, your mental baggage: biased thinking.
Almost three decades later, Finnish neurotologist Tapani Rahko independently validated the presence of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) and abnormal involuntary eye movements in dyslexia—impairing reading. However, his reported frequency was far higher than that reported by independent neurotologists involved in my study and the incidence I later obtained in my own follow-up studies. Importantly, all the specific neurological and ENG signs were reported within the Appendices of A Solution to the Riddle—Dyslexia. And a chapter was devoted to discussing these findings.
- 2.
There did appear to be many bewildering exceptions to this neat and tidy blurring-speed rule. For example, I encountered what I called “phantom tracking”—where the eyes of a few “atypical” dyslexics kept moving but saw only a blur. Analyzing all the exceptions and their mechanisms opened entirely new and unexpected research vistas, resulting in fresh insights into both dysfunctioning and compensatory tracking as well as an improved testing methodology. Amazing what happens when you pay attention to the exceptions rather than ignore them.
- 3.
This insight, among many others, also validated my gut feeling that the two-or-more-years-behind criteria for defining dyslexia was nonsensical—leading me to use the paradoxical term, “Dyslexics without dyslexia,” challenging the mistaken belief of traditionalists that dyslexia is just a reading disorder. However, the “experts” reluctantly accepted my insight several decades later—so there’s hope. But evolution moves very slowly—perhaps for good reasons.
- 4.
Might we be in continuous denial, exceptional lapses aside? And might it be in the lapses that insights and discoveries consciously occur—explaining their infrequency? Might we be sleepwalking more than we know and so unwittingly confusing our (theoretical) dreams or fantasies with reality? Does Superman represent the force within us that overcomes kryptonite?
I was also forced to modify my initial CVS theory because of other considerations, such as why non-CVS individuals with nystagmus or abnormal eye movements didn’t have dyslexia, etc.
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Levinson, H.N. (2019). The Turning Point: Solving the Dyslexia Riddle. In: Feeling Smarter and Smarter. Copernicus, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16208-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16208-5_4
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