There brians posses grate abilties

There? Their? 


No, this isn't going to be a post about commonly confused spellings--or other 'pet peeves' of writing instructors. (But, if you want some excellent, easy to understand advice on commonly confused words and spellings, punctuation rules, and so on, check out the Grammar Girl.)


I have a recurring eye condition that causes blurry vision and pain.  But even before the pain starts--even before I consciously know that this inflammation has flared up again--I start misspelling words, like 'there' and 'their.' Believe me, it is extraordinarily disturbing for a person who reads, writes, and teaches reading and writing for a living to suddenly find herself making 6th grade level errors! Or do we learn that in 4th grade . . . .?

 I only know a bit about what happens in our brain when we read--but, as Stanislas Dehaene writes, reading "starts in our eyes."  The image of the word is processed by-or travels through-- several different areas of our brain as our complex "visual system progressively extracts graphemes, syllables, prefixes, suffixes, and word roots" (11;  if you are interested, Dehaene's Reading in the Brain is an accessible discussion of this subject). We spend years training these pathways as we learn to read. 

Cognitive neuroscientists often discover how the brain works by studying people with problems.  For example, by looking at the brain of someone who has lost the ability to read after a stroke, they can more closely pinpoint areas of the brain that is involved in the reading process (Dehaene 54-71).  So, I’m sure they could tell me more precisely what happens when I lose my ability to spell as my vision becomes compromised. They could also explain why you probably understood the title of this post even though each word is misspelled.

But, since I'm not a cognitive neuroscientist, I'm more interested in the implications of this problem at a moment when our culture seems to be moving away from written words. Losing the ability to spell seems minor, but the fact that it happens so quickly on an individual level, in someone who spends so much time with words, seems to have disturbing implications.

Reading isn’t natural for humans (isn’t that one of Plato’s points? Interesting that he saw that well before the neuroscientists.). Suddenly losing part of this ability makes it seem very fragile, indeed.  How fast could an entire society lost their ability to read if they didn’t practice it frequently?

I find that not only is my spelling bad during these spells, but my sense of logic and organization feels fuzzy--somehow I need to have a visual sense of how ideas are laid out, and blurred vision blurs the order of the world for me. To gesture again toward larger implications, if we spend lots of time with images--which can come at us all at once, or be arranged in juxtaposition, rather than linearly--does that change our sense of how the world is ordered? Is that necessarily bad?