WIKIMEDIA, SHELOVESGHOSTSThe eyes of people who read with ease have asymmetrical retinas and also transmit visual information to the brain asymmetrically, according to a report out today (October 18) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The eyes of people with dyslexia, on the other hand, appear to be physically and functionally symmetrical.
“This is a really interesting study,” says John Stein, emeritus professor of physiology at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the research. “It brings back into focus the idea that vision has something to do with dyslexia,” which, he adds, “tends to be ignored nowadays.”
Dyslexia, characterized by a difficulty with learning to read, affects somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent of people. Although genetic and environmental factors have been linked with the condition, the underlying causes remain largely unknown.
“Until about the 1950s, everybody thought dyslexia was visual,” says Stein, but since then, more emphasis has been placed on theories of information-processing deficits in the brain. For example, scientists have observed that brain lateralization—the asymmetric compartmentalization of certain brain functions ...
