On Hyperlexia

Jenn recently asked me about what it is like to be Hyperlexic. I'd never thought about 'what it's like' before, as my oddity has  fueled my passion for writing. I saw it as a good thing, not something to explain away or try to overcome. I was an odd kid, yet nobody really put names to it or took me to the doctor over it. I don't remember much before ten years old, but Mom and Dad used to laugh when they told the story of my learning to read. The story is: I didn’t.

I can't remember not being able to read. Before I even went to school, relatives visited us in Havelock to find me on the living room floor with the Toronto Star splayed out in front of me. "How cute," they said, "he's pretending to read the paper." My parents laughed. "No, he's reading it." I even read aloud to prove it.

In Grade one, I could read at a grade five level, and by twelve years old I was devouring epics like 'War and Peace', 'Les Miserables', and was on my fourth or fifth reading of the old leather bound 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. I spent much time in the library in my first high school, and my inner world was interwoven with literature.

Nobody would have known much about this because my outer world lacked the social graces that I later had to painstakingly build from scratch while doing theatre in Montreal. Literature, though, was where I went to understand the world. Even recently I was asked by my chiropractor why I went from Engineering in first year to creative writing in my second, two seemingly unrelated disciplines. All I could explain, sheepishly, was that it came down to patterns. I understood both Engineering AND writing in terms of the patterns.

My experience in the mid-70’s was similar to what Owen’s is now. We first knew something was different with our little guy when Jenn discovered words spelled on the refrigerator. Owen was about two. She thought it was Cole doing it until she secretly watched Owen playing with them. It wasn’t so much a shock to us, because we remembered all the stories my parents had told about my miraculous learning when I was little.

At about two and a half years old, something happened in Owen’s brain that he looked at the alphabet, and knew which letters were which. Within weeks he was able to name them in random order, sing the entire alphabet song, and identify letters in everyday life, from signs and pictures. The alphabet and its letters were his 'first word'. It was actually the individual letters we used to teach him everyone's names. At three he could sing the alphabet backwards.

Owen in 2007, around 2 years old.

Jenn remarked this morning that this innate ability to read has made it very frustrating for Cole helping Daisy learn to read. He doesn't remember having to learn to read, and his experience is with Owen, who "just knew". He would show Owen a book, and his little brother would know the words and how to spell them immediately. Owen's ability to spell, with a keyboard mind you, is actually farther advanced than Cole's. We have to keep reminding Cole that with Daisy, she's going to learn at her own pace, and that he has to be patient. The other day, putting away the board games we'd had out, Owen rhymed off: "Risk, the world conquest game." and left Jenn thinking 'how the heck does he know how to pronounce conquest'? I don't know. I can't explain it.

We spent a lot of time in Speech and Language therapy at Belleville’s Children’s Treatment Centre. Some therapy was trying to get Owen to identify pictures on cards, but we couldn’t get him to focus on the pictures if there were words on the bottom of the card. In one of his group sessions they had a schedule written for the teachers taped on the back of the chair. Owen could not focus on anything except the schedule. At the end of each activity he would proudly announce what the next activity would be. They had to hide it during the next class so that he could focus on the lesson.

It seems to come as par for the course with Owen, to do everything in the "wrong" order, but still gets there. It feels to me, on the outside looking in, that the cart has been put before horse. Learning the words, as well as their pronunciations and spellings, for both of us came long before understanding the meanings, and even though I could read well, I couldn't understand fully what was meant in literature until later on in life, even if I understood the sentences. Does that make sense?

So how does Owen, 'just know'? How does this type of innate knowledge of language work in the hyperlexic brain? I am not a scientist, so I can’t answer that in depth, but one has to ask: why bother studying it at all if it’s a ‘bonus’? Who would want to research something that is a gift, and not a handicap? Well, it is fascinating in its links to ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders), and the study of it can help us to understand better the workings of the brain.

IS it genetic? Given our recent history, I have to ask, even if it doesn’t fit. Well, the ‘Sprung mutation’ on the eleventh chromosome is still undetermined. So far the only two people we can verify who have it are Owen and I, and we won't know about the rest of my family until the testing is done. The aversion to texture and sensitivity to noise (see the post on noise), seem to come from my father, while the tendency to hyperlexia seems to come from my mother. She was always obsessed with books. My grandfather Patterson, who was an avid crossword puzzler, also loved reading, but not in the same way. In fact, the only other person who was so obsessive about books in my family, was my mother’s sister, Aunt Chris, rest her soul, a school teacher in Duncan B.C. who passed away from Cancer in 2001, and gave me my first journal in 1983, writing a dedication in the front with her fountain pen.

Mom and I in 1972. I had just published my first novel ... lol j/k!

To be clear, hyperlexia is its own thing. It is not new, being that many of the obsessive oddball decoders in Bletchley Park in World War II were known to be hyperlexic. It is not an official diagnosis, more of a condition than a disorder, and not in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Medical Disorders). It can exist with all sorts of other conditions, being that some children with autism also have hyperlexia. I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly, it must be the polar opposite of dyslexia. It is the hyper-awareness of the order of things and the drive to keep them in that order, while dyslexia is the inability to do the same.

What does that mean? Some experts see it as a 'useless' splinter skill. It is word recognition, but not comprehension. Some think that it is akin to decoding. It seems to fit a group of children who have disordered development. Of all the webpages out there dedicated to hyperlexia, none of them seem to work. (Is this also fitting, that there are probably some very intricate and brilliant webpages stored on hard drives, without the skills to get them online? Oh, the irony...)

One great definition I lifted from a link here...  "Children with Hyperlexia demonstrate an intense fascination with letters, numbers, patterns and logos, and a self-taught, precocious ability to read, spell, write and/or compute, usually before the age of five. They have difficulty developing language and communication skills and often exhibit unusual behaviours or interests."

In terms of ASD, those who show a propensity for Hyperlexia, appear to have a better prognosis on the spectrum than those who do not. The theory behind it is that just because the comprehension doesn’t exist at the beginning, doesn’t mean it won’t come.

In simple terms, and this is the sum of what I know of it as it pertains to Owen’s and my oddities, hyperlexia is like a steel structure building. When building ‘normal’ buildings, you build from floor to floor, pouring concrete or putting up wooden walls, and building atop them, with all elements being put in place at the same time. In the hyperlexic, the whole steel structure can (and sometimes should) be built to stand alone before all the extras like cladding and floors are added.

As Jenn says: “We value people who can write, read, and do math, but if they can’t, we miss how brilliant they are. So what does that say about neurotypical social skills?”

Sometimes I wonder if all my “nice” tendencies, my sensitivity to injustice and my inability to lie, or to be politically clever, come from this. I see neurotypical people doing dastardly things that serve only themselves, especially in government, cutting social programs that are needed to put our world on the path to recovery, and doing things that blatantly destroy our environment, or downright evil political tactics like smear campaigns, presently directed at Bob Rae, or proroguing parliament or being found in contempt of it, and I think ‘if this is what it’s like to be neurotypical, count me out.’

I’d rather be socially handicapped than dishonorable.


My brilliant wife, Jennifer's, blog can be found here:
Cleverly Disguised as Cake

And my first novel, squeakyclean, here:
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Previous posts about Owen are here:
Owen
Owen ii
Owen iii
Owen iv