Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and man of letters, is well-known to the vision community through his essays in The New Yorker Magazine. Oliver’s depiction of “Stereo Sue” in June, 2006 brushed optometric vision therapy into the public consciousness, and set the tone for Sue Barry’s extraordinary book, “Fixing My Gaze”.
Four years onward, in his latest “A Neurologist’s Notebook” piece in The New Yorker (June 28, 2010), Oliver delves into what he dubs “the visuality of reading”. While this has direct bearing on visual rehabilitation after stroke, it also has deep implications for the role of vision in the process of learning to read and reading to learn.
The abstract of the article can be found here:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/28/100628fa_fact_sacks
– though you’ll need a subscription or a single use purchase to read the entire article.
Ironically Howard Engel, the subject of Dr. Sacks’ latest masterpiece, will have difficulty reading about himself. The stroke that Engel experienced in 2002 played havoc with a brain region that has also been implicated in visual forms of dyslexia: the visual word form area, informally known as the “the brain’s letter box”.
As Dr. Sacks notes, reading begins with vision, though it certainly does not end there. The visual word form area has intimate connections to the auditory and speech areas of the brain in addition to areas involved with memories, emotions, intellectual, and executive functions. The visual word form area, Sacks writes, “is a critical node in a complex cerebral network of reciprocal connections”.
Let’s not gloss over these points. In fact, what Dr. Sacks writes about this crucial aspect of reading deserves not only our bolded font, but an underline: reading begins with vision. He specifies that vision in this sense isn’t limited to normal visual acuity, color perception, and the items too often used to tell parents that vision has no relationship to reading. Nor is Sacks using the narrow conceptualization of vision used by Shaywitz and other dyslexia authority figures.
Howard Engel’s reading problem is compounded by his poor visualization, another compromise in the a-visuality of his reading. This deficit sheds light on the struggles of children who cannot use internal imagery effectively to spell. Engel has figured out some nifty compensations, chronicled in a memory book cited by Sacks. Not all patients are as fortunate.
A good colleague of ours, Dr. Lynn Hellerstein, has formalized a program that aids visualization in her book, See It, Say It, Do It. The solutions found by Oliver’s patients are typically serendipitous. With guidance from a developmental optometrist, they needn’t be.
The VisionHelp Blog 
