Every now and then as I type I’ve noticed the switching of letters in words. Ive casually dismissed it as my hurried enthusiasm in getting to the point, and in any case, spellcheck is such a handy little tool rt?
Predominantly I have always always always typed “the” as “teh” – and then I sometimes correct it or not depending on who’s going to be reading it ultimately. Seriously, that’s no big deal?
And then along came “some” – it morphed to “soem” for me. Again I brushed it aside as a minor anomaly. My fingers could never follow directions from the brain as I never really learnt to type or didn’t ace that keyboarding sessions that never happened in Chennai. Why would a medic ever need to learn to type. Duh! So as the years went by and life threw me into tangential paths, I accepted the computer and the keyboard into my life. Typing doesnt come naturally to me, am the proclaimed ‘2 finger typist’ [as dramatic as you would title a tabloid – the one-eyed milkman, or the caretaker with the tattoo] But I am good. I am so good that I beat my daughter – and before you scoff, she was taught keyboarding and is quite the skilled one, so much that my son bribes her to type his homework. Amazing speeds she wraps up her assignments, and she drops her mouth when I hit the keys! aha!!
These days I can’t help but notice that the switcheroo is becoming painfully evident. Am typing
knwo, thme, iwth, and more such lame stuff. The trained eye, conveniently switches the words and reads them right, and unless am looking for mistakes, I don’t even spot them!
I am a stickler for spelling and grammar and hate the new chat lingo that’s forcing folks to forget the beauty of the English language, so for me to do this is mortification indeed…
So I have to ask myself – Am I becoming dyslexic?
As I would normally do, I googled and found this. – ok, it’s Wikipedia, but still…
Letter order – Dyslexics may also reverse the order of two letters
especially when the final, incorrect, word looks similar to the intended
word
(e.g., spelling “dose” instead of “does”).Here’s one more .
This si completely crushing me [see, I typed ‘si’ instead of ‘is’] – I mean, seriously, can one become dyslexic?
..and considering my track record of wanting to keep experimenting various fields of study and work in my ever so tiny span of life, I thought I had adult ADD.
Sure, why not offer my services at Johns Hopkins, who really cares which side of the fence I am on…
“I am a stickler for spelling and grammar and hate the new chat lingo that’s forcing folks to forget the beauty of the English language, so for me to do this is mortification indeed… “
You are not going to believe this but this is exactly what I told my college going cousin the other day. I go nuts when I see things like ‘u r 2 gd’ ‘r u all rt?’ ‘ur gr8’ etc. Grrr..
well, i guess you only misspell when you type, and not when you ‘write’. This, I believe, isn’t dyslexia, just poor right-hand-left-hand-brain-finger coordination.
BTW, Einstein was dyslexic. And Roald Dahl wrote a great book about dyslexic, which, I’m sure your little girl will enjoy reading. The book is called The Vicar of Nibbleswick.
I still like reading kiddie books. 🙂 Its difficult to write kiddie books.
Also, people tend to match patterns. So if you see something like ‘btman’, you would, without even noticing, match the pattern to ‘batman’. The brain is surprisingly good at pattern matching.
How do you know a tree is a tree, there are no exact rules that a tree should follow to become a tree, but you recognize a tree without any difficulty. Your brain has an amazing processing power when it comes to pattern matching.
You can tell a computer to search a database of one million billion records for something, and it’ll give you an answer in seconds. But ask it to recognize a tree, and it will scratch its head.
What they are trying to do is to make the computer work the human brain does. Connect neurons, have synapses, assign weight to synapses, bla bla bla, make a mathematical model (which is obviously highly simplified and doesn’t scale up to anywhere near the brain) and try to run that. Welcome to the world of Neural Networks babe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_networks
And Neural Networks, like humans, don’t guarantee a correct. They make mistakes. And they learn by example, like all humans do (Or let us say, by experience)…
dilip – that’s a sign of growing old as in not being the current hip generation. 🙂
wh – thanks so much for your input. This obviously requires some amount of reading and time and I will do so. I don’t think I have a problem with eye-hand coordination – I dance Indian classical at a considerably higher level, and that’s quite a bit of concentration there, and I like legos, and love to draw..
I am missing something here…
OMG!!..you read my mind on this one! I have it in the draft-“computer dyslexia” and if I do end up posting my version then I will link to this post if you don’t mind….it is getting worse each day and (that’s two times I typed “adn”) and I seriously wonder if it will become an irreversible disorder…and in my case it doesn’t help at all that the key board is Li’l A’s favorite toy and mysteriously enough a few letters are missing!!
lol orchid – pardon my laughter, but truly “misery loves company” is apt don’t you think? :))
yeah…. u shld be turned to a research specimen 🙂
KC – gee thanks. :p