Reading Disorders?

A couple of days ago I mentioned I had a reading disorder. While I'm not sure if that is clinically accurate, something does go all wonky when I read - three things to be exact.

For the first two quirks I'm going to use the following paragraphs from Code of the Samurai: A Modern Translation of the Bushido Shoshinshu as an example.

"One who is supposed to be a warrior considers it his foremost concern to keep death in mind at all times, every day and every night, from the morning of New Year's Day through the night of New Year's Eve.

"As long as you keep death in mind at all times, you will also fulfill the ways of loyalty and familial duty. You will also avoid myriad evils and calamities, you will be physically sound and healthy, and you will live a long life. What is more, your character will improve and your virtue will grow."

Quirk # 1

I'll be happily reading along when for some reason I start picking up words from the paragraphs below the one I'm currently on and inserting them into what I'm reading.

So the first paragraph above will read something like this, "One who is death supposed to be a warrior myriad considers it his foremost concern..."

Get the idea?

Quirk # 2

Sometimes when I'm reading my eyes, for lack of a better word, fall down the page. Say I'm on the first paragraph, all of a sudden my eyes will drop to the second or third in mid-sentence.

Using the paragraphs above, it reads something like this, "One who is supposed to be a warrior considers it his foremost concern to keep death in mind at all times, you will also fulfill the ways of loyalty and familial duty."

If the sentence doesn't blend together properly, I can usually spot what happened right away. But more often than not, the sentences combine relatively logically and I won't realize it for a page or two when it dawns on me that I missed something.

Quirk # 3

This is the one that drives me bonkers. Thankfully it doesn't happen as often as the other two. It did happen last week though, so I'll use that as an example. I was reading a book that had a lot of dates in it. On one page I was reading, the date read 1887. Reading further, the next page mentioned something that happened four years later and gave the date as 1991. Wondering if it was a typo, I flipped back to the previous page and double-checked the date - still 1887. I flipped back and forth probably five or six times, rereading the passages when on my last pass, the date magically became 1987. Obviously it was 1987 the whole time, but it took six tries or so for my brain to register it.

Like I said, the third example is rare, but the other two happen all the time. In an average book, I'd say the first two quirks happen between twenty and thirty times, if not more.

Has anyone had anything like this happen to them? I've done searches on dyslexia, lazy eyes and reading disorders but nothing seems to match up. I can't be the only one this has happens to can I? Am I just crazy?

Who knows, once the search engines spider this page, maybe someone out there will know what's up and fill me in. If I ever find anything out, I'll post it.

Until then, why not have yourself a flavored coffee to celebrate this moment in your life?

Tags: reading disorder, reading

posted by m/a/z/e  [9:38 AM]   1 comments