“Dyslexia is not just about reading, or even language. It’s about something more fundamental: How much can the brain adapt to what it has just observed? People with dyslexia typically have less brain plasticity than those without dyslexia, two recent studies have found.

Though the studies measured people’s brain activity in two different ways and while performing different tasks, researchers at the Hebrew University of Israel, reporting in eLife, and researchers from MIT, reporting in Neuron, both found that dyslexics’ brains did not adapt as much to repeated stimuli, including spoken words, musical notes, and faces.

Both sets of researchers found that people with dyslexia more quickly forget recent events. This type of memory is called incidental or implicit memory, and includes anything you didn’t know you needed to remember when it happened. Because of how quickly their implicit memory fades, dyslexics’ brains don’t adapt as much after reading or hearing something repeatedly—which is perhaps why it is harder for their brains to process the words they read.”

SHORTER MEMORIES AND LESS ADAPTABILITY

“Together, these studies build a better understanding of how dyslexia works, and because the two studies found the same result with different methods, their results are more convincing than a single study alone. But they also raise a new question: Why is dyslexia mainly noticeable in reading if it affects other types of memories as well?”

READING IS NEW—AND HARD, FROM THE BRAIN’S PERSPECTIVE

“One theory is that reading is simply a difficult task. “We have a long evolutionary history in our brains for recognizing objects, recognizing faces,” Gabrieli points out. That’s not the case for reading. “There’s hardly a bigger challenge for brain plasticity than learning to read.” More evolutionary time has allowed the brain to evolve redundant ways of accomplishing the same thing. Perhaps people with dyslexia are better at compensating for the memory gap for recognizing faces and spoken words because the brain has more alternate pathways for these processes than it does for reading.”

Stephen