A Potential Dyslexic Scenario:

A dyslexic will start using the special talents, abilities, skills, and deficiencies that will later bring about dyslexia as early as three months of age.

At three month of age an infant is just beginning to recognize facial features. If the infant is in her crib, let's say she only has the perspective of a dresser with a person's elbow sticking out past the edge.

The potential dyslexic curiosity will trigger brain cells that will alter her perception and cause her to view an image of the person, including a face, in which the elbows belong to mentally completing fragmentary perceptions). She is ultimately disorienting her perceptions and once she has exercised this skill successfully, she will continue to use it when exploring her environment. Thus the potential dyslexic's early childhood skills may be developing more rapidly than normal because she is recognizing things in her environment that she shouldn't be able to recognize for three more years.

The potential dyslexic will develop the next stage towards dyslexia around two years of age. She is now environmentally aware that she would notice anything new brought into the house.

Say the parents brought in a gray kitten, curled it up into a ball and put it in the corner of a room. The potential dyslexic will get three steps into the room and her attention is drawn to the ball of fur in the corner. She will track it with her eyes and within seconds know that it is a kitten and heads over to it. She recognized that the furry ball was a kitten and not a bunny or a toy, because she tracked the object with her eyes, then experienced a feeling of confusion, which triggered the brain to disorient perception, and finally from her perceptual talent, she looked at the ball of fur from every angle and direction, causing the ball to come apart with mental images. In this instant, her brain just looked at the ball of fur and what it might be from 2,000 different views. She is now automatically and unconsciously using the disorientation to recognize objects within her environment.

Between ages three to five the potential dyslexic will be more intelligent than normal, but is at the same time creating a learning disability.

A normal child will develop the skills for analytical reasoning and logic around this time, but the potential dyslexic will not, because she already has a system that is faster and more accurate than analytical reasoning and logic ever could be.

A normal child uses speech and language center on the left side of the brain in his/her thought process, while the potential dyslexic has learned to understand spoken language, and can talk. Sometimes she tries to talk as fast as she thinks, and her mouth can't keep up with her mind, and so her words sound unintelligible to her parents, but to her, her speech sounds unbearably slow as she describes the thought she is visualizing.

A normal child will develop verbal conceptualization skills, thinking with the sound of language, by five years of age. While the potential dyslexic has been too busy thinking with pictures, a thought process happening so fast, that she doesn't even know she is doing it, and has never heard one of her own thoughts, even though she has and has heard people saying things.

The potential dyslexic goes to first grade and no matter how enthusiastic and prepared she seems to be, she is really terrified of being in a strange place with a strange lady at the chalk board. The teacher writes the letters C-A-T on the board, and asks the class, "Who knows what this is?" Some students have already learned this word, but the potential dyslexic doesn't know it, even when the teacher says the word. The potential dyslexic is making no connection and the lines on the board do not form anything like her mental picture of a cat. As she looks at the lines on the board, she experiences confusion, which triggers her automatic alteration of perception. This causes her to look at the word in at least forty different configurations, including forward, backward, upside down, both ways, floating in space, and pulled apart and re-assembled. She is trying to configure the word just like she had done with the furry cat, but for the first time ever, her special method for recognizing things doesn't work.

The potential dyslexic was trying to understand the word as an object and not as a symbol. In order for her to make the connection between the word and the cat, the teacher would have to show her the real cat.

At this point, the potential dyslexic has performed at least four thousand times more computations in her brain than the other children when trying to recognize the word CAT. She can think between four hundred to two thousand times faster than most other children, but because she has to do at least four thousand times more, she appears to be very slow.

It is not until someone tells the potential dyslexic that her method of dealing with incorrect data and confusion is wrong, she won't manifest the emotional reactions associated with the learning disability of dyslexia. So if the invalidation happens in kindergarten, she will develop dyslexia in kindergarten, but if it doesn't happen until fourth grade, she won't have dyslexia until fourth grade. Thus the struggle to comprehend will be there, but the potential dyslexic will not become aware of her differences from her peers, and will not lose her sense of self-esteem.

Soon someone will tell the potential dyslexic's parents that she is immature or a slow developer, without using the words dumb or stupid, but implicating them.

The potential dyslexic will continue to make mistakes, and increasingly get frustrated with herself, because these word things should be easy, just like everything else, but they are not, they are impossible. It is at this point, she will acquire the emotional distress she needs to become a full-fledged dyslexic.

While in third grade, if the potential dyslexic doesn't figure out a way to get through her problem with words, she will be stuck in third grade for the rest of her life.

At this time, the potential dyslexic will begin to solve her problems by using mental tricks and gimmicks, such as rote memorization and associations of sounds, songs, rhymes, and concentration. She begins to learn her lessons, but is not genuinely learning. The lessons she learns will comprise a lifelong disability of compulsive behaviors, which will most likely get her by in school as a "slow" student who "tries hard."

The potential dyslexic will change her limitations into a disability that she has no control over; it is her "old solutions" that control her.

She will soon find herself in a special education class, which allows her the opportunity to acquire more of these tricks than if she would have stayed in a regular class. The special education class will also lower her self-esteem even more, by convincing her beyond a doubt that she is lacking in intelligence. In the first grade, people only hinted about her stupidity, and now it has been confirmed.

To compensate and find ways to build self-esteem, the potential dyslexic may adopt a number of interests (none having anything to do with reading or writing), including sports, visual arts, music, acting, clubs, part-time jobs, leadership roles or even rebellion and joining a gang.    

As the potential dyslexic grows up, she will find school classes that involve reading and writing to be mental torture chambers. Thus she will immerse herself in the arts, music, and sciences, because these classes rely on verbal instruction and demonstration. Her written test scores will be low, even in the courses she enjoys. This may cause her to drop out of school and get a job that allows her to use her excellent mechanical abilities. Later, she may struggle through college and go into business, even though her grade school reading level forces her to operate on a semi-illiterate basis wherever written communications are concerned.

She is imaginative, inventive, and visually oriented. She is able to think on her feet and react quickly. She is a good athlete, conversationalist, salesperson, or storyteller. If her self-esteem drops to a low enough level, she may become socially inept.

The potential dyslexic has a low opinion of herself, after all she has spent at least half of her life hearing people describer her as stupid. She will secretly hide her inability to read well, and invent even more tricks and gimmicks to beat the system of the written word.

She will find ways to simply do what she can do well and avoid what she can't do. This might allow her to discover that she is talented at a visual art like sculpting. Since she can visualize the form she wants to sculpt, she can do it effortlessly.

Note: All the information above is gathered research from the Ronald D. Davis Reading Research Council Dyslexia Correction Center.