Dealing with Dyslexia: Stress and
the Brain
The key to getting a child reading
confidently is to be able to identify any underlying cause of difficulty and
fix it. One cause of difficulty that can stand alone or be combined with any of
the others is stress. Some children
develop a downward spiral of stress when reading that leads to a virtually
complete breakdown in ability.
To understand why, let’s take a look at
both reading and stress in the brain.
Reading
in the Brain
Reading is a complex task for the brain to
perform, co-opting parts of the brain in a specific sequence: the visual cortex
interprets the patterns in text on the page; the cerebellum and motor cortex
visually focus on the words; the auditory cortex maps the letter-to-sound
relationships; Wernicke's Area makes sense of syntax, grammar and other
linguistic patterns; the prefrontal cortex examines meaning.
In fact, every lobe of the cerebrum is
involved! So this is no simple process, even though once we know how to read we
cannot stop ourselves from reading a word.
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Stress
in the Brain
Stress causes chemical reactions in the
body designed to protect us from danger – you may have heard of the classic
“fight, flight or freeze” stress response. Our brain elevates the hormonal
levels of adrenaline and cortisol to give us the burst of energy we need to
fight or run. Blood flow to the higher brain functions is reduced as our basic
brain stem takes over in order to decide whether to fight, run, or freeze. The
analytical function of the cerebrum is reduced by 60% or more. All
non-essential body functioning shuts down to conserve energy - this definitely
includes reading!
So we have reading – a complex higher brain
function – and stress – that shuts down higher brain function. Sometimes not
quite adding up here…! The two are virtually incompatible.
And yet learning to read can be one of the
most stressful activities of a child's life. It is very demanding and often
involves a lot of "public" failure. And by public I am not only
referring to being at the front of peers or being on stage. A failure can feel public when a child is
sitting on the sofa with a parent and getting stuck on the word was yet again.
Children hate to fail at things just as much as adults do and early reading
practice in English can be seen as a series of failures. The symptoms of a
stress pattern like this are fairly obvious: strong negative emotions to
reading, coupled with an apparent ability to read satisfactorily at moments when
not stressed.
Solutions
In order to disable this stress response to
reading, a structured learning environment must be created where the child is
presented with small, achievable tasks. You can that by reducing the task into
elements or giving far more assistance than is normal in a conventional
setting. For instance, you might show a child a word and ask him to select
which one it is from three options that you provide. Encouragement should be
liberally given as the child slowly advances through attained goals.
Once a good level of self-confidence has
been reached, the reader regains an interest in reading and good learning progression
can start up again.
