PROS AND CONS OF ALEXIA

What is meant by Alexia?

If affected by it then how to go for its cure?

Can it affect me also?

And the reply is yes. As it can affect readers and writers from anywhere and from any lifestyle so as a writer you must be worried about it, or at least be aware about it. Alexia is a sort of brain disorder in which the patient loses its ability to recognise the written word.

The worrisome part is that these people had earlier this ability. This situation normally results due to the damage to the left part of the brain, especially the occipital and temporal lobes. In common, parlance this situation is also called text blindness or word blindness. This situation is close brother of another complication called agraphia, which is the loss of the ability to write.

If affected, then how to go for its cure? Unfortunately, there is very little that can be done once this situation arises. The reason is, there are only few scientific researches, which can identify its root cause correctly. Once we exactly know the cause only then can we think of finding the cure. Due to extreme complexity of brain, many secrets about its functioning and behaviour are still a great challenge to the modern medical science.

There are many types of alexia conditions, mainly of the four types. These are.

Pure alexia: the lesions that can cut the visual cortex cause this. In this situation, though the person retains some of the reading and writing skills but they do not recognise the meaning of the written words.

Surface Alexia: This is also by lesion but in different part of the brain. In this, the person will be able to understand the words in normal but will go haywire as soon as he sees the common meaning words.

Phonological alexia: In this type, the person is able to recognise well but not able to sound it correctly. The patients with this problem find to read concrete nouns easier than the abstract nouns.

Deep alexia: This type of alexia deals with difficulty to understand and read synonyms.

The alexia in its early form with start of the visual impairment refers to the Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), a progressive runic degenerating situation cause by the Alzheimer disease or a stroke. The research on this aspect is still going on and a lot is yet to be uncovered to understand it properly. 

It has been found that PCA evolves with progressive difficulty in visual integration starting with letters, then deteriorating to whole scenes, and then finally culminating in Balint syndrome. These symptoms prove that the problem starting from the extrastriate visual cortex and then progressing to its occipitotemporal and occipitoparietal connections.

When we face such customers there is very little can we do to stop it, but we can really help the person to communicate better. We can do this by creating the best conditions for communication by finding (1) the best place for communication, (2) the best mental condition to express oneself and help in understanding each other, and (3) the best way to communicate with a person with a communication disorder.