Thanks Donuel for opening the discussion. We have had some threads before about dyslexia, too, as I recall.

Count me in as part of the 1 in 10.

I found that playing computer games using the keyboard arrows or allocated keys for left & right, up & down, helped me a lot with my dyslexia. When I first tried playing the games - about 30 years ago - I was all over the place trying to get my fingers to respond to the visual info on the game screen, e.g. to get the game character to move left or right. Now I do it a lot more intuitively, which is something I tend to take for granted most of the time, and then it hits me suddenly, now and then, that this is a major breakthrough for me.

Touch typing used to be a trial for me, too, but years of working with word documents has helped me to "set" the left and right sides of the typing keyboard into my brain.

I still use mnemonics, especially visual cues, to remember names and words.

I still get words confused which have the almost the same syllables in a different order, e.g surreptitious, superstitious ("surrep" versus "super"). The syllables sound different, but when you read them they are almost the same letters in a different order.

If I'm saying numbers aloud, I know I will get "2" and "5" confused, yet mentally I know what the number is, and I know immediately when I've said it wrong. Why "2" & "5"? Look at "2" upside down. It looks almost like "5".

I still can't remember the names of songs, or the lyrics of most of the songs, except for bits here and there.

When I was learning the piano over the last couple years, I would sit and try to practice and feel like I had never played the piece before, and never seen it before. It was the same each time.

I tend not to think of the names of the notes, but just try to match the position on the music staff to the notes on the piano, i.e. their spatial/visual position in relation to the pattern of black & white keys.

I've never been able to play by ear, mainly because I can never remember how a tune starts. When I was going to music sessions regularly - for 10 years in total - I still couldn't play by ear. I also had to write the first few bars of the most frequent tunes we played onto a sheet of paper to be able to remember how each one started.

I am not able to listen to verbal things and remember them, unlike many dyslexics. If someone reads something out to me, I get the gist of it but I need to read it, as I am a more visual person. I like to see it illustrated with charts, graphs or pictures, and then the words make more sense.

It's also interesting to me that people will poke fun at dyslexics with those jokes about Santa/Satan, god/dog etc, but most of the same people would think it impolite to poke fun at people who have English as their second language. Some of the jokers will courteously ask if the jokes are ok, but generally dyslexics appear to be fair game in the humour department, in the world at large. On the other hand, though, I like jokes based on wordplay and puns, so I get the joke if it's funny, but I am just aware of the target on my forehead.

Helen