Contrary to popular belief, some very smart, accomplished people cannot read well. This unexpected difficulty in reading in relation to intelligence, education and professional status is called dyslexia, and researchers at Yale School of Medicine and University of California Davis, have presented new data that explain how otherwise bright and intelligent people struggle to read. The study, which will be published in the January 1, 2010 issue of the journal Psychological Science, provides a validated definition of dyslexia..

“The incidence of individuals with a mathematics learning disability is between 6 - 7% of the population.” Since there are more than 300 million individuals in the United States, up to 21 million men, women, and children may be affected by this disorder. Sidney Groffman OD, MA, FCOVD, Professor Emeritus at SUNY College of Optometry, author of the article published in the December 2009 issue of Optometry & Vision Development, also says, “This is unfortunate because math skills are of prime importance in everyday life enabling us to understand number concepts and do calculations…

The vast majority of school-aged children can focus on the voice of a teacher amid the cacophony of the typical classroom thanks to a brain that automatically focuses on relevant, predictable and repeating auditory information, according to new research from Northwestern University.

New research reveals that children with developmental dyslexia have a deficit in a brain mechanism involved in the perception of speech in a noisy environment.

A unique study of former guerrillas in Colombia has helped scientists redefine their understanding of the key regions of the brain involved in literacy. The study, funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, has enabled the researchers to see how brain structure changed after learning to read.

Chinese-speaking children with dyslexia have a disorder that is distinctly different, and perhaps more complicated and severe, than that of English speakers. Those differences can be seen in the brain and in the performance of Chinese children on visual and oral language tasks, reveals a report published online on October 12th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.