Neurological research helps explain reading difficulties
Functional neuroimaging has been able to show the timing within the brain that it takes to process the auditory and visual information when reading.
There is marked differences for chronic non readers and typical readers in the timing of these events, which significantly impairs the chronic non reader ability to read successfully with a phonetic based program.
While light travels faster than sound, this is not the case in the brain. Sound is processed faster because it has a shorter neural pathway to travel to be processed.
Fascinating research by Zvia Breznitz and colleagues has shown that information arrives in the auditory cortex after 30 milliseconds and that this information is processed sequentially.
Visual information arrives in the visual cortex after 70 milliseconds. This information is processed in a holistic and simultaneous process.
There is a difference in both the timing of processing the auditory and visual information as well as the way that the information is processed - one is done sequentially and one is done holistically.
There has to be a near perfect alignment in the processing of these two aspects for reading to occur.
For typical readers, this overlap is around 50 milliseconds, while struggling readers has an overlap of 170 milliseconds. They are out of synchronicity - Zvia Breznitz called this the Asynchrony Phenomenon.
These students, while knowing letters and letter sounds, can not blend words smoothly. They slow, stutter and jerk the words or say another unrelated word after they’ve blended it slowly correctly.
Breznitz hypothesized that by bypassing the left hemisphere processing of sounding it out and going to the holistic right hemisphere, then struggling readers could be successful.
The Right Brain Reading method bypasses the left hemisphere processing by accessing the right hemisphere to be able to read.
Two well known right hemisphere learning alternatives already exist:
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards, has shown to be a drastically successful way to learn how to draw.
Playing by ear for music is a well proven method to learn to play, rather than by sheet music. Many successful musicians play by ear.