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1:48am April 21, 2015
buttons-beads-lace asked: I was reading some of your old posts about hyperlexia, and I thought of something. Do you think hyperlexia can affect reading sheet music as well as regular text? I learned to read at a young age, and when I was in school choirs and orchestras, I was usually better than my classmates at reading music, too. Even though I wasn't a very good musician in other ways.

I have never thought of it, but I bet it affects, or at least CAN affect, any ability to read any sort of symbol system.

Just as dyslexia can cause difficulty reading music. I was just reading a book by an autistic and severely dyslexic woman who had that problem, if you’re interested the book is called My World Is Not Your World, by Alison Hale, who has a website here: http://www.hale.ndo.co.uk/

I originally got her book because she’s one of a small number of autistic people who have written about using tinted lenses and overlays to improve visual perception, and I was always being told by Irlen testers that I was the most severe they’d ever seen, even though Donna Williams and Alison Hale both seemed to have at least as bad visual perception as me. (If you ever do think you might need tinted lenses by the way, there are much cheaper ways to experiment than get Irlen testing.)

Anyway, I could see it going either way really. Some hyperlexics do better with some symbols than others. But I think hyperlexia always can involve the capacity for any symbol set, it just depends on the person. In my case I think there was overlap with conceptual synesthesia for memorability when it came to words and letters. I also have colored numbers but that could be as much hindrance as help with math.