"For Carlton Davis the always seemed to come out as hte. Frequently having problems in school he once threw a typewriter out of his fourthfloor window at college after making the hte mistake yet again.  Abby Schwartz can relate. She would often mix up the letters d and b sounding out certain words to make make sense of them. Things have gotten better but shell still make the occasional bd or  flip. Davis now  also still mixes up the digits of phone numbers. Reading would be slow. It wouldnt be enjoyable. I would lose my place said Abby  of Lexington Massachusetts. There were times when I would yell at myself I cant do this. I cant do this. I cant do this.  Abby and Davis like an estimated  percent to  percent of the population have struggled with dyslexia a condition that broadly speaking hinders a persons ability to interpret language.  Scientists have recently made headway in understanding whats going on in the brain of a person with dyslexia which has not been well understood. New research suggests it may be possible to tell from a brain scan whether a dyslexic childs reading ability will improve over a few years. It goes along with the general trend of personalized medicine in which genetic tests brain scans and other tests can increasingly help predict the conditions for which a particular individual is at risk.  And a separate recent study found that some dyslexics may have a heightened understanding of space despite an impairment in language. In dyslexia httpedition.cnn.comHEALTHlibrarydyslexiaDS.html also called developmental reading disorder http the brain doesnt properly recognize or process symbols. Children with this condition may find reading comprehension difficult because they dont connect sounds with letters and cant recognize words well. Celebrities http including Whoopi Goldberg Cher and Henry Winkler httpedition.cnn.comLIVINGmf.dyslexia.famous.celebritiesindex.html the Fonz have made their dyslexia publicly known and great artists such as Pablo Picasso are said to have had it.  Some children with the disorder can compensate or read fairly normally but perhaps more slowly than their peers by adulthood. It is hard to know who will be able to improve reading skills over time and how much extra help is necessary. A study led by Fumiko Hoeft psychiatry researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine used brain imaging to answer this question. Her study followed  children with dyslexia and  children without dyslexia over a year period.  The researchers found greater activation and connectivity in the brains right hemisphere among dyslexic children who showed greater improvement in reading after the  years. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI to study this phenomenon. In general much of the language comprehension and processing that goes on in the brain happens in the left hemisphere but there is some right hemisphere involvement also. Hoefts study suggests that people with dyslexia who go on to read fairly normally are using a part of the right hemisphere in reading tasks more than the average person would.  If made widely available this kind of brain scan could be an important complement to the assessments  based on reading and behavior  already available for diagnosing dyslexia Hoeft said. As this usage of fMRI becomes more useful and commonplace the high cost per scan would go down she said. Rebecca Branstetter psychologist who blogs at Notes from the School Psychologist httpstudentsgrow.blogspot.com says this dyslexia brain scan could provide useful information but it doesnt highlight environmental factors  such as the quality of instruction in the childs classroom  that could contribute to reading problems. Abbys father Edward Schwartz fears that this tool would just add to a childs anxiety about the testing process. The potential to alarm a child isnt worth it and he doesnt trust that this method would offer definitive information. The kids are much more likely to feel like theyre broken in some way Schwartz said. Abby he recalls didnt like it to be referred to as a learning disability. She was happy when people offered her alternative ways to think about it. Guillermo Tilley the father of yearold Nate who has dyslexia similarly would not want his son to have the fMRI. It would taint my interpretation of who Nate is and his struggle with dyslexia Tilley said.  Of course the results of the study are only preliminary. Participants included  children with dyslexia and  children without dyslexia which is too small a sample size to prove anything although still respectable when it comes to neuroimaging studies. Another important limitation in the study is that some children in the study did receive tutoring or reading interventions to which they were not randomly assigned. A larger trial that controlled for remediations would offer more conclusive results. But this one found that receiving a remediation did not appear to affect improvement in reading abilities. Heres another insight about dyslexia men with the condition may have enhanced visualspatial abilities http_obArticleURL_udiBWPYXFS_user_coverDate_rdoc_fmthigh_origbrowse_originbrowse_zonerslt_list_item_srchdocinfo according to a study in the journal Learning and Individual Differences. This was another small study   dyslexic volunteers and  participants without the condition  testing how people identify shapes navigate a virtual environment and do other tasks involving spatial reasoning. Davis a noted architect and writer in the Los Angeles area believes he fits that category. He gets thrown off by pure mathematics but hes good at anything involving spatial relationships and design. And those kinds of skills should be taken advantage of in school said Wendy Weiner principal of the artsfocused Conservatory Prep in Davie Florida and mother of a dyslexic child.  If they can create projects  instead of drawing a picture of a room if they can make a model of a room  they will generally do it pretty much to scale because they can visualize things very clearly she said.  Because of this Weiner said threedimensional letters and numbers perhaps made out of plastic or clay help a dyslexic child grasp the shapes better. Holding a  upright in your hand youre less likely to view it sideways as a V she said. The most important intervention is a direct explicit teaching of phonics or how symbols correspond with sounds Branstetter said. The sooner it can be detected the better. A childs personality can also factor in Some persist despite frustration better than others. Parents should speak to their school psychologists about the best plan of action she said. For Abby a breakthrough moment came at age  She started reading voraciously and today reads well above the seventhgrade level. Shed had good tutors and plenty of support from her parents but it also took selfconfidence for her to make herself read on her own she said.  As for Davis hed never heard of dyslexia until a friend brought it up when he was  and then went through training at a learning development center. Using computers for writing has helped him tremendously  especially spellcheck. I know a lot of people who have trouble reading as I did when I was a kid are dyslexic he said. It is an issue that certainly holds back a lot of kids because of their inability to do certain things."