I was musing today on the idea that the reason that some ‘dyslexics’ have trouble with distinguishing letters like ‘b’ and ‘d’ is that they are conceiving of them as three dimensional symbols … and that ‘b’ and ‘d’ are actually the same letter viewed from different sides. (From the side it would look something like an ‘I’ and from top or bottom they would look like a ‘-‘. I’m not sure if anyone ever confuses b and d with I and -.)
Then I got to thinking about how, when we write, we only write in a single direction – from left to right – and that the reader is forced to flick their attention from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. I’m very curious about discontinuities like this and hypothesise that a steady tracking of text – especially if it balances right to left as well as left to right – would result in some kind of smoother comprehension.
My experiment looks like this: