Each week we find a new topic for our readers to learn about in our AI Education column.
Artificial intelligence is a great problem solver. In recent years, it’s ability to find patterns and develop personalized treatments and solutions has surpassed the skills of human practitioners, opening up new possibilities for a healthier, more intelligent, more capable—and better—world.
I would like to offer a great example of how artificial intelligence is opening up the universe of words and language to people.
What do Albert Einstein, Richard Branson, Henry Ford, Muhammad Ali, Steven Spielberg, Walt Disney, Anderson Cooper and Robin Williams have in common?
Dyslexia. Dyslexia is a neurological learning disability that impacts how people process language. Dyslexic individuals often have difficulty reading at a natural pace—difficulty that, in the past, has left the branded as developmentally disabled.
Several U.S. presidents, including Joe Biden and George W. Bush, have been suspected of suffering from dyslexia and have often been maligned for instances of public speaking and reading difficulty. In retrospect, most people would think of people like Henry Ford, Walt Disney or Albert Einstein as among the great shapers of the post-modern era, not as developmentally disabled.
Clearly, dyslexia is a problem that some people can overcome, but few overcome without professional help. Treatments thus far have been time-consuming, expensive and out of the reach of most dyslexic people.
Why Are We Talking About Dyslexia and AI?
I have a nephew who is kind of a mechanical and technological savant—a lightning-quick problem-solver who is excellent with computers, who builds his own drones and vehicles and displays a real zeal for learning—but he also suffers from dyslexia so debilitating that he struggles to read, impacting his academic performance and his future prospects.
Unlike most mid-teenagers, he really wants to read. During a recent family beach vacation, it was heartbreaking to see him repeatedly pick up and put down a young adult book in frustration during a rainy day as the rest of the family happily read their own books around him.
But there is hope for my nephew and for other dyslexic people.
This year, the first AI-infused treatments for dyslexia came onto the market promising new solutions to this disability. Dysolve, one of these treatments, claims to be able offer a solution for Dyslexia that will not require hours of extensive evaluation, testing and cost-prohibitive therapy with a professional. Dysolve also claims to be the first treatment of its kind.
Why Are Some People Dyslexic?
Dyslexia is, in part, a pattern recognition problem. In what we would consider a “normal” brain, a block of text such as this paragraph is not read character-for-character. Instead, we recognize the patterns of written words from context, and our brain automatically fills in the whole of the word from a cursory reading without the need for a person to identify individual letters.
This is why most people can read a paragraph of somewhat scrambled words with relative ease—the right characters are there, and our brains deliver the right words through recognizing patterns and context and filling in the rest. Dyslexic people typically lack the neuropathways, the sequences and connections of parts of the brain, that enable this pattern recognition.
How Can We Help Fix Dyslexia?
Neuroplasticity is the ability of a human brain—even a mature or elderly human brain—to create new neuropathways. Each of us has the ability to evolve our brain over time, that’s why we’re able to learn and retain new knowledge and skills.
Applying neuroplasticity to dyslexia isn’t as simple as forcing a dyslexic person to read over, and over, and over again. Doing so fails to build new neuropathways, instead, the dyslexic person’s brain will continually revert to its old way of doing things. To build new neuropathways, new behaviors are needed to stimulate different areas of the brain into doing the work.
Why Solving Dyslexia is Still a Challenge
The human brain is so incredibly complex that we’re still untangling the mass of nerves and synapses, neurons and ganglia, cortexes and ventricles, hemispheres and lobes. We’re still at the beginning of connecting our mental understanding of the mind and psyche with our neurological understanding of the physical brain.
What we do know is that brains and minds are unique—they don’t all work the same way, they don’t all make the same connections and to treat a complex neurological condition like dyslexia will require personalized treatments—what works to treat one person’s dyslexia may not work to treat another person.
Why AI Can Treat Dyslexia Efficiently
AI is capable of automating the pattern recognition needed to diagnose dyslexia and identify its potential causes within the brain. AI can also more easily personalize treatments to create the new neuropathways each individual patient needs to rea d faster and more easily.
In Dysolve’s case, the company claims its AI continually tests and responds to each individual patient, building new exercises to help that person’s brain build new connections associated with reading. Rather than rely on a very long and intensive battery of assessments to figure out why an otherwise intelligent person struggles to read, Dysolve’s AI is capable of doing this work on the fly as it treats the underlying problems.
AI holds out the promise that treatment for a once debilitating condition can be made available to more people, at lower cost, in less time, and with less expenditure of human capital.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, in some not-too-distant future, we might be able to know more clearly whether our candidate’s gaffes or our president’s malapropisms are the result of true cognitive decline or serious developmental issues instead of relatively benign dyslexia, and thus make better choices.
