Revisiting hyperlexia Back on April 14, I was boggled by the newly-discovered child disorder “hyperlexia.” Arthur Hlavaty wrote to point out that the son of a writer he and I both know has been diagnosed with the condition. As Arthur says, surely this fellow and his wife “are not insensitive to the call of reading.” Similarly, Alison Scott wrote:

http://www.hyperlexia.org/hyperlexia.html gives details, and includes the key sentence:

“It should be noted that the diagnosis of hyperlexia does not apply to children who are precocious in reading but who do not exhibit a significant language disorder.”

Most of the fannish children I know have large spoken vocabularies as well as the reading habit.

On the other hand, whenever I read stories about hyperlexic children, even including the case studies in the article I’ve linked to, I just think ‘Hey, these kids are just weird.’

I should have been more clear. I didn’t really mean to suggest there’s nothing real there. But when I see news stories adducing what seems to me pretty normal smart-little-kid behavior as evidence of a pathology, my eyes cross. (He was so absorbed in a book, he refused to come to the table! Heavens to Betsy.)

What we know is that we don’t know much, and that a lot of neurological conditions (“narcolepsy,” “Asperger’s,” “hyperlexia”) aren’t really crisply-defined things on the same order as “compound fracture” or “the mumps,” but, instead, a bunch of fuzzy circles loosely drawn around sets of events and symptoms that often seem to go together, except when they don’t. And yet the very fact that we give these cloudy sets names tempts us to think of them as more crisply-defined states of being than they actually are. Moreover, for many people, getting assigned even one of these vague diagnostic labels is a big relief after years of feeling like they must just be lazy, crazy, or stupid. This is perfectly understandable and, believe me, I sympathize a lot.

So I don’t want to seem like I’m gainsaying anyone’s real problem, but I’m also pretty skeptical about what looks to me like a media rush to pathologize a lot of kid behavior that may not be, in every case, pathological. I’m sure there are kids out there who badly need to be diagnosed as “autistic” or “hyperlexic” and duly treated. I’m just as sure there are a non-trivial number of slightly obsessive or precociously verbal kids who are well within the range of adult “normality”—who simply have, you know, personalities, just as if they were people—who are being misdiagnosed by panicky parents and teachers who can’t imagine any non-pathological reason any kid might prefer reading all day to playing football. Does this mean the pathologies don’t exist? No, it means some adults are numbskulls. Next on Electrolite: “Water: Still Wet.” [10:32 PM]