The Teacher Who Couldn't Read

Something went wrong in the teacher’s head one morning while she was taking attendance of her kindergarten class. She didn’t recognize any of the names on the page in front of her, and couldn’t even comprehend the individual letters. She rushed over to her lesson plans, and those, too, were cryptic.A few days later the teacher, aged 40, would learn that a stroke had left her with a rare neurological condition: alexia without agraphia, more commonly called word blindness. People with this disorder can write words and understand spoken words. But they can’t read. This week, researchers Jason Cuomo, Murray Flaster, and José Biller of the Loyola University Medical Center published a fascinating description of this woman’s case in the medical journal Neurology.Read more at...Only Human, January 2014.