What are Learning Disabilities?

Being diagnosed with a learning disability can be scary at first, but it’s important to remember that such disabilities have nothing to do with one’s intellectual capacity. In fact, famous personalities such as Walt Disney, Alexander Graham Bell, and Winston Churchill all had learning disabilities, and look how well they did.

Learning disabilities: The Basics

A learning disability is defined as a problem that affects the brain’s ability to accept, process, analyze, or accumulate information. These problems may seem small, but they can make it very difficult to learn as quickly as students without learning disabilities. There are many types of learning disabilities, and many affected students have more than one kind. Some make it hard for the student to focus, causing the mind to wander, and other disabilities make it difficult to write, read, spell, or solve math problems.

The way in which the brain processes information is quite complicated, which is why it’s no wonder that we often change our minds. For example, when you simply look at a photo, the brain doesn’t just look at the picture but also forms the lines into an image, relates the photo to stored memories, and then stores the photo for future memory. Similarly, as we listen to someone speaking, we have to distinguish the words, interpret their meaning, and understand the connotations of what is being said. These activities involve different parts of the brain, and it’s up to our minds to connect all the complex components.

Learning disabilities are sometimes hard to detect, and they’re rarely apparent when you’re simply interacting with a person. They exhibit themselves only when a person is writing, reading, speaking, figuring out problems, or trying to focus. In most cases, the disability is diagnosed in school when a teacher notices that the student has trouble following directions or has a hard time doing work that should be easy. Other individuals, meanwhile, develop complicated ways of hiding their learning disabilities, and their problems are sometimes not detected until many years on.
Types of Learning Disabilities

There are two major categories of learning disabilities—verbal and nonverbal:

* Verbal learning disabilities: When a person has difficulty with both written and spoken words, he or she may have a verbal learning disability. The most common is dyslexia, which causes people to have difficulty recognizing letters and relating them to sounds. Because of this, people with dyslexia often have problems with reading- and writing-related tasks. Many people with verbal learning disabilities can read or write, but they have trouble in some aspects of language use.

* Nonverbal learning disabilities: When a person has trouble processing visual things, he or she may have a nonverbal learning disability. One may have difficulty making sense of optical details such as numbers or letters written on a blackboard—for example, he or she may confuse a plus sign with a multiplication sign. This type of disability may also lead to difficulty mastering abstract concepts such as fractions.