How do NTs read?

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I don't mean dyslexic people.

I'm hyperlexic. When I read, I just look at something unless it's a lot of words. When it's a lot of words, I read at the speed of thought. I only really struggle with reading when it's intended to be hard - like Ulysses or House of Leaves.

It seems to surprise people I'm with when I'm at a train station & looking for a train & I just 'see' the word wholesale. But it's one short word then one short set of numbers after. I don't get how that's tricky tbh (not humble bragging just saying).

But surely that's what separates literate people from people who struggle with reading for disability/age (kids)/lack of learning in childhood reasons?

Or do I just respond to words like this due to hyperlexia? Do most people actively read single words rather than taking them in wholesale?

I read the way you do. I've wondered if I have hyperlexia because of how fast I learned to read but there is probably a spectrum between dyslexia and hyperlexia.

I could say that I read at the speed of thought because I am a slow thinker, but I make up for it by being a very deep thinker.

I am trying to work out what you mean. I get certain words stand out in my brain but I would not know where from in the book and it would take me ages to find the word my brain "Caught". Is that a similar thing?

My experience with reading is like yours KT.

Yeah I think we're describing the same thing.

Unless it's a really hard book, I don't go word by word at a conscious level. Obviously I do go word by word but I don't notice myself at it.

I find it hard reading books like novels as most of the words do not sink in and some words "Grab me" from somewhere on the page but I may not know straight away from where. Nearly all the books I tend to read are factual railway books, though I dis find a book I read which was written in a style I got on with and it was called "Holly's Inbox". It was written in text or email form if that makes sense? Somehow I found that book gelled with me ad it has a funny and interesting story as well.

Railways is where I really get my point/experience, Mountain, so maybe you're the expert here...

If you were in a railway station & looking for the time that your train departs to for eg Leeds, could you immediately see the part of the sign that says 'Leeds' so long as it was already on the board and you were looking at the board? I'm talking about a London station with trains leaving for all over the country.

Apparently it's a 'skill' that I can do this. I just think it's obvious. I discount everything without 5 letters and everything that doesn't start with L then everything that doesn't continue with e etc. I do that in my head subconsciously. When something crops up which is 5 letters long and goes L-e-e-d-s, I can see it right away and all my conscious mind sees is 'Leeds'.* Sure there are other words on the board, and I know what they say, but they're not relevant so I don't mention them.

Then it's a simple matter of going along and seeing what will be a 4 digit number. So for eg '17:45'**. 'Leeds 17:45'. 'The train departing to Leeds will leave at 17:45, it's 17:45 now, we should probably get to platform 5 and board it'. All that requires is - simple word/4 numbers/one number.

Thing is I struggle reading big numbers. I have to break those down. But 4 digits isn't the same as 7 digits. And when it comes to letters, I don't struggle, so 'Sheffield' is as easy to see as 'Leeds'.

*Fictional eg as I haven't been to Leeds by train for decades.
** The people I was discussing this with find the 24 hour clock hard but if it was just a case of that, they would come to me like they usually do and say 'it says 17:45, what is that?'. Not be unable to actually see it at all.

I'm dyslexic, but I look up departure time and platform of a train on a railway station in a similar way to what you describe. It might take me a moment longer than you to actually spot the right word, but I also just look for words with the right length and first letter.
Though my mind doesn't read the whole board - also not on a subconscious level. It just looks for words that look like they could be the one I'm looking for and reads those.

That sounds normal to me, like how a person is supposed to read a board or timetables.

I know.

It surprised me that they were surprised. I don't think it's right to show off about.

Mum said 'I don't know because I'm deaf'. But I didn't hear it, I read it.

I also listen to the announcements but it's entirely understandable why she can't do that.

I would have to spend time to think about this and get back to you because I have to try to think how other people who are not me read things to compare, and I will have to fathom out how I read things to compare.


One thing I have discovered is that the prosopragnosia can come out in peoples names as well where I can group two user names as if they were one.... But also when I was working onthe railway I was known for my accuracy in picking out things that other people had missed, and in one case, the whole depot of around 150 to 200 people had missed! That was funny. I was called into the office. I thought "Uhoh!" Haha. My trains manager said "Do you know you are the only one in this depot who has signed in the right place!"
What happened was we had to sign each week to take a book. It was an odd system I dissagreed with because we were signing to say that we had read the book before we took the book, but it had always been done like this for years! But anyway. There was one book every week which had all the out of course workings like track repairs in it which took us about a week to read! (It was crammed full of lines that were outside our working area so trying to find anything that related to us took us days to sift through and to be honest was a waste of paper!) Then there was a periodical version of longer term track repairs we had once a month we had to sign for, and I think another list of a magazine type thing...
But what happened, someone had signed for this weekly book known as a "Weekly Operating Notice" in the wrong place, and the whole depot (Except me) copied by signing in the wrong place. They had to re-issue a new sheet and had to have every staff member sign again which due to all the differing shifts and holidays took ages!
I also found it a wierd system because if we had had the week off on holiday when we got beack we had to sign it even though the whole book by then was out of date and irrelivent so we had to sign that we had read it when reading it was a pointless excercise. The railways were like this!
I kept telling them they needed to update their system so only information that was relevent to us came through (As most of the book was for track repairs that were in different parts of rhe country from where we worked,so we continually had days of reading to do to find our information, and by then the event had been and gone!)
Also, that we should only sign after we had read the information and not when we were picking it up, as technically it was a legal document and if something bad happened, and there was an enquiry the first thing they asked was "Did you read the Weekly Operating Notice" and I was one of the few who did used to read them (Though I must admit that I could only do this if I had quiet trains so I had the spare time with nothing better to do!), though I would pick it up on the saturday the week before and sign for it, and it would be the next thursday by the time I had read trough it!
One depot that only operated the Valleys in Cardiff had their books only relevent to their routes, and it was only a few pages thick. Ours were around 300 pages thick. They could read theirs in a coupkeof hours! It was when I looked at theirs that I realized how we and other depots could have a much better system and we would be far safer (As we would be able to read the right information) if we only were given the information we needed for our area.

Sorry. I am going off topic.

Has your mother often been at big railway stations by herself before? Because they can be a bit overwhelming for people who are not used to them. If someone doesn't know they need to look for an information board it can take a while to notice it. Or if they're not familiar with these boards some people can take a bit longer to figure out what kind of information it provides and how to quickly look stuff up. Like, they might start reading it line by line just to figure out what kind of information it contains.

I find train stations confusing, and I've never got a train on my own. Same with airports - I've never got on a plane on my own. I can get buses on my own.

I don't think I am hyperlexic. I'm not the best reader in the world, probably due to ADHD. I am a good writer but I take a long time to read a book. A 300-page book could take me a few weeks or more to read if I read a few pages every day. My NT mum can read a 300-page book in 2 nights. I just can't sit still long enough.

Yes. You just scan the board vertically, and see the name of your destination town, and then scan right to see the info (if its an airport:flight number, ETA, etc). Not a whole lot to it. Sounds like KT hangs out with a lot of dyslexics who dont know theyre dyslexic.

Airports. I had to pay around £40 just to drop my brother off at Bristol Airport because the way the car parks are labelled.... And I followed thw arrows and found it was a staff only car park and I had to pay to get out, and then find the everyone elses car park. Dropped him off and the two lots of payment came to over £40 and back then I did not have an income so I had to pay and sell posessions to get money back in my bank account. It is the last time I ever went up to Bristol airport and the only time. I told my brother I would not take him to any airport outside of Wales... So he and his wife book a bus or go by train. It is far cheaper! How people can afford to park teir cars there and fly somewhere to come back and pay the parking I don't know! They are raking in the money by overcharging. If I spent a whole day or two and came back the bill would cost more then the value of my car!

I reacon Bristol airport put hard to follow signage and make it unclear on purpose to get money out of unsuspecting people. You can tell why when I was interested to try to travel abroad I never got my passport. I could not get past the forms so I never went in the days when I used to have a decent job.
Crazy airport and crazy prices. Can you imagine how much it would cost to fly?
If I go abroad I will buy a rowing boat and row. I am not flying by plane!

I was a very poor reader during elementary and junior high school. But when reading caught my interest, I made up the deficit in around a years time.

This recalls another type of special education that I received. When I was growing up, I never enjoyed reading for reading sake. I only associated reading with schoolwork. The only exception to the rule was comic books. But when I entered high school, the requirement to read efficiently became extremely important. My school must have recognized my limitation and placed me in a strange type of special class during my freshman high school year. The training was a type of reading comprehension training. The closest I could describe this approach was a class in Speed Reading. They would flash a paragraph or two of information for a very brief period of time and then measure my comprehension. They tried to teach me tricks on absorbing written material quickly and effectively.

My ability to learn was hindered by my lack of short-term memory. I would read the first sentence of a paragraph and then I would read the next. But by the time I finished the second sentence I forgot what the first sentence was about; so I would reread it. Then off to the third sentence but part way through that I forgot what the first two sentences were about, so I reread them. So it might take me an hour to read one paragraph - a single paragraph. What speed- reading taught me is to quickly identify one or two key words in a paragraph. This was the essence of the paragraph. Once I found them, they would anchor the entire paragraph around those couple words. So instead of reading linearly, I would read information from the inside out. I learned to comprehend meaning by drilling down from those key words to frame the entire paragraph.