How Hyperlexia Affects Me as an Adult

Here’s another gentle reminder that these kinds of things are truly lifelong.

I’ve beatten my dad at many games of Scrabble. Photo by Sven Brandsma on Unsplash

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What even is hyperlexia?

This isn’t as well-defined as it really ought to be, like a lot of stuff that has to do with our brains. It’s not, at least not yet, in any formal diagnostic manual as a standalone thing. Loosely, people define it as being able to read much earlier than expected without being taught, having a discrepancy between ability to decode orthography and reading comprehension, and often having a fascination with letters, numbers, and other symbols, and have attempted to propose three subtypes, distinguished primarily about the externally observable nature of any autistic traits.

I think that I most likely fit into most folks’ definition of Hyperlexia Type II, which entails the sustained presence of accompanying autistic traits beyond early childhood. I have a bit of an armchair hunch that Types II and III more or less describe the same thing and that “Type III” hyperlexics just tend to be of a higher masking autistic phenotype. If you do any digging around on the topic of hyperlexia, you will almost exclusively find information written for parents pertaining to hyperlexic children no older than the usual elementary school age range, and that detailed information about the topic in general isn’t the easiest to come by. Hyperlexia also does not seem to enjoy the same relatively widespread recognition as dyslexia.

How things started out

I don’t episodically remember all of the early manifestations of my hyperlexia, but my parents have filled me in on it to some extent. I have been told that I was recognizing individual letters and had memorized the entire English alphabet by about 18 months old. By about three, which is when my episodic memory kicked in a bit more, I was reading simple words and by four, I could pretty much decode anything in sight. At that age, I derived genuine pleasure from reading signs and lists of things, simply for their own sake.

I really enjoyed reading lists of ingredients on the backs of food packages and would ask to be handed bottles of supplements and medications so I could read whatever was printed on the bottle. The longer the words were, especially when it came to really long names of chemicals, the more I enjoyed saying them out loud. As you can probably imagine, given the pretty lax regulations regarding what’s allowed in one’s food in the US, as well as the relatively loose delineation between supermarkets and pharmacies compared to some places elsewhere, the grocery store, when I wasn’t experiencing too much physical distress from the stench of assorted raw meats at the deli counter, the hum of the freezer aisles, or the sheer abundance of fluorescent overhead lighting, was simply a treasure trove. When it came to speech, despite having spoken my first words at nine months old and started stringing together sentences using adult-level syntax with some pretty uncommon words by about two, I regularly screwed up pronouns in the most glaring ways and basically tried to invent new words on the basis of how I thought the “logic” of English “should” go until I was about five.

In elementary school, I moved onto reading medical reference texts. At some point, before I honed my skills at hunting down free PDFs of textbooks during undergrad, I also started requesting math textbooks as birthday and Christmas gifts. For my 14th birthday, one of my only birthday gifts was “Advanced Calculus: A Differential Forms Approach”, by Harold M. Edwards and I carried the thing around like a security blanket, along with an accompanying notebook where I spent hours toiling away at some of the exercises, for probably a solid year. There was something I just found mesmerizing about getting to interact with all of the equations and proofs on the page, as challenging as I found the material overall, and despite the fact that I later realized that I’m just really not all that into math for its own sake. A regular occurrence throughout my childhood was doodling all variety of mathematical symbols on my arms and on mirrors because I just liked how it all looked laid out in front of me. I will sometimes read things over and over and write something out in order to just read it, simply because I like how it all sounds together in my head regardless of meaning. I actually don’t even remember what else I got that year, but know that there were definitely a couple of other things. If you haven’t already figured it out, I really wasn’t all that into fiction. I used to be pretty self-righteous regarding my distaste for Twilight and Harry Potter (years before J.K. Rowling revealed herself to be a raging TERF-osaurus-rex) too.

How this all continues to pan out

I still don’t care all that much for fiction. Of course, there are quite a few exceptions, but I’m very picky about it. Most of it, including what I’m sure is some extremely high quality work, just doesn’t hold my attention for very long. It usually takes me a very long time, sometimes up to several watches or reads, to figure out even basic plots. Summarizing what I know in a way that makes sense to anyone outside of my head is a whole other ordeal. Despite having been subjected to the main works in some very popular franchises, I still can’t tell you what the hell they’re even about.

I recently shocked someone I had just met when they found out that I had seen every single Star Wars movie as a kid, but still couldn’t begin to give anyone a basic synopsis, even at gunpoint. I’d probably need to go back and study it the way I first learned to find the solution set of a simple differential equation in order to learn how to do so. I prefer documentaries to anything scripted by far and biopics are a close second. Another fun fact is that I will sometimes not know how a word is pronounced because I’ve read it so much more than I’ve heard it spoken.

All the way through the end of undergrad, when I was regularly expected to produce academic writing that didn’t revolve around the finer technical points of my favorite STEM subjects, venting about the world, or the esoteric depths Western classical music history and music theory, I compensated for my style of internalizing the written word and using language as a whole, in some pretty bizarre, yet effective ways, at least as far as my grades were concerned. One of the main techniques I used to write essays on assigned fictional works, particularly once I hit the point in my school’s high school English curriculum where we were supposed to read and analyze multiple several-hundred page novels, as well as multiple Shakespeare plays in a given school year, was to choose a small excerpt of each manuscript, at most maybe 10 pages, and then apply an especially tunnel-visioned form of laser focus toward going down convoluted winding rabbit holes of philosophical interpretation that spanned several pages.

I would first read the entire books, mostly absorbing the sounds of the words in my head as they went by and a slew of disjoint factoids about characters and the inanimate objects described to exist in their near vicinity, then carry out the more focused analyses. It just worked somehow, even when I was placed in the most advanced honors English class my school had to offer and also carried me through fulfilling my upper-division undergraduate writing general educational requirement. I was able to manage to finish high school two years early with a 4.2 GPA. To say I really started to struggle with impostor syndrome is an understatement.

When it came to not-so-musical history-related coursework, my least favorite school subject, I played around with the logic of events, especially when tackling multiple choice tests, in ways that sidestepped what my teachers were probably hopping I’d get in a more top-down way from their curricula. I have quite a few memories of taking California standardized history tests (because, you know, NCLB happened) and just piecing together how I’d bubble in the Scantron sheet based on a list of dates I had memorized, alongside creating mental truth tables regarding whether different combinations of answer choices could ever simultaneously be true. There came a time when I just stopped reading the passages in the exams altogether and I still often scored above-average.

This approach did have some issues when I tried to apply it to the parts of the SAT that weren’t quantitative and I could just never quite get at what the test-makers really wanted, resulting in about a 200-point gap between those sections and my math score, though I was somehow able to score in the 98th percentile on GRE writing. I was pretty into the politics going on in my immediate surroundings pretty early on and pondering about why people are the way they are, but could not get myself to absorb stories from history books or dramatized videos about US presidents.

I hypothesize that my brain has strongly shaped itself around interacting with written communication and reading in a way that is very similar to how I’ve seen multiple dyslexics describe a leaning toward auditory media and non-verbal visuospatial tasks. One neuropsychologist even described me as having “reverse” dyslexia. I’ve also been told in numerous ways regarding my overall communication style that I’m some level of verbose in ways that many find socially suboptimal, and I’ve tended to gravitate toward online platforms that allow for and often even prioritize more long-winded written communication, such as Reddit. It really can feel like I’m saying a whole lot of nothing when having conversations sometimes, and as if I’m operating from a whole different set of word definitions, one closely tied to an aggregate of dictionaries and a stockpile of memorized figures of speech, compared to whatever most other people are doing to string words together.

When it comes to carrying out errands, I’d much, much rather take care of everything in-browser and through self-service kiosks. I simply dread phone calls, especially with strangers in a customer service capacity. It’s bad enough that I’ve literally made sure I was intoxicated for some of them. For some reason, it’s much less taxing for me to use forms and touch-screen buttons with words printed on them to carry out these tasks. I often use closed-captions and transcripts when watching videos. There are also fairly brief occasions, though not terribly frequent, where I can’t really produce speech, and I have resorted before to writing things out in text messages during times like these.

Sometimes, I will even mute videos and exclusively read the closed-captions or read a podcast transcript without listening to the audio. This is all pretty strange for a professional musician, isn’t it? I also typically can’t understand most song lyrics without reading along during listening and thought I hated all music until I learned that music without lyrics exists, which then allowed me to slowly warm up to some music with vocals. I’m still not sure why I developed a long-standing obsession with music in middle school. I typically find lectures a bit hard to follow, particularly when the person giving the lecture doesn’t use any slides or write much down on the board and reaching a point of fatigue that feels as if I’m simply listening to a bunch of disjoint singleton sets of sounds passing by while being unable to understand a single spoken word happens pretty often in my classes which have two-hour lecture slots. I know that a lot of professors aren’t particularly great at pedagogy, but some of this is definitely a me problem too.

One big reason I think it took six attempts at my behind-the-wheel driving test before I got my driver’s license is because I really struggle with quickly acting upon verbal instructions, especially during a task that involves as much multitasking as driving, and my debilitating performance anxiety and general unease waiting my turn at the DMV weren’t helping either. Sometimes, I would just flat out drive the opposite direction from what the examiner had told me or turn down the completely wrong streets. My parents also noticed that my driving was much better when I simply followed the highlighted path on a GPS with occasional glances and the synthesized speech output silenced. They were puzzled when I kept failing despite feeling that my driving abilities had progressed beyond those of some of their friends who had held licenses for decades.

Ditto for when I ended up a 1 on both parts of the AP Physics C exam. I was caught off-guard, in my haze of lacking basic exam study skills, by just how much pure symbolic manipulation just wasn’t going to cut it. I somehow still pulled off a 5 in AP Music Theory though, despite a similar lack of studying. Physics has also continued to be my worst STEM subject by far and I think it’s because of the narrative nature of how exercises are presented, especially at the lower-division level. Somehow, despite not fully appreciating it’s full glory the way I would if I had really dug into what’s supposed to be tackled first in one’s education, I find looking at instructional materials in quantum mechanics a bit more approachable than those of more classical approaches. My guess as to why that is has to do with the raw volume of mathematical symbols being displayed on the page at any given time.

The driver’s license issue actually felt so prohibitive, especially after I got to my third learner’s permit, that I was trying to get one of the DMVs I had booked a driving test at to give me a slightly modified version of the typical testing accommodations for d/Deaf drivers, but had no luck and had to just tough it all out for as long as everything took, with only a little bit of help from a smidge of Xanax before the attempt where I finally passed. I also can usually only show people where something outside of pointing range is by directly leading them to said item and find it much easier to just be given a map of somewhere rather than someone trying to tell me where to go, and for some reason have an easier time remembering license plates, names of NVIDIA GPU models, dates, and 16-digit numeric passwords (how I was able to penetrate most of the security measures associated with my elementary school laptop) than names of streets and other people. Song titles like these also just tickle my fancy in ways that I can’t quite articulate, beyond knowing that they tickle the grapheme-color and ordinal-linguistic personification aspects of my synesthesia in satisfying ways.

Why we really need to care about hyperlexia across the lifespan

Like any other flavor of developmental disability, despite the fact that a medical resident once told me that hyperlexia “goes away” when you get older, the simple reality is that we just don’t grow out of these things, and I hope I have been able to help illustrate this by describing my internal experience with hyperlexia post single-digit age. I’m hoping I can at least give another adult out there going through the same things and perhaps a clinician or two some anecdotal insight I was unable to find. Given that hyperlexia can entail some very prominent disabling features, we must also begin to put it in the context of disability rather than that of a party trick or an invitation to indiscriminately assume that people dealing with it will be evenly “gifted” across the board.

I also think that it is important to really loudly and clearly carve out space for comorbid hyperlexia to exist as one possible permutation of autistic lived experience, similarly to how we’ve more strongly acknowledged that autism can frequently come bundled with things like epilepsy and EDS, and that having either epilepsy or EDS also does not completely guarantee autism. In my case, especially given when I grew up, it was typically thought that autism could not entail anything that ever looked like or was a strength in any way, which delayed my diagnosis by over two decades. I’ve been completely winging it when it comes to my hyperlexic tendencies my whole life and still am, even completely stumping multiple state-funded educational therapists and similar, who claim to know what to do to help a dyslexic, dysgraphic, or dyscalculic person better leverage how their brain works. I would sure not like to see generations after me lack so much understanding around this matter.