B.R. is a good friend of mine from work. As a child he endured two brain surgeries, as an adult he suffers from dyslexia, occasional seizures and what I believe could be an example of a Neuropsychological dissociation. We work in a grocery store and he is repeatedly being reprimanded for performing some of his duties more slowly than others, and for stocking items to the shelves upside down instead of right-side up. I have mentioned to management that perhaps he has problems recognizing the difference, he says it must be from his dyslexia, management believes he is lazy and inattentive. I shall explore some research in order to shed some light on what could be my friend B.R’s problem.
Dissociations in Neuropsychology are situations in which one function is absent while another function is present (Goldstein B. 2011) While I have not performed any experiments with B.R in order to determine whether he truly suffers from a dissociation I have observed him for some time and noticed some similarities between him and D.F. the woman Milner and Goodale studied after her brain was damaged from carbon monoxide poisoning. She had trouble matching the orientation of a card to a line when asked to do so, however when asked to mail the card she was holding she could match orientations. This indicated that there where different mechanisms for orientation and for action. My friend B.R. seems to have a similar problem. He is often seen searching for an items home location longer than it would take normally and while stocking the shelf (a similar action to sliding the card into a mail slot) he does not notice if the item is upside down or right side up, often these items are simple boxes with a picture on the front and are easily stocked upside down. However most clerks notice the discrepancy and correct the situation. (Goldstein B. 2011)
Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is characterized by difficulties with accurate and or fluent word recognition and poor spelling and decoding abilities. I see nothing in this definition of dyslexia that would indicate B.R. would have trouble determining whether something is upside down or not, but instead would account for troubles with reading, writing, and numbers mostly. Dyslexia does slow down the process of reading and symbol recognition which would slow down his being able to properly identify the correct item locations while stocking. An essential part of the stocking process is reading the item name and finding the correct shelf space based on the items tag, quick reading is an essential part of the process (Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity)
Spatial Orientation Phenomenon is a condition in which a person’s visual system does not properly flip the image taken in resulting in the person’s visual field being upside down. While I do not believe this is what is wrong with B.R. I thought it important to explore conditions that could cause and extreme version of what B.R. might be experiencing. If Bojana Danilovic can see the entire would upside down and be diagnosed by experts at Harvard with this condition, than is it not possible that B.R. can have trouble with recognizing images that are upside down. Perhaps not as extreme or as prevalent as Bojana’s condition but still a real possibility. (Smith, 2013)
In conclusion B.R has trouble with reading letters and numbers from his dyslexia which slows him down while performing his job function, and while management believes his frequency of miss-stocked items is due to inattention I believe that his childhood brain surgeries may have resulted in some damage to areas in his brain that have resulted in an inability to notice theses upside down images. He sees the mistake and his brain simply just does not register the difference.
References
Goldstein, B. (2011). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience (3rd ed.). Wadsworth
Hills, S. (2013, March 14). The woman who sees the world upside down: Rare brain condition means council worker sees everything the wrong way up | Daily Mail Online. Retrieved from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2293692/The-woman-sees-world-upside-Rare-brain-condition-means-council-worker-sees-wrong-way-up.html
What Is Dyslexia? * The Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://dyslexia.yale.edu/whatisdyslexia.html
good friend of mine from work as a child had two brain surgeries performed upon him. Now as an