Some surveys estimate that one in ten people, or about 40 million Americans and 700 million children and adults worldwide, have dyslexia, and according to the Dyslexia Center of Utah, 70 to 80 percent of people with poor reading skills are likely dyslexic. It's hardly a death sentence, but if left untreated, dyslexia can severely impede tasks like organization, planning and prioritizing, and keeping time. Artificial intelligence (AI) might someday lend a helping hand, hopefully. Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology's Laboratory of Clinical Neurophysiology and the University of Haifa's Department of Computer Science claim to have developed an AI model that can automatically, without human intervention and with state-of-the-art precision, identify dyslexic readers. They describe their work in a preprint paper ("Features and Machine Learning for Correlating and Classifying between Brain Areas and Dyslexia") published on Arxiv.org this week.

Right now, you are reading these words without much thought or conscious effort. In lightning-fast bursts, your eyes are darting from left to right across your screen, somehow making meaning from what would otherwise be a series of black squiggles. Reading for you is not just easy – it's automatic. Looking at a word and not reading it is almost impossible, because the cogs of written language processing are set in motion as soon as skilled readers see print. And yet, as tempting as it is to think of reading as hard-wired into us, don't be fooled.