We're a speech therapy software company making evidence-based treatment for adults with stroke, brain injury, and other conditions more accessible.
🧠 Your brain throws away details on purpose
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Your brain keeps two records of everything you read. One stores the gist. This is the meaning, the shape of it, what it was roughly about. The other stores the verbatim trace: the actual words, the specific details, the data point in the third paragraph. The gist is durable. It sticks around, gets consolidated into long-term memory, and becomes part of what you "know." The verbatim trace is fragile. It starts degrading almost immediately. To be fair, it's supposed to. Retaining every word of every piece of information you've ever read would be overwhelming. But after a brain injury, the details degrade even faster... or don't form reliably in the first place. The newest treatment in the Virtual Rehab Center is Read & Remember Articles, and it's built directly around this problem. Clients read an article aloud, identify the keywords and phrases that matter most, then compare their selection with a model before summarizing and answering four open-ended questions about what they read. The keyword step does something specific: it converts a vague impression of understanding into something the brain can actually retrieve. There are four difficulty levels, and three content categories (Health & Science, Leisure & Entertainment, and History & Culture). No more time spent hunting for the perfect article. Match the material to your client's interests and ability level, and get right to work. Hints are available for the comprehension questions if needed, though using them marks the question as incorrect, so you still get an accurate picture of independent performance. Your patients know when they're not fully getting it. They finish an article and feel like it passes right through them. This treatment gives them something to grab onto.
Let's anchor those details and help build strategies for both language and cognition. Warmly, P.S. There are 4 new reading handouts in the Handout Vault: clinical guides, patient education, and strategy sheets. Try everything free for three weeks 👉 https://tactustherapy.com/rehab/ |
Tactus Therapy
We're a speech therapy software company making evidence-based treatment for adults with stroke, brain injury, and other conditions more accessible.
Reading a text message. Skimming a menu. Catching up on the news. Most of us don't think twice about these things... until we can't do them the way we used to. After a stroke or brain injury, reading often gets harder, slower, and more exhausting. If you've noticed this, you're not alone. 🧠 What's going on in the brain Reading isn't a single skill. It's a complex chain of steps your brain performs in a fraction of a second: recognizing letters, combining them into words, pulling meaning from...
A patient reads “dog” easily. And the non-word “slib” without hesitation. But show them “plaid" and they said "played." The word "island" becomes "iz-land." What's going on here? 🤔 Answer: surface alexia (the phonological route is intact; irregularly spelled words are a struggle) If you got that – kudos! 🤗If you didn’t… don’t beat yourself up. 🥴 Even if you nailed the diagnosis, the treatment details for surface alexia might be rusty. As SLPs, we're expected to hold a lot of information in...
Hey Reader – Quick question: when you get a new aphasia referral, how much of your evaluation is focused on reading? Alexia tends to be a small part of the assessment, and while functional reading always gets a goal in the treatment plan, the depth of evaluation and treatment it actually warrants often gets squeezed out by everything else on the caseload, right? 🙈 Given that over 80% of people with aphasia present with alexia… that’s a gap worth noting. The thing is, “acquired alexia” isn’t a...