Becoming Prime

After a cryptic message, Robert Taylor helps his friend escape a situation and agrees to aid him in stopping a government plot. He finds himself in a postion where he must choose between personal gain and making things right.

The misogyny is a little too much for me, but I read through it. Why can't the nanites cure Bob's dyslexia?

(posted from Endings and Beginnings)

i've always understood nanites to beable to fix only physical problems broken bones, cancer, ect. dyslexia is more of a mental problem where the eyes and brain see slightly different things or things slightly out of order i.e. 123456 might be seen a 123546. there is no actual brain damage or eye damage so the nanites can't fix it.

Let's be clear:  The eyes don't "see" anything, because seeing requires processing, and the eyes don't process, they merely accept input.  If we were depending on our eyes to see for us, we would have some very weird imagery to deal with.

"pure" dyslexia (the kind where the only symptom is a difficulty with letter order in words, or possibly digit order in numbers), does actually have a physical cause: a legion on the specific part of the brain devoted to language.  (At least, according to Wikipedia, it does.)

Not having read the story, I don't know exactly what kind of dyslexia Bob has, nor what the story's nanites are truly capable of, but if they can fix any form of physical deficiency, then they should be able to clear up lesions.

Unless they don't like mucking about in the brain area...

But most likely this is a PDTL.  (What's that?  A PDTL is a "Plot-Driven Technical Limitation".  In other words, they can't because the author says they can't, because if they could, it destroys a huge chunk of the plot.)

Eric Storm