Reading in the Brain and Mirror Writing

Stanislaus Dehaene has a new book entitled Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention and he has been kind enough to publish chapter summaries and all color figures here.


From Chapter 7, a discussion of how mirror reading is thought to be a loss of generalization ability (recognizing that b is related to d, for instance) that occurs as children grow older. At left, Orton's original thought that mirrored letter mistakes resulted from a failure to inhibit the perception in the opposite hemisphere; at right, the current theory that mirror 'mistakes' occur from the retention of a generalization ability rather than a real mistake. The generalization ability is a good thing for young children because it helps them recognize their parents and their world from different angles.

In our own family, I remember being surprised when our then young son brooded over how to write the letter "f"... he said, "f, f, f,... oh that's right, it's a flipped over 'j' with a line through it." Huh? I hadn't even thought about the relationship between the letter 'f' and 'j' before that. To this day both he and Brock are able to read words backwards more quickly than me. There are advantages to this mirror ability (as well as disadvantages of course) - usually in the ability to rotate objects and perceive from different angles (like Tesla turning an apparatus around in his mind), and not surprisingly, we often see this talent among the spatially-talented dyslexics that we see. Our loss of mirroring ability is therefore more of a 'mistake', likely reflecting the same process that we discussed in The dark side of expertise.


In the figure at right, the bar graph shows how mirroring is common condition in children below the age of 8 years. Above the graph, the writing observations of Cornell that 5 year old children are more like to write their name backwards when not given enough room for left-to-right writing. Lissie and Meggie were sisters. Lissie was 5 and Meggie, 6.

Below, an example of Leonardo Da Vinci's mirror writing.

For more from Dehaene on mirror writing: Why do children make mirror errors while reading? pdf

Orchid Kids: The Positives of Intense and Demanding Children

"Themistocles was an unruly boy, and carried on his mad pranks without much restraint. When taken to task for them he said, "The wildest colts make the best horses when they come to be properly trained." - Plutarch (46-120 AD)

Interesting article The Science of Success in Atlantic Monthly:

The first part starts out pretty predictable..."In 2004, Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg, a professor of child and family studies at Leiden University, started carrying a video camera into homes of families whose 1-to-3-year-olds indulged heavily in the oppositional, aggressive, uncooperative, and aggravating behavior that psychologists call “externalizing”: whining, screaming, whacking, throwing tantrums and objects, and willfully refusing reasonable requests. Staple behaviors in toddlers, perhaps. But research has shown that toddlers with especially high rates of these behaviors are likely to become stressed, confused children who fail academically and socially in school, and become antisocial and unusually aggressive adults."

The researchers found that behavioral interventions and video feedback to mothers really helped behavior, for instance helping mothers to recognize that their fidgety kids really did enjoy reading books together although they were restless and seemed distractible. But the study also had another level of analysis that highlighted the unexpected greater good in the genetically at-risk kids. When the outcomes of 'at-risk' allele kids were compared to outcomes of 'protective' allele kids, the 'at-risk' ones actually fared better.

"As it turned out, the toddlers with the risk allele blew right by their counterparts. They cut their externalizing scores by almost 27 percent, while the protective-allele kids cut theirs by just 12 percent (improving only slightly on the 11 percent managed by the protective-allele population in the control group). The upside effect in the intervention group, in other words, was far larger than the downside effect in the control group. Risk alleles, the Leiden team concluded, really can create not just risk but possibility.

Can liability really be so easily turned to gain? The pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce, who has worked with many a troubled child in more than three decades of child-development research, says the orchid hypothesis “profoundly recasts the way we think about human frailty.” He adds, “We see that when kids with this kind of vulnerability are put in the right setting, they don’t merely do better than before, they do the best—even better, that is, than their protective-allele peers..."

Very encouraging finding for families dealing with intense difficult temperament kids (difficult temperaments have been described as intense, negative, and slow to adapt), and bears out with our clinical practice too. Parents of these kids often need a great deal of support - and it is true that some kids are A LOT harder to parent than others. But there is an encouraging light at the end of the tunnel.

The authors argue for a more complex view of understanding 'genetic risk' - certainly when it comes to behavior: "...This new model sugggests that it's a mistake to understand these 'risk' genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts- butthey can also enhance function to favorable contexts."

The story concludes: "The orchid variant of the DRD4 gene, for instance, increases risk of ADHD (a syndrome best characterized COchran and Harpending write, 'by actions that annoy elementary school teachers'). Yet attention restlessness can serve people well in environments that reward sensitivity to new stimuli. The current growth of multitasking, for instance may help select for just such attentional agility."


Eide Neurolearning Blog: Elementary Angst May Still Mean Success

Famous People with Dyslexia: Dyslexic Heart Surgeon, Inventor, CEO, Toby Cosgrove M.D.

"We're not very good at the scholastic stuff, but we see other things that are different, and that's a big advantage." - Toby Cosgrove, M.D., CEO Cleveland Clinics

From Leadership Powerhouse:
"Cosgrove, an international legend in cardio thoracic surgery, holder of 18 patents, author of a book and 400 journal articles, and surgeon of more than 18,000 cases, is dyslexic. He had been a C and D student in high school... Barely squeaked by on his entrance exams. And he had been accepted at the last medical school to which he had applied."

Cosgrove shared many common dyslexic talents - a spatial / kinesthetic wiz, an oustanding on-the-spot problem solver, and cognitive and people-person strengths to enable him to lead and mange a large business such as the Cleveland Clinic Hospital, one of the top ranked hospitals in the nation.

From I Speak of Dreams:

"At the Clinic, Cosgrove's inventiveness so far has manifested itself in myriad innovations for surgical procedures. His unique view of the work allowed him to spy a solution for a flexible clamp in a bicycle gear and to see an embroidery hoop as inspiration for a ring used to repair heart valves.

In surgery, he said, dyslexia is an advantage because it favors spatial relationships.

Cosgrove didn't know he was dyslexic until he was 32, when he read the New York Times aloud to a teacher he was dating. As he struggled to pronounce some of the words, she put a name to the learning difficulties he had faced since he was a young boy.

These days, Cosgrove can rely on his assistants for help with spelling and sentence structure. But in his youth, a mix of serendipity, moxie and determination helped him jump one hurdle to the next Cosgrove struggled in public schools in his hometown of Watertown, N.Y., and studied hard for D's in college French at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., his father's alma mater.

He did so poorly on the standardized tests required for medical admission that he credits special circumstances for getting into the University of Virginia's medical school, the only one of 13 schools that accepted his application."

In the video below, check out ideas he implemented in his hospital system to keep down escalating healthcare costs.

Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity: Toby Cosgrove M.D.

Less is More: Smaller Corpus Callosum Correlates with Greater Divergent Thinking & Creativity - Dyslexia, ADHD Anyone?

Interesting study from Harvard found that a smaller corpus callosum (bundle that connects the right and left hemispheres), especially the posterior part was associated with higher levels of creativity on the Torrance Figural Creativity test. The latter test involves making pictures and stories from shapes or lines.

Very interesting. Especially with evidence that dyslexics and children with ADHD have been shown as a group to have lower posterior corpus callosum areas than age-matched controls.

Excerpt from Dr. Moore's paper:

"The results of this study provide evidence for the relationship
between visual–spatial divergent thinking and the size of the CC....smaller CC size in ratio to total WMV is associated with higher divergent-thinking scores. Furthermore, while posthoc analyses showed that the posterior CC was the only subregion to correlate significantly with divergent-thinking scores..."

The paper does a good job of summarizing some of the conflicting information in the field of creativity research (sorry, paper is not free access, but we received our copy by email from Dr. Moore), and raises the idea that perhaps creativity is best enhanced by a superior intrahemispheric and interhemispheric brain activity.

"Results: TTCT (Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) scores correlated negatively with the size of the CC and were not correlated with right or,incidentally, left WMV.

Conclusions: Although these results were not predicted, perhaps, as suggested by Bogen and Bogen(1988), decreased callosal connectivity enhances hemispheric specialization, which benefits the incubation of ideas that are critical for the divergent-thinking component of creativity, and it is the momentary inhibition of this e hemispheric independence that accounts for the illumination that is part of the innovative stage of creativity. Alternatively, decreased CC size may reflect more selective developmental pruning, thereby facilitating efficient functional connectivity."

The data are particularly interesting given our work with gifted dyslexics - during development, gifted dyslexics may be able to do relatively pure left-hemispheric tasks well (e.g. logic, analytical reasoning) and relatively pure right-hemispheric tasks well (insight-based problems solving), but struggle with multitasking activities like note-taking (listening, seeing, writing) that may require real-time interhemispheric coordination. During this stage of development, perhaps the best tasks to showcase their excellence involves specialized interhemipheric processing. A few more years may need to pass before interhemispheric tasks are fairly easily performed.

Ipod Music Stimulates Alzheimers and Stroke Patients

Pretty cool finding. Music stimulates the memories and activities of stroke and Alzheimer's patients. From the WSJ:

"Listening to rap and reggae on a borrowed iPod every day has helped Everett Dixon, a 28-year-old stroke victim at Beth Abraham Health Services in Bronx, N.Y., learn to walk and use his hands again...Ann Povodator, an 85-year-old Alzheimer's patient in Boynton Beach, Fla., listens to her beloved opera and Yiddish songs every day on an iPod with her home health aide or her daughter when she comes to visit. "We listen for at least a half-hour, and we talk afterwards," says her daughter, Marilyn Povodator. "It seems to touch something deep within her."

Dr. Concetta Tomaino, director of the non-profit organization Institute for Music and Neurologic Function found that "45 patients with mid- to late-stage dementia had one hour of personalized music therapy, three times a week, for 10 months, and improved their scores on a cognitive-function test by 50% on average. One patient in the study recognized his wife for the first time in months."

At right, researchers found that autobiographical music (red) triggered the medial prefrontal cortex, an area relatively spared in Alzheimer's disease. This also jives pretty well with the observation that Alzheimer patients tend to show a 'temporal gradient' for memories (better memory for remote rather than recent events), and the fact that severely aphasic stroke patients may be able to sing though spoken output is virtually nil.

How many people might this help?

Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories
Unlocking memories

Battling Back Against Background Noise - Dyslexia, Auditory Training, and Music

Nina Kraus' lab at Northwestern reported findings that support dyslexics' greater difficulty hearing in background noise. From her powerpoints:

As background noise increased, dyslexics / poorer readers had more difficulty distinguishing words.

Auditory training improved discrimination between similar sounds and sound blending (phonological awareness), but also speech-in-noise.

Interestingly, the Kraus lab also recently studied musicians vs. non-musicians on auditory discrimination and speech-in=noise tasks. The musicians were significantly better than non-musicians at detecting speech-in-noise, and their ability corresponded with their years of musical training. The research suggests that some improvement in speech-in-noise detection might be expected with musical training.

Students with dyslexia should generally receive:

1. Preferential seating - near the teacher and away from noisy students and classroom equipment (overhead projectors, pencil sharpeners, etc.). Some may benefit by classroom speakers.
2. Small group testing accommodations because of issues with background noise as well because increased auditory distractibility.

Dyslexia and Background Noise (scientific paper pdf).
Noise worse for dyslexic pupils
Dyslexia and auditory distraction

Sensory Processing Online Webinar- Listen Online Now!

Wow! - the Eides went for 4 hrs talking about sensory processing disorder, its links to attention and emotional regulation, autism vs. autism-like behaviors, dyslexia and social interactions, and practical strategies to help. If you sign up now, you can listen immediately to recordings of the entire conference and also receive a link to Lindsey Biel's live conference tonight. Your registration includes free copies of the entire webinar on DVD.


On November 12 & 13th, Lindsey Biel, OTR/L (Raising a Sensory Smart Child) and Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide (The Mislabeled Child) and will be presenting a 5-Hour Live Online Webinar on Sensory Processing Disorders that registrants may attend through their home computer connection . Don't miss it! The webinar will include Powerpoint presentations, Live discussion and Questions and Answers. Registrants can submit their questions during the webinar or before the webinar begins. A significant portion of the webinar proceedings will benefit Karina Eide's Health Fund.

Register for this 2-Day Online Sensory Processing Webinar ($49.95) by clicking the button below:

November 12 & 13th, 2009. 5-7:30 pm Pacific Standard Time (8-10:30 pm EST)

For more information, see: http://sensorypro.blogspot.com

Sensory Processing, Postural Sway, Anxiety - Better with Occupational Therapy

** Still Time to Register for our 2-Day Sensory Processing Webinar with Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide and Lindsey Biel **

DVDs of Conference Included with Conference Registration Register here: Sensorypro.blogspot.com.

Interesting study that shows that the lines between sensory processing, emotional processing, and behavior are continuing to blur. As many parents of a child with significant sensory processing difficulties will tell you, anxiety and emotional dysregulation can be a huge part of what makes sensory processing disorders most difficult. A major reason for this, it is thought, is that sensory systems function to alert the body to danger, so that disordered sensory signals will trigger extreme danger reactions, like fear, anxiety, aggression, and escape.

But now more evidence from the psychological side point out the dangers of anxiety on sensory processing, spatial perception, and balance, informing us about the other side of the loop - sensory processing dysfunction not only makes anxiety worse, but anxiety makes sensory processing worse, so no wonder kids can quickly escalate into a meltdown or complete overload situation.

In the figure above, researchers found with surprise that an otherwise unselected group of children diagnosed with anxiety actually had unrecognized balanced problems that could be measured quantitatively on tests of postural sway. More balance problems were seen if the children had to concentrate on a memory tasks (divided attention), but the greatest imbalance was seen when kids stood on a compliant surface (foam) that required more active balancing, and this imbalance was even more severe when children were asked to stand with eyes closed.

The findings are quite startling, and the raise the question whether we're really treating a lot of cerebellar kids with balance problems with anti-anxiety drugs.

Now various groups have confirmed that spatial difficulties and balance problems are common among anxious people, but an Israeli group have take the observations a step further. In this presentation, researchers found that treating anxious children with balance training (OT) resulted not only improved balance, but also reduced anxiety and higher self-esteem. They also made the observation that commonly used physician screens for balance (standing heel-to-toe or neurological exams of the vestibular system) were not sensitive for detecting problems. The anxious children did complain of more dizziness and motion sickness than their matched controls though.

From an article in Science Daily:

“This is a breakthrough in the field of occupational therapy,” says Dr. Bart...“You can’t treat children with anxiety in a cognitive way because of their immaturity and lack of operational thinking. Working with the body may be the answer."

FYI, sensory processing guru Dr. Lucy Miller also has an article calling for more Translational research in sensory processing disorders in a recent issue of Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience.

Postural Sway and Anxious Children
Impaired spatial learning in pediatric anxiety (abstract only)
Spatial perception problems in individuals with trait anxiety

Lazy Thinkers and Dysrationalia

Pop Quiz:

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?


a. Yes
b. No
c. Cannot be determined

(No, the polar bears have nothing to do with Jack, Anne, or George).

What's your answer? If you answered c. Cannot be determined, you're probably one of the 80% who is a lazy thinker, or a 'cognitive miser' as Keith Stanovich proposes in his book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought. Excerpt from the Toronto article (Why smart people do stupid things) below:

"... most people have the intelligence if you tell them something like “think logically” or “consider all the possibilities.” But unprompted, they won’t bring their full mental faculties to bear on the problem.

And that’s a major source of dysrationalia, Stanovich says. We are all “cognitive misers” who try to avoid thinking too much. This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. Thinking is time-consuming, resource intensive and sometimes counterproductive. If the problem at hand is avoiding the charging sabre-toothed tiger, you don’t want to spend more than a split second deciding whether to jump into the river or climb a tree.

So we’ve developed a whole set of heuristics and biases to limit the amount of brainpower we bear on a problem. These techniques provide rough and ready answers that are right a lot of the time – but not always."

The solution is easy (a. Yes) if you take the time to work out the two possibilities re: whether Anne is married or single.

At least at the time this post is being written, the entire Scientific American article can be read: here.

In this older paper by Stanovich, "thinking dispositions" (habits of mind?) (e.g. length of time spent on difficult problems, disposition to weigh new evidence / other opinions vs. a favored belief, etc.) are presented as being very different from the cognitive capacities measured by conventional IQ tests, and this would seem quite true.

Stanovich would like our educational system to spend for effort on teaching (and requiring) more rational thinking, and this seems to be a lofty goal (examples given...more general thinking strategies, scientific thinking, basic statistics). Hey given the magnitude of educational need, it would even be helpful if students were given more hard problems to solve with opportunities to be put into difficult spots so that can examine their assumptions and consider others' opinions and perspectives.

The truth is, some of this concept of being a 'cognitive miser' is part of the dark side of expertise. Expertise strives to categorize seemingly random choices, simplifying and speeding downstream decisions. But of course it can result in mistakes like the Jack-Anne-George dilemma.

I liked coming across this article because like jolt of coffee, it woke me up a bit about mistakes I can make by thinking too quickly.

What I am not so sure about is the Dysrationalist discussants might be placing too much importance on rationality as the ultimate guide to decision-making. What about moral philosophy in decision-making for instance? Last night as an exercise in philosophy we watched 'Fountainhead' as a family, and couldn't help but wondering whether uber-rationalism can also lead smart people to dumb conclusions.

Why smart people do stupid things
Rationality, Intelligence, and Levels of Analysis pdf
Lazy polar bear

Video Games Improve Night Vision

As we grow older, there are many factors that contribute to our difficulty seeing in the dark. A few of the reasons include a reduction in pupil size, loss of accommodative function, and a dramatic slowing in dark adaption due to delayed rhodopsin regeneration. Well, there now may be a reason for hope... and the encouraging answer comes from action-based video games..



The Bavelier lab found first that players of action-based video games were better than non-video game players at contrast sensitivity (58% better). Next, they found that a fairly short course of action-based video game training could improve contrast sensitivity 43%s. In the picture above, see how much a 58% improvement contrast sensitivity can help...

From the University of Rochester:

" 'Normally, improving contrast sensitivity means getting glasses or eye surgery—somehow changing the optics of the eye," says Bavelier. "But we've found that action video games train the brain to process the existing visual information more efficiently, and the improvements last for months after game play stopped.' "


Playing action games Call of Duty 2 or Unreal Tournament 2004 improved contrast sensitivity, whereas playing Sims 2 (non-action game) for the same amount of time did not. Test subjects played 50 hours over 9 weeks.

"At the end of the training, the students who played the action games showed an average 43% improvement in their ability to discern close shades of gray—close to the difference she had previously observed between game players and non-game players—whereas the Sims players showed none."

The researchers are hoping that the ability to train contrast sensitivity will help kids and adults with amblyopia (lazy eye) regain their vision.

http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/Daphne/Li_NN.pdf
http://www.agingeye.net/visionbasics/theagingeye.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty_2
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3342

Visual and Dyslexic Thinking and Learning Styles and the Educational Controversies

There's a lot of talk lately about 'Anti-Learning Styles' proponents like Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist who says "cognitive psychologists know they (learning styles) don't exist." Huh? Here he is being interviewed in the Washington Post.

But a good question raised by his discussion is whether too much burden is placed on teachers to teach toward different learning styles rather than students to identify how they learn best (or how they learn worst). The essential thing for teachers is to be aware of the need to present information in different forms (redundancy) - words and pictures - and consider working memory for students who have trouble keeping up with the class. But many types of instruction can't be easily translated into kinesthetic terms - what makes more sense is if students know how they learn best - so that they can translate information (words into pictures or picture into words) into their prefer learning and memory route for long-term storage.

Several papers to share with you - sorry they're not available free access, but found them in the EBSCO database through my public library. From Exley's British Journal of Special Education • Volume 30 • Number 4 • 2003 "The effectiveness of teaching strategies for students with dyslexia based on their preferred learning styles"-->
It shouldn't surprise us that if a children learn more efficiently in their areas of strength after all the data that multisensory instruction benefits dyslexic students with reading and spelling.

But the educational literature is rife with differences between dyslexic and non-dyslexic thinking styles...probably part of the reason so many dyslexics are frustrated in conventionally taught schools For instance, from Perkin and Croft's The Dyslexic Student and Mathematics in Higher Education:

"One question was asked the dyslexic and non-dyslexic students who participated in the explanatory studies was 'are there any areas of mathematics which you understand but for which you frequently obtain incorrect answers?' Only one of the non-dyslexic students answered yes and attributed this to 'sloppy arithmetic', moreover, two students explained that if you understand mathematics you obtain the correct answer. Whereas 10 (out of 12) of the dyslexic students answered yes to this question, the topics that were cited were the use of statistical tables, operations involving rows and columns of figures, and multi-stage operations.

Another question we posed was 'do you use mind maps for mathematics?' and this also produced a very marked difference in response between the dyslexic and non-dyslexic students. NONE (my caps) of the non-dyslexic students used mind maps and many could not comprehend how they might be used for mathematics and asked if this was possible, whereas seven of the dyslexic students drew mind maps for themselves and made comments such as 'they are an invaluable part of my learning process', or 'they are essential for revision'. "

This translation of information into diagrammatic / spatial relationships or visual icons seems to a particularly common feature of the dyslexic thinking style, yet at least at present it has received little attention in the formal dyslexia education literature.

One last article excerpt (The Meaning of Dyslexics' Drawings in Communication Design...the authors commented on the observation that some 24% of dyslexic university students had chosen design schools (Zdziensky, 1996) while on the other hand avoiding further education or training that would require extensive essay writing (Ott, 1997). They sought to examine whether any differences could be seen between dyslexics and non-dyslexics drawing pictures to represent conceptual terms. The dyslexic group were quicker at drawing pictures (15 min vs. 20 min), had higher rates of using divergent symbols to represent opposing concepts (70% dyslexics vs. 40% non-dyslexics, associated with higher levels of creativity, at least suggested by Guilford, 1962).

Drawings of dyslexics:

For more on Dyslexic Thinking and Design, check out this free access article: Dyslexia as a Resource for Design pdf

Sensory Processing and School Underachievement

Over the weekend, I was reading an article about students with disabilities in college, and I was struck by the conclusions that students with hidden disabilities had much poorer outcomes than students with obvious physical impairments (blindness, physical disability). The conclusions had a ring of truth. Disabilities that occur often without obvious physical signs, like sensory processing disorders or dyslexia, are often harder to 'prove', harder to qualify for accommodations, and often faulted as being due to laziness, poor effort or motivation, or retardation.

Sensory processing disorders are probably among the most common reasons children underachieve in school, although they are often not formally recognized because of the lack of a definitive diagnostic standard like a blood test or physical sign, and fluctuations and in behaviors that might be seen. In truth, sensory processing behaviors result from a wide range of causes, from visual or auditory problems, delayed (like premature birth) or abnormal development (genetic diseases), from inherited family conditions, or autism spectrum disorders. In the last few years, more progress has been made on understanding understanding how sensory processing behaviors may arise, but clinical professionals and teachers may still be most familiar with severe aversive fight-or-flight reactions or environmental sensitivities. But sensory processing difficulties contribute to much more. In fact, understanding more about the effects of SPD on school performance will help more parents and teachers know how to help these kids learn better.

The following are some of the most commonly related school problems we see in the setting of sensory processing disorders:

- slow or poor handwriting (poor sensory-motor coordination for writing, problems organizing and selecting what to say)
- poor work output in general (effects on decision-making, sequencing, and planning)
- slowed processing of information (hard to filter out noise, longer to find and organize information)
- problems multi-tasking (spd kids and adults are uni-taskers)
- easy distractibility
- time blindness
- 'inattentiveness' in class, missing instructions

If you look at the list, it's easy to see that output takes a big hit with SPD. These kids are often quite bright, but they struggle expressing the full depth of their comprehension or understanding. Everything may take a lot longer because visual recognition may not be immediate, sounds within words may not be as clear, and it may be harder to select and prioritize information going in and going out.

In one classroom study, teachers were found to wait only about 3 seconds for an student to answer a question, before moving on to another. If the teacher was told a student might be slow to respond and wait longer, they still only waited about 6 seconds. What about the student who takes 10 or 20 seconds? Not much chance to participate in class discussions...at least not if the teacher doesn't find a way to give them more time, like assigning several questions to students to answer, then going back through the list - so the child with SPD has a longer period (while the other students are in the process of answering) to retrieve the information and organize what they want to say.

Research into the consequences of sensory processing mismatches is still a number of steps away from the classroom, but what information can be obtained can be helpful. At right from a study looking at experimentally-induced sensory (proprioceptive) mismatches, researchers found that motor imagery maps were distorted in response to the change in position sense, and motor reaction times were delayed.

If only the complexity of brain processing could be 'seen' - then it would be easier for us to understand their struggles and we would be more conscious of giving these kids more time. In the big scheme of things, more time for development will help them, not hurt them. Most will do well if strive to educate them at an appropriate pace - and keep them from becoming defeated in their early years. These kids are often bright and quite analytical. The problems are often at the perceptual level, not at the level of higher order thinking or metacognition. Also although they may not be able to multi-task well, they can often unitask quite well. Though answers may not come quickly, when they do answer they are often right because their long term memories are often outstanding.

** On November 12th and 13th please join us for a 2-day Sensory Processing conference on the Internet with Lindsey Biel of Raising a Sensory Smart Child. For more information: http://sensorypro.blogspot.com You'll be able to attend, ask questions, and chat with other participants online through your home computer. Proceeds will benefit our daughter's health fund. The conference will also be recorded and available online for 3 weeks afterward **


Proprioceptive mismatch changes motor imagery and delays reaction time pdf
Complex sensory involvement in perceptual decision making

Dyslexic Molecular Biologist Carol Greider Wins 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine

“It's going to be hard work whether you think it's fun or not, so you might as well have fun while you're doing the hard work.” - Carol Greider, PhD, 2009 Nobel Prize Winner in Medicine



Her application package was a bit unusual, Greider says. “I had great research experience, great letters of recommendation, and outstanding grades, but I had poor GREs.” Although she did not know it growing up, Greider suffers from dyslexia, which affected her scores on standardized tests. Only two schools—the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA) and the University of California, Berkeley— offered her an interview..."

Carol Greider's family history has some overlaps with others in this blog - including physics in the family (Greider's father is a physics professor). Greider has said an enjoyment of mechanistic thinking drove her to choose biochemistry over other scientific fields.



Thanks Tom West for NYT addition info:

"My parents were scientists. But I wasn’t the sort of child who did science fairs. One of the things I was thinking about today is that as a kid I had dyslexia. I had a lot of trouble in school and was put into remedial classes. I thought that I was stupid." - Dr. Carol Greider

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/13conv.html

Carol Greider Wins Nobel Prize in Medicine Despite Dyslexia
Carol Greider PhD

Sensory Processing Disorders 2009 - Research Closing the Gap

Announcement: ** Sign Up is now Open**

Eides/ Biel Sensory Processing Online Webinar Nov 12th & 13th 2009

Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide and Lindsey Biel OTR/L
Authors of The Mislabeled Child and Raising a Sensory Smart Child

Register and more information about the conference here!
Helps benefit Karina's Health Fund (cancer).


Recent advances in sensory processing research are providing insights into why child and adults suffer troubling sensory sensitivities and behaviors.

Why Impairment in One Sense Can Impair Others

At right, a European study found that mismatches in vision and position sense (proprioception) resulted in delayed and impaired responses to touch. All the senses should normally work together to provide us with a unitary representation of our bodies and the world, but if one sense significantly goes awry, it distorts and impairs the other. No wonder so many children (and adults) with sensory processing symptoms have episodes of delayed reactions and 'blunted' sensing.

Why Sensory Processing Kids Make 'Social' Mistakes of Personal Space

At left, an interesting study found that changing an auditory signal near the hand changed the motor representation of 'personal space'.

Excerpt: "We can immediately and physically interact with stimuli in the external world when they occur within a limited space around us, reachable by our limbs and known as the Peripersonal Space (PPS). We might want to grab an interesting object placed in front of us or to retract a part of our body from an approaching, possibly dangerous, stimulus, such as a bee buzzing around. In order to realize these basic behaviours, our brain needs to integrate visual and auditory information about the external stimulus together with tactile and proprioceptive information about our body parts, and the result of this integration needs to be transformed into an appropriate motor plan... (the) PPS representation has not only a sensory function, but also a motor function."

They go on to conclude: "our findings suggest that in humans, as in monkeys, the representation of the PPS has an immediate effect on the motor system...(multi)sensory and motor representations overlap in PPS and suggests that spatial representations are strongly bound up with temporal representations."

No wonder sensory 'out-of-sync' kids get in trouble for leaning on their classmates and not respecting personal space. The same kids mays also err in the other direction, perceiving a distant threat as being close and immediately threatening.

Lots of good stuff to read. Check out more at the links below.


How being out-of-sync with vision and proprioception affect touch
The Multisensory Brain
Sensory-motor aspects of Personal Space
Impaired spatial representation, postural knowledge, and motor planning in autism
Development of head-eye-hand coordination
Thalamic abnormalities may account for sensory abnormalities in autism

Watch How You Train Your Brain - Balancing Effects Between Right and Left

Interesting article about how researchers attempting to train teenage girls in a visualspatial task (Tetris) did see increases in cortical thickness in visualspatial areas, but how they were also surprised to see reduce cortical thickness in the opposite hemisphere (not in visualspatial areas), but in the right prefrontal cortex. So the stronger certain areas of the left brain became, weaker connectivity on the right.



Be careful of what you wish for. The neurological literature is filled with anecdotal reports about how injury in one hemisphere of the brain could compensated for by higher activity in the other, but the mechanisms of how different sides of the brain create a balancing act are virtually unknown. The right and left hemispheres have some overlapping functions, some complementary functions, and some functions that seem designed for cooperation.

Some of this up in one hemisphere, down in the other is not completely unanticipated by us, perhaps because of the frequency of twice-exceptional kids and adults that we see and know throughout history. Individuals who may be phenomenally talented in or gifted in one area, may be phenomenally inept or backward in the other. A common profile we see among the spatially-talented is delayed language development and poor expression through words. Conversely, it is not difficult to find phenomenally verbal individuals who are quite backward in basic spatial orientation and problem solving.

A finding such as this raises questions about whether 'intense brain training' will do what devotees hope it will...increase capacities in all areas. The likehood is that it won't.

It'll be interesting to see what future studies find.

Maybe the best thing to keep in mind is to train if there's a specific weakness that's causing significant problems, like problems hearing certain sounds that make reading and listening difficult. If you don't have a problem like that, then best to do all the other more complex things in life like reading this blog, playing with the kids, and talking with friends...


Tetris brain training and fMRI pdf

Self-Appraisal - Teen Brains Reflect Opinions of Peers

Preteens and teens (11-14 yo) are more likely to activate 'social cognition' areas of the brain when reflecting about themselves ("I am smart", "I am popular"), meaning that they reflect the opinions that they feel their peers or parents have. In the figure at the right, for instance, kids more closely mirrored what they thought their best friend thought of them, vs. adults who seemed to have a different appraisal of themselves compared to what they thought their friends thought of them. In trials involving domain-specific knowledge (e.g. whether mom thought I was smart or whether my best friend thought I was popular), brain fMRI activity seemed to mirror the relevant domain-specific perspective.

It's striking to see how differently kids self-belief is their perceived mothers' beliefs about them...Also with the much lower activation of the temporal lobes for adolescents, it makes you think that adolescents are likely to make more quick self-appraisal opinions about themselves vs. adults who draw on more previous experiences (episodic memory) to inform how they think about themselves.


Self-Appraisals in Adolescents and Adults fMRI pdf

Dyslexia Entrepreneur, Lawyer, Idealist Dov Seidman-Making Companies Ethical

“By rewarding me for the careful consideration of one idea instead of reading hundreds of pages of text, philosophy helped me conquer dyslexia." - Dov Seidman, CEO LRN

Dov Seidman struggled in school and was a classic dyslexic late-bloomer: "“My high school transcript boasted A’s: two of them, in Phys Ed and auto shop,” he joked, when he gave the commencement address at the UCLA in 2002. His SAT scores never topped 1000. Only later did he realize that he was dyslexic."

Seidman managed to get admitted to UCLA, then stumbled into philosophy class because it wasn't full. "Philosophy and ethics became his passion, and he went on to earn a B.A. and an M.A. in philosophy from UCLA, a B.A. in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford (where he captained the Balliol college crew team) and a law degree from Harvard. Not too shabby."

Seidman exemplifies dyslexic advantage 'big-picture thinking', creating a business where one hadn't existed before, high conceptual ability applied in diverse real-life circumstances.

See Dov Seidman being interviewed by Thomas Friedman below about "Transparency and Connectivity in the 21st Century".



Dov Seidman: Ethics to Business

Multi-Tasking Dumbs Us Down for Some Jobs, But Could It Provide Breakthroughs for Others?

"They're suckers for irrelevancy," said communication Professor Clifford Nass... "Everything distracts them."

Because many in your acquaintance (or even household) may proudly tout their media multi-tasking ability, researchers thought for sure they could identify the cognitive gifts that come with this ability. Researchers at Stanford searched high and low for this gift, but their final conclusion - it's not a gift at all, but a liability.

"We kept looking for what they're better at, and we didn't find it," said Ophir, the study's lead author and a researcher in Stanford's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab.

Now by true multi-tasking, we don't really mean semi-automatic activities like listening to familiar pleasant music, walking, or driving a car. These tasks don't require a lot conscious higher cortical brain work, like say reading and responding to an email or answering questions when a colleague or classmate calls you to find out what was missed in an important meeting.

At left look how poorly high media multi-taskers did compared to low media multi-taskers on a distraction task. Not only were the high media multi-taskers more distractible, but they also performed lower on memory tests and ability to task-switch.

A few years ago, a Hewlett-Packard sponsored study suggested that the IQs of knowledge workers distracted by emails and phone calls dropped their IQs about 10 points, and a Microsoft study found that on average, workers who stopped their activities to read emails needed on average about 24 minutes to return to their tasks.

All this seems very reasonable, but some of crazy media multi-tasking that many of us in think-heavy careers might do is not the same as the tasks given in these paradigms. The Poincare examples comes to mind. Henri Poincare (mathematician extraordinaire) has written that whenever he wanted to think deeply about a problem that remained unsolved, he would put it away and then work simple derivations in an absent-minded way. Often when he was at work with such 'mindless' activities, a new possible solution would come to him and he would return to the problem and find he had had a breakthrough.

The increase susceptibilty of media multi-taskers to peripheral distractions is not a surprise if you consider the research about diffuse attention and creativity,but I can't help thinking that the learning and task-switching results might arrive at different conclusions had the nature of the focus and distractor task been very different, especially if the focus task required more insight-based problem solving than a demanding problem solving task that require several very consciously-solved steps.

The ideal distractor, it would seem, should be familiar and not overwhelmingly pleasurable...an activity that perhaps could shift the brain into a pleasant 'default rest' or daydreaming state. Kind of like Einstein playing his violin for a while to come up with new ideas for solving difficult problems.

Anyway, something to think about before management gets the bright idea about doing away with email checking or games at work for high-level knowledge workers, It's not by accident that many of the most successful creative companies embrace a good deal of play and distraction at work.

Cognitive control in media multitaskers
Media multi-taskers pay a price
Death by information overload
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Biology of Creativity

http://www.flickr.com/photos/whartz/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Visual Overload and Visual Crowding - When More Means Less

"If there were only 10 problems on a page, I could do them all. But when there are 40 on a page, I can't do any of them." - 10 year old student


Visual overload and visual crowding are common problems in every school classroom or company work group, but the mistakes and errors that result from them are rarely recognized or traced back to their true source. It is a paradox - the more you see, the less you see, but it all makes sense if one recognizes that a child or an adult's visual working memory deskspace can become easily overloaded.

For visual scientists, visual crowding is a specific term that refers to a greater difficulty in seeing when other visual objects are present. When we look at a complex scene, for instance the picture above, it is impossible to take in all the other visual details. It's what causes some people to overload when they go to large gatherings like music concerts, Disneyland in the summertime, or a crowded Home Depot, but also children in crowded classroom, all-school assembly, writing on a scantron, or completing Mad Math Minutes.

Signs of Visual Overload
- Longer processing time, slow reading, and incomplete work on crowded worksheets
- Tantrums, irritability, and overload behaviors in crowded environments
- 'Careless' mistakes and unintentionally skipped problems on worksheets and tests
- Missed words or endings while reading, need to re-read words

Interestingly, a recent report on Visual crowding, reading, and dyslexia found that a visual crowding effect significantly contributed to slowness in word reading, and dyslexics as a group found that increased spacing between letters improved readability. The critical spacing threshold for readability was significantly higher for dyslexics as a group compared to non-dyslexic controls, so it became easier to identify a letter away from the center if the spacing between characters were greater.

Take-home points:

- Critical print size is larger for dyslexics than controls
- Critical spacing between characters is larger for dyslexics than controls
- Reading rate improves with print size to a critical point
- Explains why many dyslexics with excellent verbal funds of knowledge still have trouble reading long words

Classroom and Test Accommodations

In the classroom, more attention should be paid to print size and spacing in daily classroom (worksheets, handouts) and testing materials (as many as 1 in 5 students are dyslexic), and print size and spacing should be considered when purchasing books for students.

Large print books and reader glasses may help some students, whereas font differences (serifs like Times New Roman or hand-written fonts like Papyrus or Comic Sans often preferred) may be more important for others. For students with narrow visual spans (see only few letters at a time), serifs or handwritten fonts may dramatically lessen the work of reading - with serifs or personalized font shapes - it is easier to perceive the overall shape of words, so that even if a reader only sees the first and last letters and general shape of the word, they can make an educated guess about what that word might be even though they are unable to see all the letters.

Many of you are probably aware of this meme from the Internet:

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

Matt Davis has written more about the science and history of the discovery of this effect here.

Eide Neurolearning Blog: Blessing and burdens of vivid visual thinkers
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Video game training increases visual span
Photo:brain
Photo: scantron

Dyslexia and Autism are Opposites - Implications for Creativity, Late-Blooming / Precocity, and Savant Abilities

s Structural studies from Michael Casanova and colleagues showed that the brains of dyslexic and autistic subjects had opposite findings. Microcolumns are repeating groups of neurons that share a common dendritic bundle. The microcolumnar hypothesis is the idea that the microcolumn is the basic unit in the cortex, not individual neurons.

"Dyslexia and autism are on opposite tails of the normal distribution of the width of minicolumns...Autistic individuals have increased number of smaller minicolumns and dyslexic children have decreased number of larger minicolumns..." When the depth of gyral depths were measured of dyslexics compared to controls, "mean gyral white matter depth was 3.05 mm (SD ± 0.30 mm) in dyslexic subjects and 1.63 mm (SD ± 0.15 mm) in the controls." Researchers speculated that longer connectivity in the brains of dyslexics could account for "a greater capacity for abstract, 'visionary' thinking", but also slower development (late blooming?) including a slower development of reading. Its information like this that should reinforce the idea that dyslexic children should have a differentiated educational program (fewer inappropriate demands at early ages) - and recognition of high creative potential and capacity for abstraction.

The changes in autism could also account for why some people with autism show extreme precocity with rote tasks, may have unusual gifts of rapid mathematical calculation, and superior abilities with certain tasks of visual discrimination (like Oliver Sack's account of two twins with autism who could rapid determine when 111 matches had fallen to the ground).


Structural differences between dyslexic and autistic brains
Microcolumns figure
Increased gyral depth in dyslexia (abstract only)
Savant numerosity pdf

The Bad, the Good, and Variability of Time Blindness

"Time is more flexible than most of us think." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

We know them, we love them, we are them - the time blind are constantly running into trouble for being late or missing assignments, but they also can persist longer than non-blind people at projects or activities (forgetting to eat, sleep, etc.) and achieve things that time-keepers can only dream of.

Who is Time Blind?

Time perception is worse for children than adults, and children diagnosed with ADHD and children diagnosed with specific language impairment, but some variations in time perception occur in healthy people (apparently we are better at perceiving time in the morning compared to the evening...makes sense), and video games like Tetris causes adolescents to lose time (underestimate video game time vs. reading).


Recently there have been a number of research papers providing insight into what causes the perception of time to go awry - many things, it seems, but among them stress (car accidents, catastrophic life events etc.) or distractions, sensory mismatches, and strong positive or negative feelings. Moviemakers recognize the 'when time stood still' phenomena of cataclysmic events - because they slow down the film speed when portraying car accidents, attacks on the battlefield and the like - and that is often what people in crises situation say - everything seemed slowed down or it was like I saw things in slow motion.

What Keeps Time in the Brain?

Competing theories (above) point to either a single site in the brain (for instance the cerebellum, basal ganglia, or dorsal prefrontal cortex) or networks of sensory areas (vision-auditory-somatosensory areas) that dynamically interact with each other. Either idea might explain why some children (and adults of course) are so time-blind. If one system is off (for instance vision) - it throws the whole network 'out-of-sync', explaining why so many different kids (sensory processing, ADHD, speech problems, dyslexia, etc.) struggle with their awareness of time.

Context Matters and Time Blindness

In an interesting landmark study involving 10- and 14-year olds remembering to check a clock to take cupcakes out of the oven in time (they were distracted by playing a videogame while waiting), Ceci and Bronfenbrenner found both groups were better at checking the clock and taking cupcakes out of the oven in the laboratory, when compared to home. Only 1 child failed the task when it was performed in the laboratory, whereas 42% failed when the task was given at home. Reasons for this are open to discussion but might include the special setting of the laboratory, increased distractions at home, etc. The researchers also made the conclusions that the children were more strategic in the laboratory (increased clock checking closer to the time the cupcakes were to come out).

An interesting subsequent study compared young adults to seniors - and found that although young adults were better than older adults if the cupcake / oven test was performed in a laboratory, but interestingly - the performance results were reversed if the experiment were conducted at home. Several ideas have been raised about these results - young adults may have been more familiar with the laboratory conditions, and perhaps the improved results for older adults' time perception at home was the presence of familiar surroundings and familiar supports for remembering and time awareness.

When Time-Blindness is Good --> Flow

But what about the positive side of time blindness? Not uncommon when we're talking to a family about the problems with time blindness in young student, a parent sheepishly admits he or she is also time blind - and that they have to be reminded to eat for instance if they're working on a complex computer project, job, etc. Since Csikszentmihalyi's work with 'flow', additional studies have confirmed that highly intrinsically motivated students check the time less often, are less aware of time, and lose track of time more often when their working on their favored tasks. So there is a positive side of time blindness. Intrinsically-motivated students perceive time as passing more quickly, that's why external commitments slide.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defined 'flow' as an optimal experience that people can move into when they are so completely involved that 'nothing seems to matter', self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time is distorted. He proposed that had 4 components: control, attention, curiosity, and intrinsic interest.

All this important to keep in mind if young Johnny or Jane is getting in trouble with time-blindness. Some very bright kids struggle in school because they have powerful interest-driven learning styles - they learn a lot of their own choosing, but if a topic doesn't seem important or appeal to them well....Time blindness can be a clue. Another is a learning style - learning environment mismatch like an inductive learner being taught with exclusively deductive methods.

Photos: stopwatch, cupcake

Musings on Spatial Thinking, Dyslexia, and Education

"Thoughts die the moment they are embodied by words." Arthur Schopehauer, philosopher

Spatial thinking has been on our minds a lot lately because we're interviewing highly creative dyslexic adults for a book that we're planning to write, and spatial thinking is a recurring theme. Some people equate spatial thinking with visual thinking - but it's not the same. Sometimes spatial thinking involves vivid or vague visual images, but sometimes (as people assure us)...it involves no pictoral images at all.

As far as a multiple intelligence, spatial thinking gets short shrift, and young spatial experts (kids who seem to love maps, mazes, legos, physics, military history, etc.) seem better suited to life outside, rather than inside the classroom.

We've been re-reading Spatial Child and Psyhology of Ivention in the Mathematical Field. Our biggest discovery on the internet was finding the Center for Spatial Studies at UCSB. It will be some time before we are able to finish reading all the online publications there. Examples of papers: Spatial visualization in physics problem solving and The role of gestures in mental animations. It turns out that gestures seem to be very important for spatial thinking - and when asked to think aloud, over 90% of people gestured, and the answers in their gestures conveyed more than words.

Researchers have also begun to look at developmental differences in spatial reasoning; Thomas and colleagues found for instance that eye movements were more essential for children performing a spatial learning task, than adults.

An even murkier understanding is how spatial brain processes are involved in verbal reasoning. fMRI studies suggest significant overlap between spatial and verbal reasoning; also many spatial thinkers who are very strong at verbal reasoning tell us that the 'feel' ideas bumping up against each other in reasoning or logical proofs, for instance - and that if it's not correct, they can 'feel it' even though they may not have yet figured out the answer.

The spatial thinking style is so different from verbal thinking, it is shocking that very little is done to incorporate it in school curricula. Because of the overwhelming imbalance of conventional education toward the verbal learning style, spatial thinkers are at high risk to lose engagement with school, while all too many students failing to have their spatial talents discovered or nurtured. Imagine a classroom where a spatial thinking teacher shares how he (or she) diagrams when thinking of ideas, or projects have more to do with legos or taking apart a clock than turning in yet another book report? The pendulum may have swung too far to book learning - it's really not for everyone - spatially-interesting electives are becoming even more scarce because of school budget disasters. It's fine for trend-spotters to sound the alarm about future shortages of scientists and engineers in the U.S., but should it be surprising with the lack of attention given to fostering spatial learning?

And as for those of you who are currently buried under a mountain of words and paper, if you really are getting restless for more hands-on work and learning, perhaps you'll enjoy reading about Matthew Crawford's journey from highly verbal University of Chicago intellectual to motorcycle mechanic.

Eide Neurolearning Blog: Spatial Thinkers - Not Visual and Not Verbal
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Spatial and Motor Expertise
Eide Neurolearning Blog:Spatial Thinking and Education
Visual, Sensory-Motor, and Mathematical Thinking
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Spatial Cognition: The Final Frontier
Designing Diagrams
Spatial Thinking in Math
Picture Smart: Spatial reasoning in cognition

Positive Psychology Hits the Classroom

At the August APA meeting, Seligman reported results from the Positive Psychology Program (PPP) and Penn Resiliency Program based on more than 2000 8 to 15 year old school students.

The positive psychology program taught students how to "identify their signature character strengths (e.g., kindness, courage, wisdom and perseverance)." For example, one exercise in the positive psychology asked students to list 3 good things that happened to them each day for a week - then the follow-up questions asked what the event meant to them and what can increase the likelihood of this happening again (kind of connecting the dots for the students). The resiliency program taught students to " think more realistically and flexibly about the problems they encounter. PRP also teaches assertiveness, creative brainstorming, decision-making, relaxation and other coping and problem-solving skills."

The net result: positive thinking and resiliency training improved students' school outlook and engagement, improved classroom behavior and cooperation, resulted in more self-control, and more empathy. Not bad!

Carol Dweck has a slightly different take on the importance of psychological outlook on student achievement. She has argued for Mindset teaching, In her work (at right), she found that students who believed that intelligence was a fixed entity were more likely to show no improvement in their math achievement from 7th to 8th grade, more likely to withdraw or cheat, and less likely to demonstrate mastery-reactions to setbacks. Not surprisingly, the students who believed intelligence could be 'grown' - were more likely to persevere, show resiliency behaviors to setbacks, and improve performance.

Dweck's conclusions:

"Our analyses showed that the divergence in math grades was mediated by several key variables. First, students with the growth mindset, compared to those with the fixed mindset, were significantly more oriented toward learning goals. Although they cared about their grades, they cared even more about learning. Second, students with the growth mindset showed a far stronger belief in the power of effort. They believed that effort promoted ability and that was effective regardless of your current level of ability. In contrast, those with the fixed mindset believed that effort was necessary only for those who lacked ability and was, to boot, likely to be ineffective for them. Finally, those with the growth mindset showed more mastery-oriented reactions to setbacks, being less likely than those with the fixed mindset to denigrate their ability and more likely to employ positive strategies, such as greater effort and new strategies, rather than negative strategies, such as effort withdrawal and cheating.

Thus, students’ beliefs about their intelligence played a key role in how they fared in math across this challenging school transition. When students believe that their intelligence can increase they orient toward doing just that, displaying an emphasis on learning, effort, and persistence in the face of obstacles."

Dweck also mentions that the importance of setbacks does not emerge until students face real academic setbacks. An important point to keep in mind for students who are struggling. Many psychologists also emphasize the importance of realistic positive thinking rather than unrealistic positive thinking.Presumably realistic thinking involves recognizing the need for effort, perseverance, and external help if needed.

All three approaches - Seligman's approach to positive thinking (e.g. view setbacks as external, temporary, and specific), resiliency training (including problem solving, identifying sources of problems, etc.), and mindset instruction would seem to be valuable for many students.

The relationship between optimism and learning has not really been studied in detail by fMRI, but optimism activates both the amygdala (emotions, not surprising) and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex. an area important for motivation and reward, and error detection. So there may also be direct connections between brain areas important for an optimistic outlook and thinking efficiency.


Mindsets and Math / Science Achievement
Optimism
Penn Resiliency Lessons pdf
Optimism fMRI
Children with positive outlooks are better learners

More Vision Wars: Visual Training for Dyslexics

The role of visual challenges in dyslexia has a long and contentious history. Although the authors of the recent consensus statement on Vision and Dyslexia were trying to clarify the most effective approach to diagnosing and treating visual processing issues in dyslexia, their statement is more likely to misinform than inform.

While not all children or adults with dyslexia have visual processing problems, many--at least two-thirds in some studies--do. This makes sense from a neurological standpoint, because several of the structural neurological features associated with dyslexia appear to predispose to visual difficulties. For example, coordinated control of the movements of the two eyes requires sending signals over long distances in white matter tracts, as well as sharing information between the two hemispheres of the brain, and oversight, modulation, and coordination by the cerebellum. Deficiencies in white matter function, interhemispheric communication, and cerebellar function are each known to be more common in dyslexic than non-dyslexic individuals (especially in the pre-adult years). In addition, many dyslexic children are known to have difficulty with muscular coordination, especially for fine motor actions. Consequently, it should not be surprising that their visual movement functions, which are controlled by many of the same neural pathways, are also poorly coordinated.

Not surprisingly, several types of visual difficulties are more common in dyslexic than non-dyslexic children. In one study of dyslexic children, just one type of visual problem, near-point convergence insufficiency, was present in 30-40% of the dyslexic children, compared to just 20% of controls. (As can be seen from this control figure, visual processing problems are also quite common in non-dyslexic school-age children). For children with convergence insufficiency, peer-reviewed NIH sponsored research has shown that home therapy can work as can home exercises with computer training, but that in-office therapy shows the best efficacy.

Not all dyslexic individuals have visual processing problems, and correction of these visual problems will not "cure" dyslexia. However, for children who have both dyslexia and visual problems, interventions (whether visual exercises, vision therapy, or glasses) will often improve their ease and endurance for reading. Many of the children who have visual difficulties will experience visual symptoms both with reading and--importantly--with other kinds of near work, and they will often be able to describe their visual symptoms if asked. They may report that they can't read clearly because the letters are blurry, or that letters wiggle or seem to move in-and-out of the page. They may also report fatigue, eye strain or tearing, headaches, or other symptoms. Both in our clinical experience and in published research data, children with such symptoms will often show benefits from visual therapy.

Again, it would be a mistake to believe that vision training "cures" dyslexia or that dyslexia is entirely or even primarily a visual disorder. Dyslexia usually involves a range of issues, nearly always including important challenges in the phonological processing system. That's why training in phonics/phonological awareness is the cornerstone of therapy for dyslexic challenges in literacy. However, differences in the phonological processing module cannot account for many of the common findings associated with dyslexia. Instead, the preponderance of available research strongly suggests that the difficulties with phonological processing, along with the difficulties with visual processing, are in turn due to more fundamental differences in neurological structure and function. That's why it is important not to limit interventions to simply addressing phonological processing challenges when children show other important challenges. When visual problems are present in individuals with dyslexia, and they commonly are, these individuals can be greatly helped by interventions that directly address their visual challenges.

The video below is from Finland, but look at the eye movements a child needs to make in order to read a passage fluently.



But also check out this video showing eye tracking movements as a fluent reader scans a web page. Many dyslexics would have trouble with this: the reading is so fast and not word-by-word, and the eyes leap to different sections of the page.



Finally, if you'd like to learn more how convergence insufficiency presents with vision problems, check out this video from the NEI:




Additional References
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Training the eyes to see
Convergence insufficiency from the Mayo Clinic
Visual Training in Basketball
Benefits of visual training at the US Airforce academy
Retraining the brain after visual stroke
Visual training improves stroke-induced hemianopic alexia

Famous People with Dyslexia: PGA Golfer J.B. Holmes

"One strength he has, and it ties into his ability in golf, is very strong spatial skills," - about JB Holmes, PGA golfer and 2008 Ryder Cup Winner



From this Craig Dolch article:

Excerpt: "Holmes would open a schoolbook and feel as if he were trapped in a maze. An assignment that might take his friends 30 minutes to complete would take him hours as he inevitably became distracted.

"I used to say, 'Son, you're just not paying attention,' " Maurice Holmes said. "We didn't know what to do."

His parents sent him to several tutors. It didn't help. His third-grade teacher wondered if Holmes might have dyslexia, a learning disorder, but his parents could not find anyone in the state to test him for it.

"I made good grades, but just being able to read real slow kind of makes you not feel real good," he said.

The more he struggled in school, the more he looked forward to playing golf afterward. After all, when he was on the golf course, the only thing he had to read was the greens. So he would play every day, sometimes 36 or 54 holes.

"I think the golf course was the only place he felt like he was in control," said his mother, Lisa. "He always hated school."

Despite the academic difficulties, Holmes earned a golf scholarship to the University of Kentucky. But his grades quickly became an issue when he was on the verge of losing his academic standing his freshman season.

"It was too much reading," Holmes said. "I thought I was going to flunk out."

But Holmes' academic counselor at Kentucky, Amy Craiglow, suggested a psychologist test him after learning of his background. Dyslexia was diagnosed, and Holmes' teachers allowed him extra time to complete his tests and assignments.

"It was nice to know I wasn't dumb," Holmes said. "It was a relief."

Someone with dyslexia will picture one word for another, such as "house" for "horse" and may skip over smaller words such as "it" or "the," which makes reading comprehension difficult. Or they may have a hard time reading the words in the correct order, so Craiglow had to find other ways for Holmes to read and remember his lessons.

"One strength he has, and it ties into his ability in golf, is very strong spatial skills," Craiglow said. "A lot of times, we could put certain things in certain spots on a wall and study them, like a visualization. It's also a very good skill to have as far as understanding distance and being able to see the golf course...."Once I get on a golf course, I can usually remember all the holes, where they placed the pins before and where my shots went," Holmes said."

A JB Holmes shot-of-the day:

Eye Contact: Look Away to Think and Imagine

When elementary school children are given verbal reasoning or arithmetic tasks by an examiner, they look away the more the problems get difficult. Added instructions to "Look at me" resulted in poorer performances. In fact, looking at when gaze aversion could occur provided a fairly reliable indicator that children were "ready to learn" - some answers were correct...but not all, so it could be used by teachers to see when their students were at the right challenge level (not too easy, not too hard). Other interesting findings from the research group at Stirling, gaze aversion could be trained (some children did not know to do this - and when trained, it helped their performance answering questions) and the onset of gaze aversion as a strategy for thinking tended to arise at about the age of 5 years. When surveyed, teachers did not know that gaze aversion was associated with a student's good effort at thinking and comprehending.

The idea is that kids (and adults too) look away in order to control "cognitive load". Looking away decreases attention to extraneous environmental input so that working memory and higher cortical functions can be addressed to the task at hand. Cognitive performance was best when kids were looking away, poorer when kids looked at a stationary visual stimulus, poorer still when looking at a moving visual stimulus, and the poorest of all looking at an examiner.

In the table above, investigators found that gaze aversion was also helpful when college students had to performa a cognitive task that required visual spatial imagery or imagination. When selecting a path through a 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional matrix, eye contact caused performance to deteriorate while gaze aversion resulted in the best scores of all. At left, Einstein gaze averting (a.k.a thinking).

The latest additions to gaze aversion research should be very helpful for parents and teachers working with kids. Gaze aversion is well known among children with autism spectrum disorders, but also quite commonly seen among dyslexics of all ages and really any one trying to really think hard.


Gaze Aversion Research
Gaze aversion on visual-spatial imagination pdf

Dyslexic Entrepreneur Venture Capitalist from Dragon's Den

“There is absolutely no question that dyslexia can be an advantage. It teaches you to think logically and very quickly because you are constantly having to adapt what you are saying to fit the words that you can actually use." - Theo Paphitis

Theo Paphitis, self-made multimillionaire and star of the entrepreneurial TV show Dragon's Den failed to have his dyslexia picked up in school, he dropped out at 16, had a shaky start as an assistant tea boy at Lloyd's of London, but at 18 he went into retail, and by 20 he moved into financy - property and corporate, specializing in turarounds, setting up his own company in the property finance business at 23.

Excerpt: "Paphitis has tried to work out what makes his dyslexia worse because sometimes he has the vocabulary of a ten-year-old while at others it’s quite extensive. Alcohol doesn’t affect it. So far tiredness is the only obvious cause. When I’m with him he gets his words wrong only once. He is telling me that he used to be chairman of Millwall FC. But “I’m retarded now,” he says, meaning “retired”. He says of his dyslexia: “It can be frustrating, and the more frustrated you get, the worse it gets. So you learn to chill out. I learnt to have a laugh about it, and if you’ve used the wrong word, use it again and make it into a joke. When I see my kids getting stressed about it, I sit down with them and try and accelerate the learning curve that I had to go through..."

When you watch what Paphitis does when reviewing the pitches on Dragon's Den, it's apparent he's using many dyslexic strengths - conceptual ability (seeing beyond appearances), nonverbal strengths (reading the candidates - beyond what they say), financial strengths, analytical strengths, humor, and what some people have called 4th dimensional thinking...an ability to see how ideas or products could evolve through time.



Theo Paphitis
Theo Paphitis and Dyslexia

The Beginnings of Reason - Earlier Than You Think

Developmental Psychologist Jean Piaget observed that if you presented 10-11 year olds with a counterfactual syllogism such as:

All cats bark. (major premise)
Muffins is a cat. (minor premise)
Does Muffins bark?

Most children fail to solve the syllogism because they answer, "No, cat's don't bark." But when a clever psychologist group decided to retry the questions in a playful tone of voice, they actually found that children as young as 2 years old could deductively reason (hmmm- now do we in our school systems assume that children reason that early?).

Piaget had assumed that children did not develop the capacity for abstract reasoning until they were 11 years old or so, but he was wrong. Children were expecting the answers should be given on the basis of real-world reasoning and not as a hypothetical or "lets pretend" scenario.

Peter Gray (below) also makes the point that when college students were given the candle/box of tacks/matches experiment, most failed to figure out how to attach a candle that could be lit to a bulletin board...unless they had watched a slapstick movie before the experiment. The researchers concluded that better problem solving occurred with a 'happy mood', Gray concludes it was playfulness, and we would agree. That is the principle of course for many companies today that require creativity problem solving activity on the part of their employees on a daily basis (e.g. Pixar, Google, etc.).

Researchers from the Bunge lab also confirmed that children as young as 6 do indeed reason, but they were surprised to see that the area implicated so importantly from adults (RLPFC or rostrolateral prefrontal cortex) in fluid reasoning only activated after the children chose their answers! This result triggered some soul searching on the part of the investigators (the paradigms were suboptimal because they could answer from experience rather than 'pure analogy', kids are too impulsive - they answer before their RLPFC activates, etc.), but another interesting possibility from this result is that kids are more like to reason from personal experience than pure abstraction or impersonal premises.

More questions: If children learn so well from personal experience and reasoning, are we stimulating enough direct / personal learning experiences in our education of young children? Do we encourage enough play while we encourage students to problem solve? and Have we been grossly underestimating the reasoning ability of young children?

As a parent, I'm fairly flummoxed at how Piaget could have been so wrong! Could he not have noticed the reasoning of young children? Often when very bright children come to very wrong conclusions on the basis of reasoning, we've found that the errors are more with their reasoning from the basis of insufficient experience than errors of the reasoning process itself.

How Play Promotes Reasoning in Children and Adults
Development of Fluid Reasoning fMRI pdf
Wikipedia: Thinker

Famous People with Dyslexia: Master Game Designer and Entrepreneur Jordan Weisman

"Gaming is actually a very important part of my life. I think the reason for that is that I was very severe dyslexic. I couldn't read, really." - Jordan Weisman, Game Designer, Entrepreneur


A prolific game designer for over 20 years, creating role-playing, board, interactive site-based and computer games that have won more than 50 design and market awards, Weisman is also a serial entrepreneur (founded 5 companies) and helped create the first virtual reality immersive networked game. Weisman was Creative DIrector for the Microsoft Entertainment group (helped launch Xbox), founded Wizkids that created the category of collectible miniature games, and many others. His current company, Smith and Tinker is working on "reinventing play for the connected generation."

From an interview:

"I went through many years of tutoring and, thus, learned the skills to read, but it was very slow and painful. So like any kid, I avoided it, even though I had the skills. I was really apt at cheating, and I could cheat my way out of any class...Then at summer camp (I was a junior counselor), one of the older counselors had Dungeons and Dragons ®...

The counselor was a good gamemaster and a good storyteller. This fired my imagination like nothing I'd encountered before. The problem solving, the visualization, the socialization had been completely captured.

I was inspired about fantasy. I was inspired about gaming -- all these things I had no access to. The other thing is there is no way to cheat. If I wanted this, I had to read.

So I started reading [J.R.R.] Tolkien. I started reading the rule books. It was slow, and it was painful, but it was something I wanted enough that I would do it. It turned me around completely. It also inspired my imagination enormously.

At the camp, then at my school, I became the gamemaster and the storyteller, which were roles I really enjoyed. I formed game clubs in my high school and so on and so forth, and I started to follow that route. Gaming became the core of my social experience. It also inspired me to organize things. I started this game club that grew into 500 members back in Chicago.

Then there was college. College was not a very successful career for me, but gaming continued to be part of it. I started to publish some special designs and scenarios that I had done at home. They started to sell and became a good reason to drop out of school and pursue this success."

Jordan Weisman was also the creator of the I Love Bees phenomenon that was designed as both a real world experience and viral market campaign for the release of Halo 2.



Incredible. We would like to interview Jordan Weisman some time.

Jordan Weisman

Why MIT Students Can't Write and Harvard Students Can't Count

An MIT PhD engineer dad was recounting an old saw about how MIT students can't write and Harvard students can't count and it made me chuckle because I am a Harvard grad who counts on her fingers.

Like the old MIT-Harvard rivalry, there's often a cortical battle for resources between spatial and verbal / visual "picture" thinking. In studies of spatial experts, high levels of spatial expertise were correlated with lower levels of verbal fluency, auditory verbal memory, and visual memory (for more, read here. But these studies, if you look at mathematicians and physicists talking about their thought processes (see Hadamard's Psychology of invention. From the mathematician Hadamard: "I insist that words are totally absent from mind when I really think...even after reading or hearing a question, every word disappears at the very moment I am beginning to think it over; words do not reappear in my consciousness before I have accomplished or given up the research...I fully agree with Schopenhauer when he writes, "Thoughts die the moment they are embodied into words." Well no wonder MIT students can't write. In fact, they may take solace in the words of polymath Francis Galton: "It is a serious drawback to me in writing...that I do not so easily think in words as otherwise. It often happens that after being hard at work, and having arrived at results that are perfectly clear and satisfactory to myself, when I try to express them in language I feel that I must begin by putting myself upon quite another intellectual plane. I have to translate my thoughts into a language that does not run very evenly with them. I therefore waste a vast deal of time in seeking for appropriate words and phrases, and am conscious, when required to speak on a sudden, of being often very obscure..." If you look at the SAT subtest scores of MIT and Harvard students (25th percentile listed here - because 75th percentile was clustered at 800), MIT students are indeed weakest at reading and writing (not surprising you find many dyslexic engineers, mathematicians, physicists at MIT).

If you're an MIT student, Harvard students really may seem bad at math. The more uniform differences between reading, math, and science suggest more verbal (fewer spatial) left hemispheric types at Harvard.

There aren't any studies yet comparing the math abilities of highly verbal thinkers but if you superimpose test subjects doing verbal reasoning tasks (green) with estimations of nummber (red) - the areas really are distinct. And there are certainly plenty of famous highly verbal thinkers (for instance the polyglot Max Muller) who have gone on record saying that they didn't think that thinking could exist separate from words - definitely from the descriptions of spatial mathematicians and scientists above. We don't know how Muller did with Math, but certainly the multi-talented author, linguist, and etymologist C.S. Lewis was notoriously bad at math and simple calculations. He failed the mathematics part of college entrance exams twice, and was only allowed into college without passing math because he had served in WWI.

Spatial Expertise Gray Matter pdf
Causal / Verbal Reasoning pdf
fMRI of Dyscalculia pdf
C.S. Lewis and Math

Black Sheep or Gifted Dyslexic?

"'What will become of Fred?' That's the question that echoed through my home when I was a child. I was the son of two accomplished professionals, and my older brother was a good student who seemed destined to follow in my father's footsteps as doctor. Meanwhile, I was in second grade and still hadn't learned to read." - Fred Epstein, M.D. pioneering pediatric neurosurgeon, NYU Medical Center

Dr. Epstein's story is all too familiar - one child from an academically-talented family seems to have so much trouble in school, and parents and teachers begin worry and possibilities fly about- mild retardation? immature? slow? Parents worry that they're just expecting too much from this child, and teachers may worry that over-achieving parents assume too much from their children. But what everyone needs to ask more is: Could he or she be a Gifted Dyslexic? Undiagnosed dyslexia is surprisingly common among the Davidson families that we see - at times it's the sibling who didn't make the cut-off for the program, while other times it's a Davidson child who doesn't seem to be performing to potential (mainly due to written output) given their high IQ scores.

More of Dr. Epstein's story: "The letters just never seemed to line up in a comprehensible pattern. I couldn't spell either. One of my earliest and most painful classroom memories is of standing at the blackboard, writing out the spelling words for the week. Behind me I heard my classmates snickering into their hands, then laughing out loud. When I finished writing I couldn't get up the nerve to turn around and face my tormentors. Finally, my teacher blurted out, "Fred, all your e's are backward!"

Aunt Lottie...was endlessly patient and encouraging. It didn't happen overnight, but gradually the alphabet stopped looking like a foreign language. Then my fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Murphy, tried to figure out why I was failing every written test. He discovered that I could get A's if he tested me orally. For the first time, I felt a glimmer of self-confidence in the classroom."

Tom West (In the Mind's Eye) has talked about the saying "Never trust a surgeon who can spell..." It may be that what makes the best surgeons so talented is their ability to see in 3-D. Reversals in dyslexia are not random...the letters that get confused (for instance, b & d, p & q) are the same letters in 3 dimensions. Being able to think and manipulate images in 3 dimensions is of course essential for all surgical work.

More from Dr. Epstein: "If you tell children that their future is limitless, and you give them enough love and encouragement, they'll believe you. And they'll believe in themselves. They'll form an inner vision of themselves that they can grow into."

To watch a video of Dr. Epstein, visit our Video library at: http://dyslexicadvantage.ning.com There is a brief sign-up (prevents spammers), but it's all free!

If I Get to Five
Biography Dr. Fred Epstein

The Paradigm Shift for Big Picture Thinking

What is 'big picture' thinking? Business consultant Andrew Sobel described it as:

1. Having a simple framework
2. Using analogies and metaphors
3. Developing multiple perspectives
4. Looking for patterns and commonalities

Big picture thinking is usually lauded in the world of corporate leadership, but it doesn't cut the mustard in most K-12 classrooms. What makes a good grown-up leader and innovator, doesn't make an ideal student let's face it. But maybe we need a paradigm shift.

Instead of training for compliance, careful rule-following, and exact memorization or a paragon of crystallized intelligence, we need to make more room for 'big picture' thinkers - while still recognizing the need for basic skills and knowledge.

Pint-sized big picture thinkers really do exist and they seem to be over-represented among gifted children who underperform or cause behavioral disruptions in their early elementary school years. Many of these kids are 'high conceptual' thinkers, those who like discovering novel subjects, themes, and things that don't make sense("The thing that doesn't fit is the interesting thing" - Richard Feynman), but the reason for this is often not random - inductive learners (learners who derive rules from examples) use novelties to generate new hypotheses or new rules.

If you really want to teach and interest big picture thinkers, you would expose them to rich multisensory and chronologically-advanced experiences. Look for subjects, phenomena and ideas that could be compared and contrasted. Complexity should be embraced and not shunned. For big picture thinkers - complex is simple and simple is complex. Complexity often brings more meaning because there are enough examples that one can make a pattern.

Big picture thinking really is a sort of upside-down thinking style, but if it is truly understood, it has many ramifications for education. Many big picture thinker struggle with time management problems and underachievement (poor written output) in their school years. When we ask many of these kids why it is hard for them to start writing, it becomes clear that the problem is more that they know too much (and have trouble narrowing their subject) than than they know too little. Many confess to us that they read more the assigned reading because they feel they need to understand things better if they are to understand a thing at all. Many of them are seeking the overarching framework inside which they can put their new bit of knowledge. Often these are 'why' kids - who need to know why something is true, not just that something is true. For those of us who are content to be 'little picture' thinkers when called for, the drive seems a little arbitrary and perhaps fatuous- but if you see enough of these kids, it seems more than a preference, it is a necessary requirement for learning at least in some people.


What does inductive learning look like in the brain? fMRI is still fairly limited to simple experimental paradigms involving inductive learning, but in a study involving uncertain visual categorization (generate rules from examples), the frontostriatal-thalamic network was active as well as other brain areas. The frontostriatal network is an interesting because of its implication in ADHD and reward and cognitive control.

Picture: Top of the world

Famous People with Dyslexia: Silicon Valley Pioneer William Hewlett (HP)

"I invested a lot of hours disassembling door locks and things like that. My mother just called it mischief."- William Hewlett, co-founder Hewlett-Packard

Bill Hewlett was co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, currently the largest technology company in the world. Hewlett had a difficult early childhood because of his dyslexia and loss of his father in his teens. What started out as a few hundred dollars and space in a garage would soon grow into a high technology company with offices in nearly every country in the world. Hewlett's accomplishments were not limited to technology, however. Some believe his greatest accomplishment was in creating a model for creative corporations today...

"...an egalitarian, decentralized system that came to be known as 'the HP Way'..."...one of the first all-company profit-sharing plans... gave shares to all employees... among the first to offer tuition assistance, flex time, and job sharing... Today, the behavior of the two founders remains a benchmark for business..."

Apparently Bill Hewlett was in favor of flexible hours and schedule-free Fridays to encourage creative thinking on the part of his engineering team.

From Bill and Dave (Michael Malone)
“...young Bill was a brilliant child, an indifferent student, and something of a hellion. He was constantly getting into fights –including one memorable occasion when he came home covered with a bottle of ink…young Bill too had a near brush with explosives ad morality-twice. On one occasion, he nearly killed himself with shrapnel after setting off a homemade grenade constructed from a brass doorknob stuffed with black powder…

At the age of 14, Bill Hewlett lost his father, a prominent Stanford professor, to a brain tumor, and his grandmother packed him, his mother and his sister up for 15 month stay in Europe where Bill was tutored at home. ..Hewlett had been “struggling desperately in school” because of dyslexia.

“He was a classic case: in English and history he struggled gamely, but inevitably failed. He simply couldn’t read the textbooks or keep up with his note-taking in class, so he had to rely entirely on his memory of the teacher’s words. By comparison, in chemistry, physics, and mathematics, Bill’s performance was nothing short of astonishing. This was particularly true when he was allowed to work with his hands. Among other electrical items, he built a pair of crystal radios for himself and his sister, made an electric arc from carbon rods, and even fabricated a Tesla coil In math he…tore through the curriculum so quickly that they had to beg th teacher to instruct them in college-level mathematics…

But…miserable other grades- and the resulting median of mediocrity made him less than a good college prospect…It seemed likely he would now have to attend a trade school…”

The video below was made when Bill Hewlett and David Packard won the 1995 Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award. For lots more videos, stories, and resources for dyslexia, join our Dyslexic Advantage community.



Doing it the HP Way
William Hewlett
Stories about Bill Hewlett
Bill and Dave by Michael Malone

Creativity for Non-Visual Thinkers, People with Non-Verbal Learning Disabilities, Aspergers etc.

"A thought may be compared to a cloud shedding a shower of words." - L.S. Vygotsky

Had an email last week from someone with a nonverbal learning disability - and he asked us a great question...that given that visual imagery seems to be so important in creative work, was there hope for NLDer's in the Conceptual Age? Of course! We apologize for not giving as much attention to non-visual thinking on this blog (part of the reason is our interest and large clinic population of dyslexics), so we'd like to correct this slight right now.

Verbal thinkers tend to have less trouble than visual thinkers in conventional K-12 school tasks... but if visual perceptual and organization problems also exist (e.g. nonverbal learning disabilities), more struggles await them in their adult years, driving and reading maps, reading the emotions of their co-workers, bosses, and family members, and keeping their home and work life organized.

The two most important factors we have seen in these individuals' success relate to metacognitive ability -an ability to reflect about their own thinking processes, recognizing their strengths and weaknesses (build on strengths, accommodate weaknesses) and external supports (helps when needed from loved ones - parents, siblings, spouses, professionals, business partners) if and when needed.

We know and have learned of many highly (and sometimes exclusively) verbal thinkers working in various diverse occupations - academia / research, law, business, education, writing, science, math, and computers and engineering. Many of the most successful verbal thinkers capitalize on their strong memories, pattern recognition, reasoning and analytical abilities, and eye for detail.

Verbal thinkers tend to wrestle with ideas through talk, debate, or writing. Brainstorming may take place through conscious chains of deductive thinking, word play or conscious manipulation of words (e.g. drawing verbal analogies),or even verbal brainstorms (e.g. freewriting)in which loosely associated words, digressions, phrases, etc. are written down to open ideas up about a problem or question. impression.

How common is it to not be able to make images? A number is hard to generate as a continuum seems to exist in individuals' image-making ability. At least when we have asked, there always seem to be at least a few people who report that they are unable to make images in non-selected groups of 100.

Some people who don't have pictoral visual images also tell us that although they never get "snapshot" pictures, they do have non-visual imagery (auditory, somatic/ kinesthetic) or strong associations (e.g. feelings emotions, spatial / symbolic representations)that are integral to their thinking style.

Interesting, there was once intense debate over whether visual imagery exists and has a functional importance in the brain(for more, see this). Presumably one the most strident advocates of the anti-imagery position, cognitive psychologist Zenon Pylyshyn, did not have pictoral imagery:

"It is argued that an adequate characterization of "what one knows" requires the use of abstract mental structures to which there is no conscious access and which are essentially conceptual and propositional, rather than sensory or pictorial, in nature. Such representations are more accurately referred to as symbolic descriptions than as images in the usual sense. Implications of using an imagery vocabulary are examined, and it is argued that the picture metaphor underlying recent theoretical discussions is seriously misleading, especially as it suggests that the image is an entity to be perceived." (from What the mind's eye tells the mind's brain)

fMRI of causal reasoning
Employment for people with Aspergers Syndrome
Book: How to find work that works for people with Aspergers Syndrome
Book: Choosing the right work for people with autism or aspgergers syndrome

Famous People with Dyslexia: William Butler Yeats

“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” - William Butler Yeats, poet, Nobel Prize Winner in Literature

William Butler Yeats is one of the most famous poets of all time, but fewer people know of this quote from Yeats Autobiographies: "My father was angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head."

But lest you get a permanent wrong impression of WB Yeats' father, this was also said of him (from Eileen Simpson's wonderful book Reversals):

"When John Butler Yeats finally realized how useless it was to bully his son to rad aloud, when his son was clearly incapable of doing so, the father took over the reading himself. From the time the boy was nine until he was sixteen, father read to son from Macaulay, Scott, Shakespeare, Shelley, Rossetti, Blake- the narrative verse and prose a poet would need to know when he began to write his own verses."

WB Yeats' own recollection of his father's reading times:

"My father's influence upon my thoughts was at its height. We went to Dublin by train every morning, breakfasting in his studio. He had taken a large room with a beautiful eighteenth-century mantelpiece in a York Street tenement house, and at breakfast he read passages from the poets, and always from the play or poem at its most passionate moment."

Below is a video of Yeats reading some of his poems.



The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

For more stories and videos of famous dyslexics, visit Dyslexic Advantage.

Strategic Reasoning = Super Theory of Mind?

Does super strategic reasoning sometimes mean super EQ (emotional intelligence) or theory of mind? Yes, but it depends on the game. In this recent fmri-game study, high strategic reasoning (winners) correlated with strong activation of the medial prefrontal cortex, an area important for 'mind reading' of other peoples' intents and behaviors or theory of mind.

Neuroeconomists are interested in studies such as this because many types of business and financial industry success depend upon accurate prediction of others' behaviors (e.g. customer, investor, competitor).

Well, there is a significant body of research to support the importance of emotional intelligence in business as well as classroom environments. And emotional intelligence appears to be much more 'trainable' than IQ...

In our dyslexic population, a surprising number of students we see do seem to have a strong EQ. They are the ones who are talking about the emotions and motivations of every character in the Cookie Thief picture from the Boston Aphasia battery, and exuding leadership qualities in school, and seem to take longer to assess because it is so enjoyable talking to them and listening to the stories. Some of these kids seem destined for future success in business

Strategic Reasoning
Medial prefrontal cortex and self-referential pdf
Benefits of Emotional Intelligence pdf

Famous People with Dyslexia: Dinosaur Hunter Jack Horner

"If you do something no one else has done, you don't have to read very much, you can just write your own stuff." - Jack Horner, one the world's most famous paleontologists, inspiration for Jurassic Park

Many dyslexics excel in spatial problem solving, analytical ability, and science in general - talents well-suited to the field of paleontology.

"I found my first dinosaur bone at the age of eight during a fossil-hunting trip with my father...Kindergarten through eighth grade was extremely difficult for me because my progress in reading, writing, and mathematics was excruciatingly slow. I would never stand to read out loud in class, even if the teachers threatened to give me failing grades...Eventually, I managed to graduate high school, but just barely, having received Ds in all required classes, including English, in which my grade was a D minus, minus, minus. The teacher told me that this was essentially an F, but that he never wanted to see me again. That was indeed the last time I saw him, but I did send him a copy of my first book!

There was, however, one area of school besides P.E. in which I excelled: science projects."

Horner had an eclectic history before becoming a paleontologist - he was a recon Marine, dabbled in astrophysics at Cal Tech, tried college, but never graduated, worked for his father's gravel business, then "began writing letters to every museum in the English speaking world asking if they had any jobs open for anyone ranging from a technician to a director..."

The video below is more about spinosaurus, than Jack Horner's dyslexia, but we wanted to post for all those young dyslexics who love dinosaurs. Find more about Jack's early life and dyslexia here: http://mtprof.msun.edu/Spr2004/horner.html




For more stories and videos of famous dyslexics, visit Dyslexic Advantage.

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day to the wonderful fathers out there who gift their children with their whimsy, passion, and thoughtfulness.

I lost my Dad 10 years ago, but I'm still enjoying his gifts ever day because he touched so many ways I look at things. My dad was Harry Chao-hung Fang, neurologist, teacher, family storyteller extraordinaire, and great friend. He entered neurology at a time when it was a new field, having trained under Ray Adams (Principles of Neurology, later chairman at Massachusetts General Hospital) when Adams was serving as missionary doctor in China. Dad left China with only "a violin, the Bible, and a copy of Longfellow's poems", intending just to pursue his clinical training in the US, but that move became lifelong when the Communists took power. He was fortunate to train under some of the giants and founding fathers of neurology - Ray Adams, Derek Denny-Brown, and C Miller Fisher.

There so many memories I have of my dad - he definitely inspired me to become a neurologist. I brought a plastic model of the brain to show-and-tell in kindergarten and remember practicing how to say "medulla oblongata", but I loved being able to follow him around on rounds in the hospital, to see how kind he was with patients, how he took time to listen, and solved patient cases like putting together pieces of a complex puzzle.

So a special salute today to the fathers out there who share so much of who they are to help their children become who they are meant to be. One of my favorite quotes about a dad is from Ansel Adams:

"I trace who I am and the direction of my development to those years of growing up in our house by the dunes, propelled especially by an internal spark tenderly kept alive and glowing by my father."

The Biology of Self Control

In an Cal Tech fMRI study of self-reported dieters, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) emerged as the important area for self-control. Subjects who exercised poor self-control in the study chose to eat fattening and non-nutritious foods and it correlated with a lack of activation in the DLPFC.

Excerpt: "The vmPFC works during every decision," says Hare. "The DLPFC, on the other hand, is more active when you're employing self-control."

"This, ultimately, is one reason why self-controllers can make better choices," Rangel adds.

Still, the DLPFC can only do so much. For instance, it can't override a truly negative reaction to a food, notes Hare. "We rarely got people to say they'd eat cauliflower if they didn't like cauliflower," he says. "But they would choose not to eat ice cream or candy bars, knowing they could eat the healthier index food instead..."Imagine how much better life could be if we knew how to flex the willpower muscles in the brain and strengthen them with exercises," says Camerer.

How does this all fit with what we know about the development of kids? From Bunge lab, not surprisingly this self control area usually takes quite a while to mature (colored in green at left). In fact in kids, control seems to much more subcortical (caudate) and direct-reward related. With maturity (not surprisingly), additional higher order types of information direct decisions.

Another interesting study that came out re: kid self-control is one from Opposite - Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes task in which kids are supposed to do the opposite of what was asked (kind of like a Stroop interference). The kids who were able to do this task well had the highest achievement scores in reading, vocabulary, and math.

The next obvious question is, would training in self control result in greater achievement? The likely answer is yes. Another self regulation game involves practice doing the opposite game in a back-and-forth ball activity.
Science Daily: Self Control (original scientific article not yet free access)

Famous People with Dyslexia: Legendary Filmmaker David Lean

"I'm not a word man, I'm a picture man." - David Lean, filmmaker, producer, screenwriter, and editor of Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago, A Passage to India, and Ryan's Daughter.

From David Lean: A Biography: "David was sent to kindergarten...here it became apparent that brilliant families do not always produce brilliant children. By the standrads of the time, with their ruthless emphasis on the three Rs, David was dim. By comparison with his brother, who was still only four, he was alarmingly backward.

'I remember my mother coming back one afternoon from a visit to Miss Clayton. She said, 'Dave, Miss Clayton has told me a terrible thing about you. She's afraid you will never be able to read or write.' And she burst into tears...The kindest theory was that perhaps the boy had some brain disease...(his father) decided that the boy was being sluggish on purpose and began to bully him. As for David, he often sat glumly and silently - David Lean's silences would later become legendary in the film industry."

More from Lean's childhood: "David did not enjoy the pursuits he was expected to enjoy. Reading was an effort and he avoided it as much as he could...Boys of low academic ability were forgiven if they shone at sport, but David wasn't much good at this either...He would spend longer and longer gazing into space, actually deep in thought, but to his father, merely confirming his worst suspicions..."

Lean's family history was also a fairly common one for dyslexia - his father was an accountant, and his mother's family was "very artistic with a lot of gift in them. The Tangyes were artists, inventors and engineers."

Lean reminisced, "Horses and trams were an important part of my childhood; the clop-clop-cloop of horses' hooves on cobbles and the noise of tram bells and the tram wheels on the tracks...I can see the cart wheels, bright silver from friction, the metal lining in place of a tire, gleaming, highly polished silver, like a railway line...the exciting flash and crackle as the arm travelled along the wire - I used that in Doctor Zhivago!" One wonders whether today Lean whether someone would have been tempted to diagnose him with Aspergers..

Lean exemplifies many of the common talents seen in gifted dyslexics - strong visual thinking and storytelling, powerful personal memory and an ability to "get into the heads' of others.

More Lean: "I think slowly, and there is nothing unusual about my methods. I envy people who receive sudden flashes of genius, because I don't. I try to work out every possible way to do a scene, and then choose the way that will surprise audiences. I live with my scripts, I live with my characters, and if I seem to be in another world when friends and unit people speak to me, it's because I don't have the scene solved yet. I'm frequently thought to be rude when I'm really in a mental turmoil, struggling with some problem that seems insuperable at the moment."

In the video below watch some Steven Spielberg talk about David Lean and the making of Lawrence of Arabia (there are some great clips selected in the short video), but better yet, take time and watch all of Lean's greatests. We also loved Great Expectations.

For more stories and videos about famous dyslexics, visit Dyslexic Advantage

ADHD = Different Reward / Motivation Pathway?

More on the evolving story about ADHD biology and reward. Rather than ADHD appearing as a fixed deficit in executive function, increasing evidence suggests that children (and adults) with ADHD behaviors are showing impulsivity mainly in non-reward situations.

In this latest study from Germany, 8-13 year old boys diagnosed with ADHD showed a much greater ability to inhibit impulsive behavior on the go/no-go test if rewards- monetary or social were involved. The differences were striking between the two groups...whereas only 12.5% of the control group slowed down their behaviors and improved their responses in the control group, 43.8% of the ADHD group slowed down their behaviors and exhibited fewer false alarm rates. The implications for findings such as this are significant - if making external or situational changes to a task could eliminate or significantly reduce impulsivity, the impulsivity is not a disease or fixed deficiency, but rather a behavioral response to specific conditions implicit in the task.

The researchers are very careful to not overstate their findings: "given the heterogeneity within the ADHD population,it is arguable that dysregulated reward-seeking behavior alone can account for all cases of ADHD. Nevertheless, reinforcement theories are able to explain most of the ADHD symptoms [44]. ADHD possibly represents the final outcome of diverse and discrete neurodevelopmental
pathways with an 'extreme reward approach pathway' leading to impulsive and overactive behavior."

One might also argue whether the term "extreme" is unduly negative to describe what could be an alternative and not necessarily pathology reward pathway. Why locate the fault in the children? Why not say that 1/4 of the population of children don't respond well in an "understimulated" environment. Why should a child be motivated to perform a meaningless go/no-go task?

So what about the child diagnosed with ADHD whose symptoms are worst with uninteresting (at least to the child) classroom work? Perhaps the rewards of socializing, dodgeball at recess, doodling a design for game, or designing a space ship out of legos are more rewarding (and deserving of focus and care) than Mad Math Minutes? Our prior blog post on fMRI activation patterns for money-induced incentives and ADHD now seem more compelling...



p.s. Data such at this also lend positive support for the use of more extrinsic rewards when tasks are not completed by children with ADHD.

Greater Sensitivity to Social Rewards In Children with ADHD pdf
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Amphetamines Blunt Rewards in Normal Subjects
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Money, Motivation, ADHD, and the Brain

Gifts and Talents of Dyslexia: Dyslexic Journalist Richard Engel

NBC's leading foreign correspondent, Richard Engel was once "a frustrated child (who) got into frequent fistfights and struggled with dyslexia". From the Washington Post: "He was down in the mouth and low on self-confidence...He lived in the shadow of his older brother, Mr. Perfect," who is now a cardiologist. In fact, she had only "a very faint hope" that he would be able to go to college.

When he was 13, Engel asked his parents to send him to a wilderness survival program in Wyoming. Frustrated by his learning disabilities, he was eager to escape the comforts of Upper East Side life and try a tougher environment...When the teenager returned, he told his mother: "I learned a lot about myself...Engel says the experience began a transformation that largely enabled him to overcome his dyslexia and school problems. Despite his learning difficulties, he showed early promise in other ways.

'He was a great writer,' says Ross Peet, who was a classmate at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx. "But he struggled with anything that had a number on it...' "

From Engel's recent book War Journal: "I have something of a map problem. Brian Williams ribs me about it all the time. Whenever I want to explain the situation in Iraq, I feel compelled to draw maps....I am dyslexic and I understand things better if they are visual. In middle school, my grades were so bad that one of the school administrators advised my parents to pull me out and enroll me in another school with a more developed 'special learning program.' They never did."

Engel's career highlights many of those other dyslexic talents that receive less attention: strong storytelling, vivid personal memory, and an ability to analyze and distill down a complex situation into a simpler form. We have had college dyslexics tell us that they struggled with research until they realized they were outstanding at projects that required field research - research that went beyond the books, but into the actual places where things were happening...

For more stories and videos about gifted dyslexics, join Dyslexic Advantage. The video below is brief of Richard Engel in the field