If your dyslexic child seems to struggle with the visual aspects of reading, but the eye doctor said 'everything's fine' - the problem may be with brain-based aspects of seeing in dyslexia. Dyslexia can be associated with a wide range of visual difficulties including problems with stabilizing visual gaze, moving the eyes smoothly and in a coordination fashion, and visually registering letters or words.

Additional studies supporting the visual aspects of dyslexia continue to trickle out, but here in the U.S., much more attention is paid to the phonological aspects of dyslexia in the classroom. Children may have predominant phonological problems, predominant visual problems, or mixtures of the two. Understand what a particular child's difficulties are will help focus remediation and educational strategies.

There has been an explosion of research in the biological bases of dyslexia in the past few years. School are having to play catch up with the pace of research.

Dyslexia Research Trust - Science and Research
Dyslexia More than Phonological Disorder
Seeing Differently - Contrast Differences and Dyslexia

It's not your imagination, classrooms are filled with children with auditory processing problems - for some it's mishearing, others have exquisite auditory sensitivity and become overwhelmed with normal school noise. Although clinicians have known for a long time that hearing loss and hearing hypersensitivity can occur in the same patients, the biological processes involved are just beginning to be understood.

Children often don't mention that they suffer from tinnitus (ringing in the ears), and there are no ways to detect it by a simple clinical test. The first link below shows how tinnitus can be 'seen' on functional brain imaging studies. When certain frequencies are lost in the brain, the 'hearing brain' reorganizes to try and compensate for the loss. The only problem is, the hearing of some frequencies may become overly sensitive, while the losses of others still persist. Interestingly, some of the most beneficial therapies for tinnitus are directed at introducing sound at the appropriate frequencies to allow the brain to reduce its self-generated sounds.

There are many reasons why we may be seeing more hearing loss, tinnitus, and sound hypersensitivities in school-aged children. Predisposing factors are many, but may include premature or stressful birth, frequent ear infections, and or autism spectrum disorders.

The diagnosis of brain-based auditory processing disorders is still in its infancy, although the pace of research and advancement in the areas of auditory training are exciting.

Seeing Tinnitus on fMRI
Tinnitus, Hyperacusis, and Hearing Loss
Hyperacusis in Autism
Auditory Processing and Language Difficulties in Prematurely Born

Other senses become keener with deprivation, and for Helen Keller, touch, proprioceptive sense, and smell became essential modes of communicating with and sensing others. From Anne Sullivan's writings: "Her sense of touc has sensibly increased during the year, and has gained in acuteness and delicacy. Indeed her whole body is so finely organized that she seems to use it as a medium for bringing herself into closer relations with her fellow creatures. She is able not only to distinguish with great accuracy the different undulations of the air and the vibrations of the floor ade by various sounds and motions, and to recognize her friends and acquantiance the instance she touches their hands or clothing..."

When children are severely impaired in critical sensory modalities like sight or sound, it is important to remember that other senses can help a child compensate, and instruction needs to be driven through the intact pathways.

Analogies can be a powerful tool for teaching higher order thinking, and strong performance in analogies is thought by some to be the greatest predictor of creative and flexible thinking.

This first paper is a beautiful study by Wagner and his group at Stanford. It shows the different anatomical 'filing' away in the brain of words that are merely related and those that are true analogies - related by functional relationships or representations. It's the analogy that is foundational for higher order creative thinking. Understanding how one system could be related or differentiated (the analogy breaks down) from another leads to new theories, new models, and new paradigms.

Teaching with analogies can be a powerful approach for gifted thinkers. We've included two links to teachers' sites discussing the use of analogies in teaching. Please send us your favorite links or books too - we'd like to hear about them.

Anatomy of Analogies
Teaching with Analogies
Teachers views of analogies and models as motivators

The New SAT

"Little seizures" should always be considered in children who have periods of 'spaciness' or 'blanking out'. Subclinical seizures may just cause a child to flutter eyelids, lose her train of thought, or repeat what he was saying. Sometimes brief or nighttime seizures cause attentional problems and restlessness that are misinterpreted as ADHD. Treatment of epilepsy results in improved attention and behavior.

Attentional problems and epilepsy in children
Incidence of Seizures in Children
Improved Behavior with Treatment of Epilepsy
ADHD and Epilepsy
Language Difficulties in Children with Benign Epilepsy

Talk about exercising your mind! Hooked on adventure stories? Chances are you're living the action through your brain's motor imagery.

Listening to Action-related Sentences Activates Fronto-parietal Motor Circuits --

Finally, some news you can use. Elaborative rehearsal of information (reorganizing information in a meaningful way) is the best way to help you remember. "Just memorizing", or rote rehearsal helps things look 'familiar', but is not as good helping you remember.

For list material, elaborative rehearsal may mean calling up relevant associations, developing mneumonics, stories, adding images, or redrafting or outlining information as mentioned in the linked article from the ADHD lawyer posted yesterday. Now many students of psychology may not be surprised at this study's result, but how many K-12 students are aware of this valuable tidbit?

Different Strategies for Memory

What if Einstein Had Taken Ritalin? ADHD's Impact on Creativity

We're back! Over the next few weeks, we'd like to talk about some of the main take-home points of developmental neurobiology, and what it means for education. Multiple Intelligences was important for introducing and popularizing the concept of different preferences for learning, and Mel Levine's approach of "A Mind At a Time" emphasizes the importance of learning differences in each child, but neither addresses the implications of brain plasticity or its tremendous reorganization potential in education, the importance of perceptual processing disorders in school underachievement, and the potential for targeted brain-based retraining to overcome specific learning blocks.

We're at a point where the lines between biology and education blur. We would like to hear some discussion from some of you about what education should include. These days it seems that a majority of the time in school is spent on fact mastery and the basic building blocks of reading, writing, and mathematics. Should a core system of neurocognitive skills be added to this list? Is it a responsibility of educators to help entrain skills of sustained attention, organization, or efficient memory? Or if not, whose job is it?

We like the resources at www.addresources.org It's especially nice to hear from successful adults who learned time and task organizational strategies that helped them. We fear that our existing educational supports for children with attentional problems are spotty and haphazard. Because children with attention problems are thought to comprise almost 1 in 5 children, a more systematic approach to different learning environments, and teaching of self-focusing and organization strategies could have a powerful impact on student success.

ADDvice from a Certified ADHD Non-Expert

Here is a link to the National Academies Press' free online book, the Mathematics chapter. Mathematics is the perhaps one of the most commonly underrecognized learning disabilities.

Nat'l Academies Press, How Students Learn: (2005), page 218, in chapter Part II MATHEMATICS: 5 Mathematical Understanding: An Introduction

We hope you've been enjoying this blog. We're headed out of town and will be back Feb 3rd. When we return, we'd like to share our ideas about "Brain Remodeling-Based Education" and think about how it builds on, but is quite different from Howard Gardner's view of learning embodied in "Multiple Intelligences" and Mel Levine's approach using the model of "A Mind at a Time."

A little preview:

Education today needs to incorporate the view of brain ability and function as a highly dynamic and changeable system. Perceptual disorders in the primary senses - seeing, hearing, and touch, and preferences in memory systems profoundly affect learning efficiency and achievement in school. Thinking about the different ways we think and how much may be within our control, can fundamentally affect the best ways we should teach, how we approach disabilities and special education, and how we design education for the high ability learners.

The new black box warnings about SSRIs and children were directed toward depressed children and adolescents, and extra caution was raised about possible increased suicide risk. However, SSRIs are not prescribed for depressed children - in fact they are prescribed for a wide variety of behavioral disorders in children that include 'disruptive behavior disorder' ('explosive child') and severe anxiety disorder. The question is what effects could they be having on these children, and how well is the safety known?

The serotonin system is widely distributed throughout the brain and it appears to be involved in many processes important for behavior - including arousal, aggression, activation of the autonomic system, pain modulation, and pain modulation. The links provide additional background to the serotonin story. The illicit drug ecstasy is nicknamed the hug drug for the euphoric and empathetic outpourings that can come from its use. After the effect wears off, though, there appears to be a rebound and users are more aggressive or tend to perceive statements in a more aggressive fashion.

These studies again raise cautions about what we know and don't know about serotonin drugs in developing children. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter which is usually regulated in specific locations in precise ways in response to brain activation. Pharmacology is still very non-specific in its action at different sites and in its effects on neurotransmitter levels over time. SSRIs should not be thought of simply restoring something that a child lacks. SSRIs should not be considered lightly these drugs clearly affect much more than aggression or anxiety, and they may unwittingly affect 'good' serotonin-drive pathways (empathy, motivation)as well.


Serotonin, Aggression, Empathy

SSRIs and Apathy
The Empathy Drug
Not Seeing All the Data
The "file drawer" phenomenon: suppressing clinical evidence

The finding that some autistic subjects have difficulty rapidly processing the emotional movements of the face, suggests that slow motion training can improve individual's facial processing. DVDs and videos can be advanced frame-by-frame to help children recognize emotional expressions and their context. The second link below is to Baron-Cohen's Software for facial emotion recognition at amazon.com.

Autism, Movement, and Facial Processing

Mind Reading Software

Writing Errors by Normal Subjects

This study is a good reminder to us that writing is rarely 'automatic'. When University students had to do other tasks at the same time (like making nonsense sounds or tapping) they made multiple errors like omissions, grammatical mistakes, repetitions, and substitutions. It was interesting too that there were different patterns of errors between the two conditions.

These interference effects may play some role in the dysgraphia of dyslexia. Some writing errors may occur because of students'increased demands of the phonological loop or the sensor