The Dyslexic Advantage (37 page)

2
http://otherendofsunset.blogspot.com/
.

3
This belief is beautifully exemplified by one of his projects at Google: “Imagine that people could ask questions of the world around them and get back answers that don't entirely match their perspective. How terrific would it be if it were possible for all of us to read what the Arabic newspapers were saying about our operations in the Middle East. How good would it be for the world if the democratization of information got to the place where consumers could see their own perspectives, the perspectives of those they trust and the perspectives of people who disagree with them all together and compare them.” A. Lundberg, IT's Third Epoch . . . and Running IT at Google.
CIO
(2007).
http://www.cio.com/article/144500/IT_s_Third_Epoch
. . . and_Running_IT_at_Google.

1
Interest in philosophy has been a common theme among the “dyslexic families” with whom we work. Earlier we mentioned that the most common college major among parents of our dyslexic children was engineering. The second-most common was philosophy. While only about 3 percent of college graduates in the United States majored in philosophy, over 12 percent of our parents with personal or family histories of dyslexia did. That's over four times the expected rate.

2
D. Seidman,
How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything . . . in Business (and in Life)
(New York: Wiley, 2007).

1
Both this and all other quotes attributed to Anne Rice have, unless otherwise stated, been taken from her autobiography,
Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

2
We've posted a somewhat longer—but by no means exhaustive—list of these and other dyslexic writers on our Dyslexic Advantage website (
http://dyslexicadvantage.com
).

1
Dr. Demis Hassabis has a curriculum vitae that sounds like it was dreamed up by Stan Lee as the backstory for a superhero. While he doesn't admit to slinging webs or turning green and muscley when he gets angry, he was a chess master at age twelve, won the world Pentamind championship at the Mind Sports Olympiad a record five times, and became a successful video game designer at age seventeen. He also earned a double first-class degree in computer science from Cambridge and started a successful video game production company with sixty-five employees—all by the time he'd reached his mid twenties. After successfully selling his company, he decided to combine his interests in imagination, creativity, and artificial intelligence by pursuing a Ph.D. in cognitive neurosciences at University College, London.

2
D. Hassabis, D. Kumaran, S. D. Van, and E. A. Maguire, Patients with hippocampal amnesia cannot imagine new experiences.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA
104 (2007): 1726–31. See also D. Hassabis and E. A. Maguire, Deconstructing episodic memory with construction.
TRENDS in Cognitive Science
11 (2007): 299–306.

3
From a test called the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination. H. Goodglass and E. Kaplan,
Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination
, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Lea and Febiger, 1983).

1
S. Andrews, Spatial thinking with a difference: An unorthodox treatise on the mind of the geologist.
AEG News
45, no. 4 (2002), and 46, nos. 1–3 (2003).

2
In contrast to her poor verbal performance, Sarah excelled on the math portion of the SAT—despite being a C student in math class—prompting her math teacher to ask her, “Where have you been hiding this?” Sarah explained that the difference was entirely due to the SAT's multiple-choice format, which eliminated her problems showing work and removed any penalty for her “original” way of doing math. Like many of the individuals we've mentioned in previous chapters, Sarah had difficulty memorizing and following the standard math formulas and procedures, so she created her own and did most of her work in her head. This led to conflict with her teachers. “My goal was, ‘Let's get the right answer,' but theirs was, ‘Let's do it the right way.'”

3
In a fascinating twist on this story, rather than work as a geologist, Sarah's aunt Lysbeth taught grade school and became a specialist in teaching what she termed “reluctant readers.”

1
J. Horner,
Dinosaurs under the Big Sky
(Missoula, MT: Mountain Press, 2001).

2
S. Andrews, Spatial thinking with a difference.

3
Ibid.

1
S. Andrews, Spatial thinking with a difference.

2
Ibid.

3
M. Jung-Beeman et al., Neural activity when people solve verbal problems with insight.
Public Library of Science—Biology
2 (2004): 500–510.

1
Dr. Logan reported that the incidence of dyslexia is 20 percent among entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom, where the population incidence of dyslexia is estimated at 4 percent, and 35 percent of entrepreneurs in the United States, where the population incidence is around 10 to 15 percent.

2
Glenn Bailey also gave us a great example of the way that personal relationships can greatly affect worker satisfaction and performance. “When we ran our first water company, we had a great relationship with our team, and we had virtually no claims for work-related injury claims, despite the fact that we hand-delivered all these huge five-gallon bottles of purified water. When we sold the company, the people who bought us out were all about cash and bottom line, and they got rid of the Ping-Pong table and the barbecue and they got unionized, and their claims went through the roof. As a result, they became number one in worker injury claims in British Columbia.”

1
R. J. Bidinotto, Vince Flynn interview (2008).
http://ayn-rand.info/ct-2066-vince_flynn.aspx
.

1
For example, many Orton-Gillingham–based programs, like the Wilson or Slingerland method, use fine-motor kinesthetic training, which emphasizes repeated practice in writing letters and words, or making tracing movements of the fingers. While these approaches are highly effective for individuals with dyslexia with good kinesthetic-spatial memories, individuals who are particularly weak in motor-kinesthetic imagery (and who often show significant problems with fine-motor finger coordination) often find these approaches both frustrating and ineffective, and they will learn better with programs that engage other areas of learning strength. Students with strong visual imagery but weak motor-kinesthetic imagery will often learn better with programs like Lindamood-Bell's Seeing Stars, which heavily engage visual imagery. Also, for students who struggle with finger coordination and position sense (i.e., the ability to tell what the fingers are doing without looking at them) but have good large-motor coordination and position sense, kinesthetic approaches that practice writing words and phonemes using large sweeping motions of the whole arm on a whiteboard rather than writing with the fingers using pencil and paper may also be effective. Other techniques that engage the visual, spatial, design, and color memory strengths in visual and spatial imagery that a particular student possesses will likely also be effective.

2
An example of this approach would be the Phonetic Zoo program, which couples phonics instruction with information about animals (see Appendix A).

3
B. L. Eide and F. Eide,
The Mislabeled Child
(see chap. 3, n. 1).

4
From a strictly neurological standpoint, there's a great deal of scientific evidence suggesting that many children who struggle to master fine-detail phonological skills may also have difficulty mastering fine-detail visual skills. This is even more likely for the large group of dyslexics who struggle with fine-detail movements of the fingers, which are required for tasks like handwriting and tying shoelaces.

1
B. M. Vitale,
Unicorns Are Real: A Right-Brained Approach to Learning
(Austin, TX: Jalmar Press, 1982).

2
R. D. Davis and E. M. Braun,
The Gift of Dyslexia: Why Some of the Smartest People Can't Read . . . and How They Can Learn
(New York: Perigee, 2010). There are certain aspects of this book and of the Davis Method with which we are not fully in agreement, and many of his theoretical ideas seem far off the mark, but the practical material on building 3-D models of letters and words and on what Davis calls “trigger words” are often very helpful and are not well covered elsewhere.

3
D. Hanbury King,
Writing Skills
1 and
Writing Skills
2 (Cambridge, MA: Educators Publishing Service, 1990).

4
www.inspiration.com/blog/2011/01/discover-ways-to-showcase-dyslexic-talents/
.

5
N. Margulies,
Mapping Inner Space: Learning and Teaching Mind Mapping
(Tucson, AZ: Zephyr, 1991).

6
This book, for example, was written entirely on a laptop, so handwriting played no role in its construction.

1
M. H. Raskind, R. J. Goldberg, E. L. Higgins, and K. L. Herman, Patterns of change and predictors of success in individuals with learning disabilities: Results from a twenty-year longitudinal study.
Learning Disabilities Research and Practice
14 (1999): 35–49.

2
M. E. P. Seligman,
The Optimistic Child: A Revolutionary Program That Safeguards Children against Depression and Builds Lifelong Resilience
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), and
Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment
(New York: Free Press, 2002).

1
B. L. Eide and F. Eide,
The Mislabeled Child
(see chap. 3, n. 1).

2
J. Mooney and D. Cole,
Learning Outside the Lines: Two Ivy League Students with Learning Disabilities and ADHD Give You the Tools
(New York: Fireside, 2000).

3
L. Pope,
Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about College
(New York: Penguin, 2006), and
Looking Beyond the Ivy League: Finding the College That's Right for You
(New York: Penguin, 2007).

4
Landmark also offers summer programs for high school students at various spots around the country. These programs run for two or three weeks, and they prepare students for intensive high school or college work by providing training in executive function, organization, learning strategies, and the use of assistive technologies. For students who are struggling with some of the skills that will be necessary to succeed in college, these courses can provide an excellent chance to acquire them.

1
So far, this program has been very popular with mentors as well as mentees. One reason for this popularity is that the demands placed on the already busy mentors are quite reasonable. Mentors must commit to only twelve hours total, and they're given training and oversight from the organizers, so they always feel directed and supported.

abstract definitions vs. scene-based depictions

abstract reasoning

accommodations and resources

ADHD

stimulant medications for

ambiguities

Andrews, Sarah

anxiety

Archimedes

association (togetherness), relationships of

attention

reading and

selective

stimulant medications and

sustained

working memory in,
see
working memory

attitude, optimistic

Attree, Elizabeth

Authentic Happiness
(Seligman)

autism

Bacon, Alison

Bailey, Glenn

baseball

Beacon College

Beeman, Mark

Benton, Robert

Bergne, Sebastian

Boies, David

brain

big-picture processing in

cerebellum of

cortex of

fine-detail processing in

hippocampus of

information processing in

brain (
cont
.)

left hemisphere of

phonological processing in

procedural learning and

right hemisphere of

structural differences in

brainstorming

Branson, Richard

Breimhorst, Mark

British Airways

Called Out of Darkness
(Rice)

career,
see
workplace

Carroll, Lewis

Casanova, Manuel

case-based depictions vs. abstract definitions

cause and effect, relationships of

cerebellum

Charlton, Blake

Close, Chuck

college,
see
high school and college

Colleges That Change Lives
(Pope)

confidence and self-worth

connections

see also
I-strengths

conscious compensation

“Cookie Thief” picture

correlation, relationships of

cortex

creative prediction

creativity

episodic stimulation and

insight and

latent inhibition and

pattern separation and

Critchley, Macdonald

Daniels, Roy