Chapter 14
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).
Chapter 15
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).
Chapter 16
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).
Chapter 20
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.”
Chapter 21
1 J. Horner, Dinosaurs under the Big Sky (Missoula, MT: Mountain Press, 2001).
2 S. Andrews, Spatial thinking with a difference.
3 Ibid.
Chapter 22
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.
Chapter 23
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.”
Chapter 24
1 R. J. Bidinotto, Vince Flynn interview (2008). http://ayn-rand.info/ct-2066-vince_flynn.aspx.
Chapter 25
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.
Chapter 26
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.
Chapter 27
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).
Chapter 28
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.
Chapter 29
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.
INDEX
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
daydreaming
declarative memory
episodic, see episodic memory semantic
Delahaye, Valerie
depression
development, M-strengths and
Dinosaurs under the Big Sky (Horner)
distractibility
D-strengths (Dynamic reasoning)
in action
advantages of
backward process in
entrepreneurs and
insight and
key points about
learning methods and
N-strengths and
prediction in
reading and
trade-offs with
writing and
Dynamic reasoning, see D-strengths
dyslexia:
broadened perspective on
confidence and self-worth and
current definition of
development of concept
as learning disorder
metacognition and
narrow perspective on
optimistic attitude and
prism metaphor and
self-advocacy and
stealth
talent and
telescope metaphor and
two perspectives on
dyslexic advantage
Economic Times
Eden, Guinevere
education:
home schooling and private tutoring
supportive environment for
see also elementary and middle school; high school and college
Einstein, Albert
elementary and middle school
confidence and self-worth and
external supports and
helping students in
internal supports and
metacognition and
optimistic attitude and
supportive environment in
teachers in
entrepreneurs
environmental stimuli
episodic memory
daydreaming and
scene-based depictions in
story-form thinking in
understanding
episodic stimulation
D-strengths and
Epstein, Fred
essays and reports
eureka moment
Everatt, John
eyes, reading and
factual memory, see declarative memory
Fawcett, Angela
filing papers
fine-motor coordination
Flink, David
Flynn, Vince
Ford, Richard
Fortune
Foss, Ben
Foster, Norman
friends
Frostig School
future, optimistic attitude toward
Geschwind, Norman
Gilger, Jeffrey
gist
global thinking
goal setting
grammar
handwriting
Hassabis, Demis
Haynes, Charles
Headstrong Nation
Hewlett, Bill
Heywood, Daniel
Heywood, Jenny
Heywood, Lance
high school and college
applying to college
developing skills and supports
resources related to
summary for
thriving in college
hippocampus
home schooling
Hopkins, Anthony
Horner, John “Jack,”
How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything . . . in Business (and in Life) (Seidman)
Hynd, George
Icon Magazine Online
imagination:
insight and
prediction and
information input
information output
informa
tion processing
big-picture
fine-detail
phonological
procedural learning
in right hemisphere vs. left hemisphere
innovation
insight
Inspiration program
Intel Reader
Interconnected reasoning, see I-strengths
interest(s)
job-related
learning and
Interview with the Vampire (Rice)
In The Mind’s Eye (West)
IQ tests
Irving, John
I-strengths (Interconnected reasoning)
in action
advantages of
global thinking and
insight and
key points about
learning methods and
perspective shifts and
reading and
in real life
relationship perception and
trade-offs with
writing and
Jackson, Lesley
Jansons, Kalvis
job, see workplace
Kamen, Dean
Károlyi, Catya
Katz, Lynda
Kenyon, Sherrilyn
Kidspiration program
kinesthetic memory
King, Diana Hanbury
Landmark College
language
The Dyslexic Advantage Page 28