Revised Listing of Materials for National Library of Medicine Archive, March 19, 2021

 Selected Significant Events and Documents for the West Archive

Updated Listing for History of Medicine, National Library of Medicine, NIH 

 Working Draft, in Process -- Revised, March 19, 2021

 

Introduction

 

From 1991 to 2020, Thomas G. West has given hundreds of presentations in the U.S. and 19 countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Over time, West has come to measure the significance of these invited talks, seminars and workshops by the extent to which the simple but powerful ideas he learned from two prescient neurologists (using the National Library of Medicine History of Medicine collections) have been received and given serious consideration by those interested in the strengths and talents of individuals with dyslexia and other learning differences -- together with the related advances in computer graphics, visual thinking and advanced information visualization technologies. 

 

This listing of selected events and documents, with brief descriptions, is intended to show evidence of the gradual development and effectiveness of these efforts -- and provide researchers, advocates and other archive users a guide to available resources along with models for future efforts.

 

West is the author of three books, In the Mind’s Eye (with editions in 1991, 1997, 2009 and 2020), Thinking Like Einstein (2004) and Seeing What Others Cannot See (2017). 

 

The first book, In the Mind’s Eye, was awarded a gold seal and selected as one of the “best of the best” for the year out of about 6000 reviewed books by the Association of College and Research Libraries of the American Library Association (one of only 12 books in the broad “Psychology” category, including books on neuroscience, intelligence testing, language impairment, mental health and psychiatry).

 

The book has been translated into Japanese, Chinese and Korean -- and West has provided presentations for scientific, medical, art, design, computer and business groups. The interest in these topics, across many different fields and disciplines, has been an indicator, much to West’s surprise and satisfaction, of the timeliness and broad impact of these research findings and publications -- largely based on the original work by the neurologists Dr. Samuel Torrey Orton in the 1920s and Dr. Norman Gechwind and his students in the 1980s.

 

The second edition of In the Mind’s Eye includes a Foreword by the late Oliver Sacks, MD, who said “In the Mind's Eye brings out the special problems of people with dyslexia, but also their strengths, which are so often over looked. . . . It stands alongside Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind as a testament to the range of human talent and possibility.” According to one early reviewer: “Every once in a while a book comes along that turns one's thinking upside down. In the Mind's Eye is just such a book.” 

 

A broad and enduring interest in these topics is further indicated by the reissue in July 2020 of a Third Edition (first time in paperback) of West’s first book, In The Mind’s Eye. With 29 years in print, the book continues to be what they call in the trade an “evergreen” -- a book that never stops selling. The two previous revised and expanded editions (Updated edition and Second edition) each contain Epilogues with some 40-50 pages of new material. 

 

Another indicator of continuing interest is that in recent months, West has been asked to join a global network, based in Stockholm, Sweden, of those with high interest in the strengths and talents of dyslexic children and adults. This network includes researchers, advocates and academics from Oxford, Cambridge and Sheffield universities in the UK as well as individuals associated with the Nobel Prize Foundation in Stockholm and a former advisor to the Swedish Royal Family (where three of five are dyslexic). The 7th meeting of the group is to be held (via Zoom) on March 29, 2021 -- including network members from Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and the US. This network provides evidence that the interest in dyslexic strengths is global and continues to be a main focus of many researchers and practitioners (although these views continue to be debated by certain groups). 

 

More recently, West has given additional talks (via Zoom and related technologies, recorded and/or live) in October and November 2020 for groups based in Amsterdam, Holland, Cairo, Egypt, a group associated George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia -- as well as the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) annual conference based in the U.S. (previously planned for Denver, Colorado, later made virtual).

 

On June 9, 2020, West gave the commencement address (via Zoom) for graduates of Siena School, Silver Spring, Maryland, a high school for college-bound dyslexic students. (A copy of this address is provided in Appendix C, below -- providing a brief overview of these considerations for young adults, among others.) 

 

Over the years, West’s investigations have led him to look beyond dyslexia to a wider range of learning differences. In his third book, Seeing What Others Cannot See, West investigates how different kinds of brains and different ways of thinking can help to make discoveries and solve problems in innovative and unexpected ways -- ways of thinking quite different from conventionally trained experts. With this book, West focuses on what he has learned over some 30 years from a group of extraordinarily creative, intelligent and interesting people -- strong visual thinkers and those with dyslexia, Asperger’s syndrome, or other different ways of thinking, learning and working.

 

The numbered sections below provide a listing of some of the more significant presentations, events and publications -- showing the broad range of institutions and organizations that have become increasingly interested in understanding the creative and innovative styles of thinking exhibited by dyslexics and other different thinkers. An additional section with selected reviews and comments is also provided (Appendix A).

 

Accordingly, this listing serves as a checklist of some of the associated materials not to be missed in the boxes and binders donated to the NLM History of Medicine permanent archive during recent mouths. In each case, the related documents might include drafts of talks and research papers, printed programs with topic descriptions, speaker bios, newspaper clippings and other publicity, conference proceedings, associated drafts, chapters, books, journal articles and other materials. 

 

Related websites, videos, blogs, audio recordings, photographs, overhead sheets, 35 mm film slides and Power Point images have been (or will be) provided separately. The West blog (below) has already been incorporated into the NLM-HOM digital archive system, with over 90 articles and commentaries to date. Additional information is to be provided from time to time for the numbered events below where only a name or brief description is currently listed. Blog: (inthemindseyedyslexicrenaissance.blogspot.com)

 

 

 

A Time of Fundamental Change: “A Return to Visual Thinking”

 

It should be noted that with his early publications and talks (based on the work of Orton and Geschwind, along with what he had learned from those working with the most advanced computer graphics technologies), West found himself swept up in a wave of fundamental change in thinking about thinking.

 

He found that he was invited to participate and provide presentations for a highly varied group of high-level institutions and organizations as part of a new awareness of fundamental change with respect to visual thinkers, visual technologies, scientific data visualization and new ways of thinking about the distinctive capabilities of dyslexics and other different thinkers. 

 

This new awareness was partly based on the rapidly emerging power of the new visual technologies during this period. But it was also based on a renewed awareness of the power of the visual thinking used by earlier scientists and engineers, such as Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, Tesla and others. (Thus “A Return to Visual Thinking” was the theme of the 1993 annual meeting, and West’s presentation, for the 50 Max Planck Institutes in Germany. See item 2 below.)

 

In most cases, the high interest in these topics and trends was from those who were observing these capabilities in actual operation and use “in the real world” of scientific discovery, medical innovation and entrepreneurial business. At the same time many specialist academics seemed to have found it difficult to understand and appreciate these capabilities, employing their conventional tests and measures and a conceptual framework that favored conventional verbal and numerical academic capabilities over visual thinking and “thinking in pictures” in 3D space.  

 

(In addition, West noticed that when he spoke of these learning differences in highly positive ways, with credible positive examples, some in his audience felt free, for the first time, to talk about considerable strengths and hidden weaknesses in themselves, their family members and their co-workers. For example, see especially, item 24, the Markle Scholars in Academic Medicine, the Fifty-Year Reunion. In a striking and unexpected example, during the course of the conference, among these highly praised, award-winning physicians and medical school professors, roughly half of those attending spoke to West of their own dyslexia or the dyslexia of highly creative members of their own families.) 

 

Accordingly, the events and documents listed below could serve, in part, as an informal survey of the development of these fundamental ideas in various industries and various parts of the world over nearly three decades. (For some of the best examples of how these changes were recognized, adopted and promoted by organizations such as MIT, NASA Ames, GCHQ in the UK, the Max Planck Institutes and related institutions, see especially items 2, 4, 5, 12, 13, 22 and 25.) (Selected recent summary presentation slides of this basic approach are provided in Appendix E.) (Listed in Appendix F, Acknowledgements, are the names of the people who did so much to move these ideas and insights forward by arranging the presentations and events listed below.  )

 

___________________________

 

 

Selected Significant Events and Documents

 

(1) The Northern California Branch of the International Dyslexia Association and Schwab Learning presented a program with two talks -- Martha Bridge Denckla, MD, “Reading and ADHD: The Reciprocal Inter-Active Effects Uncovered,” and, Thomas G. West, “Dyslexics at the Leading Edge: The Visual Talents of Dyslexics are On-target for New Knowledge in the Visual Computer Age,” March 16, 2002, 9 am to 4:30 pm, South San Francisco Convention Center. With headquarters in San Mateo, California, Schwab Learning, a service of the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, “dedicated to helping kids with learning differences be successful in learning and life.” At the time, Dr. Denckla, now retired, was Director of the Developmental Cognitive Neurology Clinic at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. Dr. Denckla was a cum laude graduate of Harvard Medical School, and trained with Dr. Norman Geschwind in Behavioral Neurology. She was President of the International Neuropsychology Society and also of the Behavioral Neurology Society. Her previous positions included Director of the Learning Disabilities Clinic at the Boston Children’s Hospital and Chief of the Section on Autism and Related Disorders at the NINCDS (National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke). 

 

(2) An annual meeting of 50 Max Planck Institutes in Göttingen, Germany. See chapter in the book compiled from the proceedings of this conference: West, Thomas G., 1994. “A Return to Visual Thinking,” Proceedings, Science and Scientific Computing: Visions of a Creative Symbiosis. Symposium of Computer Users in the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, edited and translated by P. Wittenberg and T. Plesser. Göttingen, Germany, November 1993. Published as a book in 1994, in German: “Ruckkehr zum visuellen Denken, Forschung und Wissenschftliches Rechnen: Beitrage anlasslich des 10. EGV-Benutzertreffens der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Göttingen, November 1993.” Invitation initially based on a short article by West in Computers and Physics. The article in English and the German language proceedings volume has already been donated to the archive collection. (To be confirmed.) During informal discussions after his talk, West was told of dyslexia and other learning differences within the families of famous German physicists. It is noteworthy that this large high-level meeting in November 1993 was dominated by conventional “main frame thinking” and remarkably antiquated technologies. For example, they had to move to a small conference room to show video clips on a TV. (This is, in fact, shown in one of the photographs provided in the printed proceedings book; West is shown looking at a computer graphic image on a TV screen.) In dramatic contrast, in the conference in Amsterdam in October of that same year the designers, artists, architects and computer professionals had already adopted and were using the latest technologies in all the presentations. (See item 4 below.) 

 

(3) The New York Branch of The Orton Dyslexia Society, Twentieth Anniversary Conference, Language & Medical Symposia on Dyslexia, March 18-20, 1993. As the economy moves from a primarily verbal orientation to one that is visual-spatial, the talents of dyslexics will be increasingly needed as various visual technologies are adopted. Presentation title: “Dyslexic Talents in a Changing Technological Context.” Speaker: Thomas G. West, MA. Chair: Anne Ford, Chairman of the Board, National Center for Learning Disabilities, New York, N.Y. It is noteworthy that West was invited to give this talk only two years after his first book was published in 1991 -- and that he was introduced by the Board Chair of NCLD, a major organization in the field. At this time, the conference of the New York Branch was often as big as or bigger than the annual national conference of the Orton Dyslexia Society (that later became the International Dyslexia Association). Many of the major figures in the field spoke at this three-day meeting. This included Patience Thomson, Head of Fairley House School, London, England -- who Thomas West and his wife Margaret later came to know well through several conferences and visits in the US and the UK. Patience Bragg Thomson is daughter of the famous Sir Lawrence Bragg, who received the Nobel Prize, with his father, for their work with x-ray crystallography -- and who later was the boss for Watson and Crick when they discovered the structure of DNA using his techniques (both of whom also received the Nobel Prize). The Bragg Thomson family over five generations includes many visual thinkers, many dyslexics and four winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics. (See item 44 and Appendix B.) Other speakers at the New York meeting were: Martha B. Denckla, Bennett Shaywitz, Albert Galaburda, Frank B. Wood, Roger Saunders, Edward Hallowell, Wilson Anderson, Barbara Wilson, Drake D. Duane and Diana Hanbury King. (Full program listing to be provided.) 

 

(4) Invited speaker. The Netherlands Design Institute in Amsterdam: “Doors of Perception,” October 30-31, 1993, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, organized by The Netherlands Design Institute and Mediamatic magazine. Program description: “DoP is a ground breaking conference for which leading thinkers from the fields of graphic and industrial design, architects, information technology, philosophy, computer science, business and media will assemble . . . to consider the cultural and economic challenges of interactivity + the role of design in turning information into knowledge, for example through the visualization of complex scientific data. . . .” Other speakers included Louis Rossetto, the founding editor and publisher of the first Wired magazine (published in Europe well before moving to the US). West was recruited to speak at this first conference of the newly formed Netherlands Design Institute based on a talk he had given at the ACM SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Los Angeles only two months earlier. (This is the only time West observed an unusual Dutch practice: He was paid his speaker’s fee in cash, using crisp US bills of $100.) 

 

Please see a letter (to be provided separately) from a designer met at this Amsterdam conference. An excerpt: “It was a pleasure to have met you at the ‘Doors of Perception’ seminar in the Netherlands. I enjoyed listening to your talk on visual thinking. It was inspiring and was very appropriate in that particular forum. I found your talk of particular relevance to my work with LEGO. . . . I work for LEGO in a capacity as a designer visualizer. I’m sure you understand how your talk and book was a great inspiration. In the Minds Eye is a real eye opener. Your book has given me a detailed insight into the way my mind works and why it behaves the way it does. The book is well researched and it is edited in such a way that it becomes a useful reference book. In the Minds Eye should be read by teachers and parents alike who have children in their care that show traits of dyslexia. It will enlighten them all about the gift of dyslexia and its many advantages that it can provide the individual and possibly society. As we discussed during our meeting in the Netherlands, the Vice President of my research department at LEGO . . . is a cofounder of a school for dyslexics in Brande, Jutland. It is the first school of its type in Denmark and has a campus of 50 students.” K.B., Lyngby, Denmark, 21st April, 1994. 

 

(5) Invited to be the main speaker at first “Diversity Day” conference (June 2006) for the staff of GCHQ, the code-making and code-breaking descendants of Bletchley Park (World War II code breakers and the source of “Ultra” for highly secret intelligence for Winston Churchill), in Cheltenham, England. See section on GCHQ, pp. 147-150, in Seeing What Others Cannot See, West, 2017: “Seeing the Puzzle with Only Two Pieces -- Learning Differences at GCHQ.” According to one employee at GCHQ, “while people with neuro-diversity may be viewed as ‘odd or weird,’ they are ‘fully accepted’ at GCHQ,” p. 150. [More to be provided about this most important meeting -- and a subsequent informal gathering the following Saturday with a nearby village walk and pub lunch -- where one teen-aged son said, “Now I finally begin to understand my father.” At one point, after the lunch and the round the village walk, West found himself sitting with a group of seven at the edge of our host’s garden, suddenly realizing that all of those with him had recently been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Among other things, they discussed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon and connections with Sherlock Holmes stories. It is apparent that GCHQ would be an excellent place to investigate and better understand extraordinarily high performance and seek positive links with visual thinking, dyslexia, autism and other forms of different thinking. To avoid lengthy reviews and security clearance, West’s section on GCHQ in Seeing What Others Cannot See is based on publicly available sources.]

 

(6) Scientists and artists at Green College within the University of Oxford, England. [Much more information to be provided here -- as well as for the named-only listings below. -- TGW]

 

(7) The Royal College of Art in London

 

(8) The Glasgow School of Art in Scotland

 

(9) A conference at the University of Uppsala before the Queen of Sweden

 

(10) The University of California at Berkeley

 

(11) An education conference sponsored by Harvard and MIT

 

(12) A small, high-level, visualization, science and technology conference at MIT. Program description: “IM: Image and Meaning Conference, MIT, June 2001, Envisioning and Communicating Science and Technology. Who We Are: In late spring of 2001 we have come together at MIT to consider images in science to learn from each other to add something of our own, We are shown here in name and image.” Attendance was by invitation only. Each attendee was asked to provide an image that represented their work -- to be worn as part of their nametag -- to be discussed with other attendees. The conference handout (to be provided separately for the archive) includes 210 images with names and organizations. Speakers and attendee participants included Benoit Mandelbrot (his image was the famous “Mandelbrot Set”), E.O. Wilson (an image of a tree) and Victor Spitzer (an image from the Visible Human Project), one of the developers of the Visible Human Project for NLM. The image for West was the first x-ray crystallographic image produced by Sir William Lawrence Bragg, used to discover Bragg’s Law, which is basic for the determination of crystal structure, and later, DNA. (Image supplied to West by Bragg’s daughter, Patience Bragg Thomson, former head of a school for dyslexic students in London. This family includes (as noted above), over five generations, many with visual occupations, many dyslexics and four winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics.) 

 

West had several conversations with Dr. Mandelbrot. He talked about the hostility he encountered from most conventional mathematicians, especially at Harvard University, where he had been teaching at the time. He had moved on to Yale University where they showed respect for Mandelbrot’s highly innovative approach to mathematics. West mentioned his own interest in highly talented visual thinkers and dyslexics and asked whether Dr. Mandelbrot had ever encountered any dyslexics among his work associates. He laughed and said: “If you ask my wife, she is convinced that I am dyslexic myself.” Later, West heard of several additional reports from others where Mandelbrot had spoken elsewhere of his own dyslexia. West was not surprised by this revelation because Dr. Mandelbrot’s work is extremely visual in nature and extremely original in orientation and approach, successfully employing the most modern computer graphics technologies (starting with the most primitive early forms, well before others). These aspects are seen as signature indictors of the work of a classic visually-oriented dyslexic approach. 

 

(13) Invited to participate in a (second) invitational meeting of visualization scientists and artists sponsored by MIT, this time with the Getty Museum at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, June 2005. Program description: “IM2 -- Image and Meaning Workshop: MIT.GETTY 06.23.05. Discovering new visual expressions for science and technology: a participatory forum. Who we are: In June 2005 we came together, as we first did in June 2001, to consider the visual expression of science, to learn from each others, and to add something of our own.” Supported by: MIT School of Science and Office of Research, the National Science Foundation, Harvard University in Innovative Computing, Dupont and Apple. By invitation only. Total of 167 attendees representing varied fields and institutions, including: Larry Gonick (The Cartoon History of the Universe), Antonio Damasio (Descartes’ Error, U. Iowa), Donna Cox (National Center for Supercomputing Applications, ACM-SIGGRAPH), Ellen Winner (Gifted Children, Boston College), George Whitesides (Harvard U.), Scott Kim (Shufflebrain), Michael Johnson (Pixar), Roy Gould (Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics), Shawn Lani (Exploratorium), Carol Strohecker (Media Lab Europe). John Sullivan (Technische Universitat Berlin), Jana Brenning (Scientific American), and Thomas G. West (In the Mind’s Eye, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study). 

 

(14) The Arts Dyslexia Trust in London, invited presentations at various sites and dates -- in England, Scotland and Wales. Sometimes, as many as eight talks in were scheduled for a single UK trip. There were many visits and many talks scheduled over the years by Sue Parkinson, head of the ADT. [More to come. -- TGW.]

 

(15) The Learning Disability Association of Taiwan. Three day-long presentations in three different cities. Three different translators -- from English into Mandarin Chinese language, alternating. One formal professor served as the last of the three translators. She seemed initially reserved about the content of the talks. However, in time, she warmed to the topic and began to elaborate and provided her own related examples and commentary along with the Mandarin translation of the talk. During a break, the organizer requested that the professor stay within the translations alone. (West, however, was greatly pleased to see the new interest and support from this previously rather reserved professor.) Travel to Taiwan was linked to a prior conference in Hong Kong conducted in English and Cantonese (item 17 below). (The organizer of the Taiwan talks, Wei-Pi Hung, over 12 months, translated West’s book, In the Mind’s Eye, into Chinese. This book is to be provided to the archive along with the Japanese and Korean translations.) Discussions of dyslexia in Taiwan are especially interesting since the culture puts extreme pressure on students. They should look pale and sleep deprived -- or they are not studying hard enough.

 

(16) The international conference of computer graphic artists and technologists (ACM-SIGGRAPH) in Vancouver, BC, Canada. One of several conferences over some 12 years where West often was asked to give talks or join panels. West had been recruited earlier to write regular quarterly columns for the in-house professional magazine over several years. The editor of these columns, Gordon Cameron, worked at Pixar; originally from Scotland, he was technical director and cultural advisor on the Pixar feature film “Brave,” featuring a young Scottish girl in a Medieval fantasy animation. At the request of West’s publisher, Prometheus Books, these SIGGRAPH columns were later revised, edited and collected together for the book Thinking Like Einstein (2004). (To be provided, the book Thinking Like Einstein plus three sample copies of the in-house magazine Computer Graphics.)

 

(17) The International Symposium on Dyslexia in the Chinese Language organized by the Society of Child Neurology and Developmental Pediatrics in Hong Kong. (See item 15 above. See also the Hong Kong journal article, provided separately; publication had been delayed for 12 months because the Hong Kong doctors were successfully dealing with SARS at the time.)

 

(18) The U.S. National Library of Medicine, Board of Regents. West was invited by the NLM Director, Donald A. B. Lindberg, MD, to be the after dinner speaker for the Board of Regents meeting. [Three other events were associated in various ways with Dr. Lindberg, and his special interest in the connections between dyslexia, visual thinking, visual technologies and important original scientific discoveries. To be provided, with available program information. -- TGW.]

 

(19) Presentation for the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. Many staff members said that they agreed with points raised in West’s talk. But they pointed out that the ETS felt that it had to protect itself from any possible threats to their “cash cow,” the SAT. (Recently, in late 2020, many universities, after many years of debate, have announced that they are discontinuing the use of the SAT and related standardized aptitude tests for college admissions.)(See Letter to Editor, Washington Post, about changing views and descriptions of the SAT, January 22, 2021.)

 

(20) Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California. Five visits, two talks.  Of course, Pixar is full of tech-savvy artists, programmers and visual thinkers -- a common profile associated with dyslexia. (See Gordon Cameron, item 16 above.)

 

(21) Scientists, researchers and advocates at Oxford University, England. Two talks. One at Green College (as part of a program arranged by the Arts Dyslexia Trust) and a later one at Magdalen College (arranged by Professor John Stein). [More info to come. -- TGW]

 

(22) Director's Colloquium for scientists and staff of NASA Ames Research Center (at Moffett Field in California’s Silicon Valley). Standing room only, at sides and back of large lecture theater, at this large organization with many, many visually-oriented scientists, technologists, mathematicians and engineers. As part of our associated visitor tour, we were shown massive wind tunnels and many scientific exhibits -- including new raw data on a large wall of flat screen TVs indicating possible planets orbiting hundreds of stars fresh from the Kepler satellite. When asked whether there might be life on other planets, we were treated to wave after wave of stars and planets washing across on the large wall of TV screens -- so, hundreds and thousands of possibilities (and these were only the planets that happened to be “in front” of the star at the time of observation). 

 

(23) In November 2014, West was invited to give five talks for the Dyslexia Association of Singapore as part of a country-wide effort to take advantage of the distinctive talents exhibited by dyslexic children and adults. Long a leader in technological and commercial innovation, Singapore planned and plans to lead the world with this effort as well. (Several publications and web videos are available -- or have already been donated to the West NLM-HOM permanent archive.)

 

(24) Markle Scholars in Academic Medicine, Fifty-Year Reunion, September 17-19, 1998, Arizona Biltmore Resort and Villas. Speakers included, among others: Donald A.B. Lindberg, MD, National Library of Medicine; Gerald M. Edelman, Scripps Research Institute (Nobel Prize winner); Howard Gardner, Harvard Graduate School of Education (MacArthur Prize winner); and Thomas G. West, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University. Markle Scholars (provided with a cash award) were identified as the best medical school professors in the US and Canada during several decades after WWII. Dr. Lindberg suggested that West provide a brief proposal for a talk at the gathering. Indeed, as it turned out, the organizers were interested. In his talk, West spoke primarily of visual thinking among creative scientists and recent developments in visual technologies and computer graphics. But West also spoke of how visual thinking and associated innovation were sometimes linked to dyslexia and other related learning differences. Remarkably, during the course of the three-day conference, roughly one half of the attendees and their spouses spoke to West about their own dyslexia (two surgeons from Johns Hopkins, for example) or told stories of dyslexia among their coworkers or the more creative and innovative members of their own families. (See a highly supportive letter from a Canadian physician, to be provided. -- TGW) 

 

(25) “In The Mind’s Eye: Where Dyslexia May be an Advantage?” The Arts Dyslexia Trust, April 12 to 24, 1994, The Mall Galleries, London, UK. Major art exhibition at major gallery on the Mall located between Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace. Many paintings and pieces of sculpture by dyslexic artists, including a donated scale model by the famous dyslexic architect, now, Lord Richard Rogers. West was asked to give three informal gallery talks to small invited groups, one group including a famous UK film director. This was the first major high-profile event for the new Arts Dyslexia Trust, well designed to gain high-level interest in the UK and elsewhere in the talents of dyslexics. The ADT sponsored West for many UK trips and talks for art, business and scientific groups over the following years. 

 

West was made honorary founding member of the ADT. For 5 years the Chairman of the ADT was Lord (Charles) Hindlip, head of Christie’s Auction House, London. Dyslexic himself, Lord Hindlip has 5 children, 4 of whom are also dyslexic. Remarkably, dyslexics are said to have the “great eye” to see what others do not see -- in radiology and in art forgery. A high-quality handmade leather-bound fundraising book for ADT, Art Works, had two introductions -- one by Lord Hindlip and one by Thomas West. The ADT had a great influence in the UK and elsewhere in promoting a better understanding of the varied and distinctive talents exhibited by many dyslexics in the arts, science, medicine and entrepreneurial business. 

 

During this same period, the UK TV group “Channel Four” produced a series of three programs on dyslexia partly influenced by the ADT; one of the three programs, “Dyslexic Genius,” featured businessman Richard Branson, filmmaker Guy Ritchie and Thomas West (including footage of West filmed by a UK production crew at the US National Library of Medicine one weekend). 

 

(26) Dyslexia and Creativity Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, June 3, 2019. Organized by Susanna Cederquist, Then advisor on Dyslexia to the Swedish Royal Family. Attended by the son of the King of Sweden, Prince Carl Phillip. Three of five in Swedish Royal Family are dyslexic. Speakers included Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide (Dyslexic Advantage) and Thomas West. An historian from the Nobel Prize Foundation noted that all the Nobel Prize winners who were dyslexic saw that their dyslexia was a great advantage, not a disadvantage. (More information is to be provided about this conference.)

 

(27) “The Global Summit, Made By Dyslexia, Programme: 15th October, 2018, BAFTA, London, UK.” Sponsored by Microsoft and others. Admission by invitation only. Speakers included founders, Richard Branson and Kate Griggs; Robert Hannigan, Former Director of GCHQ; The Rt. Hon. Matt Hancock, MP, Secretary of State for Heath and Social Care. Links: MadeByDyslexia.org and #MadeByDyslexia. At this conference West met Susanna Cederquist, author, in Swedish, of Dyslexi + Styrkor = SANT (Dyslexia plus Talent equals Truth). Cederquist’s book quotes extensively from books by Thomas West (46 endnotes) and Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide (79 endnotes). This meeting partly led to the conference in Stockholm, Sweden, June 3, 2019 (item number 25 above). 

 

(28) National Dyslexia Research Foundation, The Extraordinary Brain Series, Hawaii, June 27-July 2, 1998. Thomas West and Maryanne Wolf (Tufts University) spoke on “The Abilities of Those with Reading disabilities.” Other speakers included Glenn D. Rosen, PhD, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston; Drake D. Duane, MD, Institute for Behavioral Neurology, Scottsdale, AZ; Daniel Geschwind MD, PhD, UCLA School of Medicine; Sally Shaywitz, MD, Bennett Shaywitz, MD, Yale University Medical School; and Frank B. Wood, PhD, Wake Forest University School of Medicine. The conference talks were collected into a book: Reading and Attention Disorders: Neurobiological Correlates, Drake D. Duane, MD, editor, York Press, 1999. West’s talk is Chapter 11, “Focusing on the Talents of People with Dyslexia.” 

 

(29) To be provided, information on four conferences and talks arranged by and/or participated in by Donald A. B. Lindberg, MD, Director of the National Library of Medicine -- In Aspen, Colorado; in San Francisco, California; and in the Board of Regents Room of the NLM (attendees included William J. Dreyer of Caltech and Alvy Ray Smith of Pixar and Microsoft). See full audio tape recordings by NLM already provided in a box donated to the NLM archive (to be confirmed). The tape recordings should provide a rich resource for future researchers. (Note: These analog tapes need to be digitized in the near future. -- TGW)

 

(30) The Confederation of British Industry, Centre Point, at 103 New Oxford Street, London. “A Future of Reversals: The Changing Skills Needs of Business.” February 28, 1995. Visit included a brief talk the following evening at a The House of Lords reception. See BDA letters and newspaper clipping from the Financial Times (to be provided). Arranged by Paul Cann, Director, the British Dyslexia Association (BDA), and by Lord (Harry) Renwick, Vice President of the BDA, a long time supporter of understanding the talents of individuals with dyslexia. In 1958, Harry Renwick explained to West, his father was the recipient of the last hereditary peerage for his major contributions to the war work during World War II. It is noteworthy that his father is said to have avoided reading and writing; all communications were entirely oral. 

 

(31) Stories about dyslexia and innovation have appeared in varied media. The story below was posted on West’s Facebook page in March 2020 -- also intended for West’s blog: 

“Dyslexic Physician Discovers ARDS”

I have always carefully avoided talking about current events or politics on my two blogs or my Facebook page. There is plenty of coverage elsewhere 

-- and I did not want to create a distraction from our main areas of interest.

However, in the last few days, and the last week especially, the coronavirus (Covid-19) has begun to dominate all other topics and considerations. 

I did re-post recently on Facebook a piece involving Nobel Prize winner Joshua Lederberg and a fictional story of a world plague that was ended by a computer graphic artist. At the time, that story seemed relevant but still appeared remote. However, things have changed. Now all the elements seem to be merging together and the threat is now all around us -- even recognized by those who were in complete denial only a short time ago.

As I have tried to inform myself (as a former medical corpsman for the USAF long ago), I have noted that we are told when coronavirus patients die, the cause is often a condition called Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). As it happens, years ago I met and recorded an interview with the dyslexic physician who first identified and named ARDS. It is worth telling the story of how this came to be. 

The story also indicates that when you seek the origins of a major, highly innovative discovery in medicine, science or elsewhere, you should not be surprised to find a dyslexic. You should also not be surprised to find that the discoverer often encounters stiff resistance when conventional beliefs are challenged by some major innovation or discovery -- challenged by a really new and different way of seeing things. 

ARDS Discovery Rejected by Three US Medical Journals

Years ago, I was attending a conference of the International Dyslexia Association in Denver, Colorado. There I met a physician named Gary Huber, MD, the former head of the pulmonary (lung) unit of Harvard Medical School. 

He was buying a copy my book, In The Mind’s Eye. As I signed the book, he noted that there were several dyslexics among his work colleagues, friends and family members -- and how my positive approach and stories of highly successful dyslexics had been helpful to him and others.

Indeed, Dr. Huber noted that one of the top people in his own field of pulmonary medicine, Dr. Tom Petty, also dyslexic himself, happened to live and work in the Denver area. He offered to contact Dr. Petty to suggest an interview -- which was arranged for the next day. I was not expecting to do an interview so I went to the bookstore of the University of Colorado in Boulder for a small recorder. 

During the interview, Dr. Petty told me the story of how he and his team first recognized the syndrome now called Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). To their surprise their paper on the topic was rejected by three major US medical journals. 

Later, they sent their paper to the British medical journal, The Lancet. This article was then read by American Army doctors in Viet Nam -- and, as Dr. Petty explained, the American doctors realized the importance of the newly discovered syndrome and its treatment: “This is what is killing our troops.” The details of this story are provided below in an excerpt from an article on the life of Dr. Petty --

“Drs. Ashbaugh and Petty, along with 2 of Dr. Petty’s fellows, prepared a manuscript describing this new syndrome, which they termed “acute respiratory distress in adults,” acknowledging its similarities to the previously described infant respiratory distress syndrome. They submitted their paper summarizing the clinical features and management of the initial 12 patients to the New England Journal of Medicine, which promptly rejected it as documentation of inappropriate and dangerous ventilator management. A revision submitted to the Journal of the American Medical Association was similarly rejected, as was a subsequent version sent to the American Journal of Surgery. Somewhat in desperation, the authors finally submitted the manuscript to The Lancet. There, it was quickly accepted for publication and appeared as a lead article in the summer of 1967. Subsequent decades have shown this paper to be one of the seminal contributions to all of critical care medicine. It is certainly one of the most referenced, having been cited by other indexed articles 1,630 times as of April 11, 2014.” -- “Thomas L Petty’s Lessons for the Respiratory Care Clinician of Today,” David J. Pierson, MD, FAARC. Respiratory Care, August 2014, vol. 59, no. 8, p. 1293.

See also a book given to West by Thomas L. Petty, MD. (To be provided separately.) Frontline Update in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Co-editors, James T. Good, Jr., MD, Thomas L. Petty, MD. 2004, Snowdrift Pulmonary Conference, 899 Logan Street, Denver, Colorado 80203. 

 

(32) Japanese TV film crew (NHK) traveling with West visited Jack Horner during field dig in north central Montana, near the Canadian border. See video interview filmed by NHK where West asks Horner what he would do with the schools. Horner responded that he tries to teach his 19 graduate students to “think like a dyslexic.” To observe what they see in nature -- and “not think of other peoples’ thoughts” -- by not quoting the articles that they had read and studied. (Noted, so different from conventional graduate school education.)

 

(33) Forgotten Letters: An Anthology of Literature by Dyslexic Writers, 2011, publisher: RASP. Edited by Naomi Folb. West was asked to provide the Foreword on why some of the best writers are dyslexic. West was also asked to provide an excerpt from the second edition of In The Mind’s Eye titled “Amazing Shortcomings, Amazing Gifts.” The inside cover of this book has this lone quotation from West: 

 

“The truth-talking commentator who is not caught up in the race.

“They have felt the otherness from the start.”

 

(34) The Italian Dyslexia Association in Rome. First talk on dyslexia ever given in Rome. Other talks in Italy had been provided only in the university city of Bologna. Continuous sequential translation into Italian of West’s talk was provided by an Italian physician married to a dyslexic graphic designer. The conference was focused mostly for teachers. The organizers kindly provided a translator for West and his wife to follow the whole conference proceedings, all of which were in Italian. After the conference, West was told that the conference had been moved from a major university to a minor university because the Minister of Health for Rome was a Freudian and therefore did not believe that dyslexia exists.

 

(35) The Orton Dyslexia Society, 47th Annual Conference, Boston, Mass., November 6-9, 1996. West was selected as one of four symposium speakers along with Albert M. Galaburda, MD, and Gordon Sherman, PhD, both of Harvard Medical School. The tile of West’s talk: “ ‘Strephs,’ Tumbling Symbols and Technological Change: The Implications of Dyslexia Research in a World Turned Upside Down.” 

 

The program for this Boston conference included an article by West reprinted with permission from Computer Graphics, August 1996 issue: “IMAGES AND REVERSALS, Talking Less, Drawing More.” This article was introduced by: “Editor’s Note:  the following article was prepared by Thomas G. West as part of the series of articles requested by the editor of Computer Graphics magazine, a publication of the International Society of Computer Graphics Professionals, ACM SIGGRAPH. Mr. West says that he sees himself as often serving as a bridge between worlds that know virtually nothing of each other -- such as those dealing with the brain and dyslexia on one side -- and those dealing with advanced computers, film animation, scientific data visualization and technological change on the other. This particular article addresses the possible great changes in education and work that might be expected from the spread of new computer graphic technologies. However, you will note that Mr. West introduces to this technological audience the ideas of nonverbal talent and dyslexic gifts by referring to quotations from the German poet Goethe and the modern British science writer Nigel Calder. He says that he meets many individuals with dyslexia within the highly creative computer graphics community. Perhaps we can help our students with dyslexia have a more positive attitude about their own talents and future prospects through the ideas presented here in this column.”

[An excerpt:] “We should talk less and draw more. I personally would like to renounce speech altogether, and, and like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches.” These are indeed strange and remarkable words to be coming from a famous writer -- the great German poet and author of Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe’s words are quoted by the essayist Stephen Jay Gould, who explains it is quite notable that words occupy such an important place in human culture, in spite of the fact that we are highly visual by nature.

“ ‘Primates are visual animals,’ explains Gould. ‘No other group of mammals relies so strongly on sight.  Our attraction to images as the source of understanding is both primal and pervasive. Writing with its linear sequencing of ideas, is an historical afterthought in the history of human cognition.” 

 

“ ‘Yet traditional scholarship has lost this route to our past. Most research is reported by text alone, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Pictures, if included it all, a poorly reproduced gathered in the center section divorced from relevant text, and treated as little more than decoration.’ (Eight Little Piggies, Norton, 1993).”

”Gould touches on a matter that I expect will become more and more important in the near term and the long term. It seems inevitable, as new visualization tools are applied effectively in more and more fields, that visual talents and skills will have greater and greater value in the economic marketplace, as well as the scientific laboratory. However, during the transition, I would expect a lot of debate about the proper roles of visual versus verbal ways of thinking.” [End of excerpt.]

 

(36) Wadsworth Center, Albany, New York, May 31, 2018. West gave talk titled: “Seeing What Others Cannot See -- Visual Thinking, Different Thinkers and Scientific Discovery.” For the state of New York, the Wadsworth Center is similar to the Federal Center for Disease Control. Indeed, it was established long before the Federal level CDC and has a similar broad range of responsibilities and missions. (Details of mission programs to be provided.) West was invited to speak by the Head of the Center, a virologist, who he met at a dinner of the Friends of the National Library of Medicine. The visit included an extensive tour of the Center facilities, programs and missions -- along with several Q&A discussions with Center staff. 

 

(37) “Disabled New Students: Special Talents in a Not-So-New Population,” Keynote Address, February 18, 1994, National Forum on Disabled New Students, National Resource Center for the Freshman Year Experience, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC. From the summary Statement: “In my experience, most professors would believe that smart students and learning disabled or dyslexic students are two entirely different groups -- with no overlap. I hope that what I will have to say this morning will persuade you that these two groups overlap quite often. Moreover, if you do not need persuasion that this is often the case, I hope my talk and writings will provide you with ammunition to persuade others on your home campuses.”

 

(38) Excerpt from Seeing What Others Cannot See (Appendix B), Dyslexic Advantage, Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide. “In March 2011, I received an advance uncorrected manuscript for a new book that was to be published that August. I was asked to provide a recommendation. This is what I wrote: “Here I insert my recommendation for The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain by Brock L. Eide, MD, and Fernette F. Eide, MD, Hudson Street Press, publication date, August 18, 2011. This book is destined to become a classic. After my many years studying the talents of dyslexics, I was pleased to gain from the Eides’ systematic investigation a deeper understanding of how and why dyslexics often have a major advantage, working at high levels in many different fields -- and why there is so much misunderstanding among conventional educators and employers. Linking their broad clinical experience with the newest brain research, they illuminate many puzzles -- such as why there are so many dyslexic entrepreneurs, why so many dyslexics choose to study engineering or philosophy, why dyslexics often see the big picture and see linkages that others do not see, why they often think in stories or analogies, and why some of the most successful authors are dyslexic. They explain why reading impairments should be seen as only a small part of a larger pattern -- that dyslexia is not simply a reading problem, but a different form of brain organization, yielding remarkable strengths along with surprising difficulties. With new technologies and new business models, we can now see how the often remarkable talents of dyslexics will be in greater demand over time while their difficulties will be increasingly seen as comparatively unimportant. I am enormously grateful to the Eides for explaining why and how this is so.” --  Thomas G. West, author of In the Mind’s Eye and Thinking Like Einstein. 

 

“These words still reflect my basic approach to this wonderful book, which I continue to re-read. With this book, and their previous book The Mislabeled Child, the Eides have continued to provide an important public service with the non-profit they founded, their websites, their conferences and their energetic advocacy. They are both physicians and have vast clinical experience. This experience is coupled with a willingness to listen at length to the stories of their patients and their families. By listening, rather than merely administering standardized tests, often they have uncovered extensive giftedness (sometimes in several generations) -- where many practitioners would only see pathologies and abnormalities that require repair and remediation. Their approach to these matters is, of course, very close to my own high interest in talents and their development. (In full disclosure, I should say that I have been working closely with the Eides for several years -- and I am currently a member the Board of Trustees for the non-profit organization they established “Dyslexic Advantage” -- along with the blog at DyslexicAdvantage.org.)”

 

(39) “Using Images to Think: Visual Thinkers and Information Visualization.” One of two invited presentations, August 2003, at the Chautauqua Institution, Lake Chautauqua, New York. (See CD of this talk, to be provided.) Also to come: the story of how two speakers during the same week at Chautauqua that summer had the same name: ‘Thomas G. West’ -- the other one an art historian and author from New York City -- who said he would display on his own coffee table the book In the Mind’s Eye, to be seen by visiting friends, for fun, without comment.

 

(40) Transcripts of presentations and interviews with highly successful dyslexics -- having received high awards for innovations and discoveries in their fields: William J. Dreyer, PhD, and Marc I. Rowe, MD. [To be provided. -- TGW]

 

(41) Noted from West: “In my continuing sorting of old papers, I recently found a journal reprint that had been quite popular and was distributed widely during the 1990s. Brief excerpts are provided below. Today I would not change a word. This piece may show how advanced my thinking was at the time -- or how I have learned nothing new in the last 28 years. -- TGW”

 

 

 

 

“A Future of Reversals:

Dyslexic Talents in a World of Computer Visualization”

by Thomas G West, Washington, DC

 

The Reprint Series, The Orton Dyslexia Society. 

From the Annals of Dyslexia, Vol. 42, 1992. ISSN 0736 –9387, pp.124-139.

[Excerpt:] With the recent revival of visual approaches at the forefront of several scientific, mathematical, and technological developments, this paper proposes that visually oriented dyslexics may be in an increasingly favorable position in future years. The same set of traits which have caused them so much difficulty in traditional verbally-oriented educational systems, may confer special advantages in emerging new fields which may rely heavily on visual methods of analysis –- fields which employ powerful graphic workstations and supercomputers to visualize complex scientific data. Recent trends have also led some technical professionals to become aware that their own special talents seem to be closely associated with certain dyslexic traits. It is argued that similarly mixed talents have been major factors in the accomplishments of a number of important historical figures. 

Overview

New technologies and techniques currently being developed in computer graphics, medical imaging, and what is now called “scientific visualization” are already having important effects on our society and will in time have profound consequences for education and work at all levels. 

A side effect of these advances may be that certain visual-spatial abilities often found among dyslexics may come to confer special advantages in those fields that are coming to rely more heavily on visual approaches and techniques. Ironically, these special advantages may result from the same pattern of traits that has long caused so much difficulty for visually oriented dyslexics in traditional verbally oriented educational systems. Thus, it is proposed that many dyslexics will find themselves on the right side of a major set of trend reversals -- ones that could dramatically affect their lives in the lives of their children.

Historically, some of the most original thinkers in the physical sciences, engineering, mathematics, and other areas have relied heavily on visual modes of thought, employing images instead of words or numbers. Some of these thinkers have shown evidence of a striking range of learning difficulties, including problems with the reading, spelling, writing, calculation, attention, speaking, and memory. In recent years, neurological research has suggested that some forms of early brain growth and development tend to produce verbal and other difficulties the same time they produce a variety of exceptional visual and spatial talents (Geschwind and Behan 1982; Geschwind and Galaburda 1985). 

 

* * * * *

Implications

The consequences of the coming changes maybe far greater than we can easily imagine. We need to realize that for some 400 or 500 years our schools essentially have been teaching the skills of a Medieval clerk –- reading, writing, counting, and memorizing texts. With the more pervasive influence of increasingly powerful computers of all kinds, we could be on the verge of a new era when we will be required to develop a very different set of talents and skills, those of a Renaissance man such as Leonardo da Vinci rather than those of the clerk or lay scholar of the Middle Ages.

* * * * * 

 

In the future, instead of the qualities desired in a well-trained clerk, we may find far more desirable talents and traits similar to those associated with Leonardo da Vinci: a facility with visual-spatial approaches and modes of analysis instead of mainly verbal (or numerical or symbolic) fluency; a propensity to learn directly through experience (or simulated experience) rather than primarily from lectures books; a habit of continuous investigation in many different areas of study through ceaseless curiosity (perhaps with occasional but transient specialization); the more integrated perspective of the global generalist rather than the increasingly narrow specialist; a predisposition to innovation by making connections among many diverse fields; an ability to rapidly progress through many phases of research, development and design using imagination and “intuitive” mental models, now incorporating modern three-dimensional computer-aided design systems.  (Aaron, Phillips and Larson, 1988; Ritchie-Calder, 1970; Sartori, 1987).

Leonardo da Vinci’s predisposition to investigation and analysis through visualization may come to serve us as well as it served him, providing innovative results well in advance of those competing groups which follow other more conventional approaches. 

Thus, in the foreseeable future, we may come full circle, using the most advanced technologies and techniques to draw on some of the most old-fashioned approaches and capacities to simulate reality rather than describe it in words or numbers. To learn, once again, by doing, rather than by reading. To learn, once again, by seeing and experimenting, rather than by following memorized algorithms and routines. In so doing, all of us will learn greater respect for abilities and intelligences that were always vitally important, but were generally eclipsed by a disproportionate emphasis on the traits and skills most valued by traditional schoolmen and scholars. Sometimes, the oldest pathways and most primitive patterns can be the best guides into uncharted waters.  [End of excerpt.]

 

(42) The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.. The Mission Statement: “The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study seeks to expand scientific understanding of the mind, the brain, and intelligence by conducting research at the intersection of cognitive science, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and complex adaptive systems. These separate disciplines increasingly overlap and promise progressively deeper insight into human thought processes spanning all scales of description, from neurons to nations. The Institute also examines how new insights from this interdisciplinary research can be applied for human benefit in the areas of mental health, neurological disease, education, environmental and societal dynamics, and intelligent systems design.” Initially, West joined Krasnow to do research for his third book and to establish the Center for the Study of Dyslexia and Talent at Krasnow. Later, West was asked to join the Krasnow Advisory Board. (To be provided for the NLM archive: The Advisory Board Briefing Book for October 18, 2007, as an example of the Institute’s work; including: Institute role in the Decade of the Mind; the Director’s Vision; Grant Portfolio; Krasnow Media; Molecular Neuroscience Faculty; Social Complexity Faculty; Krasnow Faculty Publication List.) For many years, Krasnow was highly respected as the “jewel in the crown” of George Mason University -- until the University President was replaced by a new President and Provost who no longer supported Krasnow and its mission.  West wrote an open letter to the Provost; the Chair of the Advisory Board agreed with the letter and requested that West read out the letter to the Provost, face to face, during a critical turning point Board meeting.  The full letter follows:

 

December 11, 2015

 

An open letter to Dr. David Wu,

Provost, George Mason University

 

Dear Dr. Wu,

 

My name is Thomas G. West. I am member of the Advisory Board of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study. I have been fortunate to be associated with the Institute from its earliest days, as it took shape under the leadership of Dr. Harold Morowitz. And, of course, as you know, all of these early developments took place separately from George Mason University -- following the advice and vision of two Nobel Prize winners, as well as the influence of the Santa Fe Institute.

 

As a writer who is very much an outsider to the academic world, I feel that I must take this opportunity to speak for myself alone with honesty and candor about recent developments. I hope you will allow me to speak frankly and that you will take to heart what I have to say.

 

In recent years, other universities have been trying to create or develop their own Krasnow Institute. With the best of intentions, I assume, it seems to me that you are working steadily to destroy everything that is distinctive and unique about the Krasnow organization and its original vision. 

 

I hope that you will begin to understand this – and to work with the Krasnow faculty, the students and the Krasnow Advisory Board to work out ways of correcting this course of action and to find ways of returning to the central vision on which this Institution is based.

 

It took many decades to begin to realize this vision. But, in my view, you are, perhaps unwittingly, wrecking in a few months, all that has been accomplished by some of the brightest minds over many years. Among the various sources describing the early development of these ideas, I think one of the best is M. Mitchell Waldrop’s 1992 book, Complexity.

 

This book describes the early development of the Santa Fe Institute, “founded in the mid-1980s and which was originally housed in a rented convent in the midst of Santa Fe’s art colony along Canyon Road. The researchers who gather there are an eclectic bunch, ranging from pony-tailed graduate students to Nobel laureates such as Murray Gell-Mann and Philip Anderson in physics and Kenneth Arrow in economics. But they all share the vision of an underlying unity; a common theoretical framework for complexity that would illuminate nature and humankind alike. . . . They believe that they are forging the first rigorous alternative to the kind of linear, reductionist thinking that has dominated science since the time of Newton -- and that has now gone about as far as it can go in addressing the problems of our modern world. They believe they are creating, in the words of Santa Fe Institute founder George Cowan, ‘the sciences of the twenty-first century.’ ”(Waldrop, pp. 12-13.)

 

In my view, your actions in recent months – indeed, your long periods of inaction, as well – have been extremely damaging to this vision and to all those who have shared it.  George Mason University did not create the Krasnow Institute and it should not assume that it has the power to destroy it.

 

Everywhere we look we see evidence of the deepening damage. Researchers will not dare to ask their wealthy friends for funds to support the sick old man. Tenured professors quietly bide their time. Morale is at an all-time low. The old excitement is gone. The sense of adventure is gone. Bright grad students look for another track. Researchers in other countries – who had come to expect so much from Krasnow – now wonder what has happened.

 

In the past Krasnow was seen as a leader in the “Decade of the Brain.” Under the leadership of Dr. James Olds, it has had a strong international reputation for leading-edge research. Now it seems that the lead is passing to other organizations more attuned to following government contracts.

 

You have claimed to support inter-disciplinary research. Yet you say that one can only do one thing well. So you have drawn and quartered the old man to suit an anachronistic vision – returning to worn-out specialist, linear, reductionist thinking. I hope that you can soon come to understand the Krasnow vision and way of working -- and why it is important.  

 

I fear that if your goal is to follow applied research, by whatever name, you will doom the institute, and indeed the university, to be the sad tool of the security industrial complex. It is my belief, that real science is not predictable. Genuinely new scientific knowledge is often a surprise and often comes from different ways of thinking and different kinds of minds. It is not available on demand or on contract.

 

In past years, Krasnow was seen as the “jewel in the crown.” George Mason University was proud to have such an organization on campus – indeed, to have been given, fully developed, such an advanced and prestigious organization. 

 

What will your legacy be? Will you be known as the man who turned back the clock -- exchanging new science for old -- and making the extraordinary ordinary once again, just like all the others? Or will you be known as the man who came to realize, before it was too late, the true value of the Krasnow Institute -- and then found ways to advance and support the development of this fresh new vision?

 

Sincerely,

 

Thomas G. West, author of In the Mind’s Eye and Thinking Like Einstein 

 

In January 2021, the Krasnow Institute website is still online but has not been updated since 2017. It is apparent that the Institute is largely dead. Separately, a GMU press release dated February 3rd, 2020, says: “Mason Provost S. David Wu named next president of Baruch College.” The release goes on to explain: “One of Wu’s signature achievements was to elevate multidisciplinary academic and research collaboration at Mason, which lead to the creation of the Mason Impact Initiative to enrich student learning, and the creation of multidisciplinary research institutes in BioHealth Innovation, Sustainable Earth, and Transnational Crime. During his tenure, the sponsored awards for research, scholarship and creative work increased by nearly 80 percent. During the past two years, Mason jumped 90 places in the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Ed ranking based on ‘educational impact and a lifetime benefit to students.’ ”

 

(43) “The Creative Brain: Gifted, Talented and Dyslexic,” Annual Conference of The Southwest Branch of the International Dyslexia Association, February 11-12, 2005, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Based on ideas from his book, In The Mind’s Eye, West was Chairman of the conference Symposium. His talk was titled, “Geniuses Who Hated School. Are we blind to the Einsteins in our schools?” On West’s recommendation, the organizers invited as speakers from the UK, Patience Bragg Thomson (Fairley House School, London; from prominent scientific family with a number of dyslexics, strong visual thinkers and four Nobel Prize winners) and Jo Todd (Key 4 Learning, consultant to GCHQ and other UK civil service agencies). Other speakers included Gordon Sherman (head of New Grange School, former IDA President), Jeff Gilger (Purdue University), Malcolm Alexander (dyslexic, sculptor) and Patricia Michaels (dyslexic, fashion designer, native of Taos Pueblo). DVD of conference produced by Tony Carlson and Associates (to be provided to archive). 

 

(44) Patience Bragg Thomson and the Bragg Thomson Family. Books to be listed here along with letters and informal recorded memories, several received as personal gifts to Thomas West from Patience Bragg Thomson and David Thomson -- as well as books and articles by (and about) their adult children, Hugh Thomson, Ben Thomson, Alice Thomson and others. (See Appendix B.) Also to be included, a DVD including a talk by Patience Thomson during the conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico (a conference on the talents of dyslexics built around ideas from West’s book, In the Mind’s Eye, item 43 above.) As noted, West had suggested that Patience and David Thomson be invited to the Albuquerque meeting along with Jo and Richard Todd regarding their work with GCHQ and other UK government agencies (item 5, above). See also reference to this family with four Nobel Prize winners and many visual thinkers and dyslexics (mentioned in item 3 above). Interest in how dyslexia and major visual thinking trait is manifested over five generations, often exhibiting creativity, entrepreneurial innovation, or work leading to important discoveries (such as the use of x-ray crystallography to discover the structure of DNA). Note that one book listed in Appendix B, The Legacy of Sir Lawrence Bragg, includes sections written by 10 Nobel Prize winners.

 

(45) “Visualization Research Agenda Meeting,” National Library of Medicine Meeting, NLM Board of Regents Room, February 15-16, 2000. “The purpose of the meeting is to outline a research agenda to inquire into the broad impact of new information visualization technologies -- and the kinds of special skills and talents that may be required.” Meeting participants: National Library of Medicine: Donald A. B. Lindberg, MD, Director NLM; Alexa McCray, Director, National Center for Biomedical Communications; Michael Ackerman, Assistant Director for High Performance Computing and Communications; Steven Phillips, MD, Assistant Director for Research and Education; Thomas G. West, MA, consultant. National Institutes of Health: A.I. Leshner, Director, National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIH; Michael Huerta, Associate Director, Division of Neuroscience, National Institute of Mental Health; Gerald Fischbach, MD, Director, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; Reid Lyon, Chief, Child Development and Behavioral Branch, National Institute on Child Health and Human Development; Greg Downing, NIH Office of Science Policy. Smithsonian Institution:  Marc J. Pachter, Counselor to the Secretary, SI; Judith Gradwohl, National Museum of American history, SI. Computer Graphics, Visualization, Computer-Human Interaction: Alvy Ray Smith, PhD, formerly, Microsoft, Pixar (co-founder), LucasFilm; Ben Schneiderman, University of Maryland; Jock MacKinlay, Xerox PARC. Evolution and the Brain: John Allman, California Institute of Technology. Gifted and Talented,Visual Spatial Intelligence. Carol Mills, Johns Hopkins University. Neuroscience, Dyslexia, Imaging: Gordon Sherman, PhD, Dyslexia Research Laboratory, Harvard Medical School; Guinevere Eden, Georgetown University. [Sherman and later Eden became presidents of the International Dyslexia Association,] Molecular Biology: William J. Dreyer, PhD, California Institute of Technology. Institutes, Foundations, Other Organizations: James Olds, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University; William H. Baker, Jr, National Dyslexia Research Foundation. See Appendix F for “Brief Quotations to Provide Background and Context” for this meeting. 

____________________________________________________________

 

Thomas G. West, author of In the Mind's Eye, Thinking Like Einstein and Seeing What Others Cannot See. Mobile: 202-262-1266.

Blog: http://inthemindseyedyslexicrenaissance.blogspot.com.

Emails: thomasgwest@gmail.com and thomasgwest@aol.com. 

 

Revised and updated, February 7, 2021. 

 

 

 

APPENDIX A

 

Selected Reviews and Comments with Biographical Sketch -- T. G. West 

 

Foreword to the Second Edition of In the Mind’s Eye

by Oliver Sacks, M.D.

 

“Although, as a neurologist, I sometimes see cases of alexia—the loss of a previously existing ability to read, usually caused by a stroke in the visual areas of the brain— congenital difficulties in reading, dyslexias, are not something I often encounter, especially with a mostly geriatric practice such as my own. Thus I have been particularly fascinated—sometimes astonished—by the wide range of considerations which Thomas G. West has brought together in this seminal investigation of dyslexia, In the Mind's Eye.  

 

“People with dyslexia are often regarded as defective, as missing something—a facility in reading or linguistic thinking—which the rest of us have. But those of us who are predominantly verbal or ‘lexical’ thinkers could just as well be thought of as ‘avisuals’ [defective in visual thinking]. There may indeed be a sort of reciprocity between lexical and visual powers, and West makes a convincing argument that a substantial section of the population, often highly intelligent, may combine reading problems with heightened visual powers, and are often adept at compensating for their problems in one way or another—even though they may suffer greatly at school, where so much is based on reading. Some of our greatest scientists and artists would probably be diagnosed today as dyslexic, as West shows in his profiles of Einstein, Edison, da Vinci, Yeats, and others. West himself is dyslexic — this, no doubt, has strongly influenced his life and research interests, but it also gives him a uniquely sympathetic understanding of dyslexia from the inside as well as the outside.

 

“My own experience seems to be in the opposite camp—I learned to read very early, and my own thinking is largely in terms of concepts and words. I am rather deficient in visual imagery, and have a great deal of difficulty recognizing places and even people. When I met Temple Grandin, the autistic animal psychologist who is clearly a visual thinker (one of her books is titled Thinking in Pictures), she was taken aback when I said I could hardly visualize anything: ‘How do you think?’ she asked. Grandin herself has very heightened spatial and visual imagination, and thinks in very concrete images.

 

“The idea of compensation for various neurological ‘deficits’ is well supported by neuroscientific studies, which have shown, for instance, that people blind from birth have heightened tactile, auditory, and musical powers, or that congenitally deaf people who use sign language have heightened visual and spatial capacities, and perhaps a special attunement to facial expression. People with dyslexia, similarly, may develop various strategies to compensate for difficulties in reading. They are often very highly skilled at auditory comprehension or memorization, at pattern recognition, complex spatial reasoning or visual imagination. Such visual thinkers, indeed, may be especially gifted and vital to many fields; among them may well be the next generation of creative geniuses in computer modeling and graphics.

 

“In the Mind's Eye brings out the special problems of people with dyslexia, but also their strengths, which are so often overlooked.  Its accent is not so much on pathology as on how much human minds vary. It stands alongside Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind as a testament to the range of human talent and possibility.”

 

Oliver Sacks, M.D., January 2, 2009. Dr. Sacks, a British neurologist residing in the US, is most widely known for his book Awakenings (1973) that was made into a film of the same name starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. Also well known are his books An Anthropologist from Mars(1995), Seeing Voices: A Journey into the Land of the Deaf (1989) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985). His most recent book is titled The Mind’s Eye (2010). The late Dr. Sacks was professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and maintained a private practice in New York City. Sacks considered that his literary style followed the tradition of 19th-century “clinical anecdotes,” a style that focuses on informal case histories, following the writings of Alexander Luria. One commentator noted that Sack’s work has been featured in a “broader range of media than those of any other contemporary medical author.” The New York Times said that Sacks “has become a kind of poet laureate of contemporary medicine.” 

 

Selected Reviews and Comments -- In the Mind’s Eye

 

“I would like to thank you for the copy of your book . . . which I read with considerable interest. I wasn’t aware, and I am enormously proud that I share my learning problems with such distinguished characters as Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Sir Winston Churchill, Gen. George Patton and William Butler Yeats. I found your detailed analysis of the various deficiencies very informative and I think your book is a real contribution to the field.”

 

-- Baruj Benacerraf, M.D., letter of August 5, 1994. The late Dr. Benacerraf was Fabyan Professor of Comparative Pathology, Emeritus, Harvard Medical School and was past President of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston. A Nobel laureate for discoveries in immunology (1980 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine), Dr. Benacerraf was recognized as a distinguished dyslexic in 1988, receiving the Margaret Byrd Rawson Award from the National Institute of Dyslexia. Together with his life-long difficulties with reading, writing and spelling, he observed that he (along with other family members) has a special facility with visualizing space and time--an ability that he believes contributed greatly to his scientific research and discoveries.

 

“Since he first published In the Mind's Eye 18 years ago, Thomas G. West has been at the forefront of a growing number of experts who recognize that the ‘dys’ in dyslexia is often far less important to those who have it than the often remarkable abilities in reasoning, visualization, and pattern recognition that frequently accompany this condition. The impact of this now classic work upon the dyslexic families and individuals that we have the privilege to work with--the encouragement and insight it has provided--is incalculable . . . . Everyone who is dyslexic, has a child with dyslexia, or works with such individuals will be encouraged and enlightened by this marvelous book. For those tired of an educational system that too often treats dyslexic children like ugly ducklings, it is a field guide to the glories of the swan. We cannot possibly recommend it highly enough."

 

-- Brock Eide, MD, MA, and Fernette Eide, MD, email of August 2008. The Eides are founders of the Eide Neurolearning Clinic in Edmonds, Washington, and are authors of The Mislabeled Child (Hyperion, 2006) and The Dyslexic Advantage (Hudson Street Press, 2011). 

 

“Interestingly, dyslexia is found to be often associated with talent. . . .  It’s not unusual for children with perceived general learning disabilities to display an exceptional ability that results in their placement in programs for the specially gifted. . . .  Perhaps no one has championed the association between dyslexia and talent more than Thomas G. West, author of In the Mind’s Eye. . . . West’s research focuses on the correlation of very high success with the prevalence of dyslexia, a relationship that will likely be the focus of more research in the years ahead.” 

 

-- Jim Romeo, New York Academy of Sciences, Update Magazine, April/May 2004, “Getting Scientific about Why Johnny Can’t Read--Understanding Dyslexia.” 

 

“Dyslexia and other learning differences are commonly seen as disabilities, but they must also be seen as distinctive abilities, different (and often superior) modes of perceiving and understanding the world. As Thomas West shows, some of our greatest minds, from Einstein and Edison to Churchill and da Vinci, have been visual thinkers who today might be labeled ‘learning disabled.’ In the Mind’s Eyemakes a powerful case that the dyslexic-visual mind may be full of creative human potential, and is as crucial a part of our cognitive heritage as any other.” -- Oliver Sacks, MD

 

-- Blurb above sent to Thomas G. West by Dr. Oliver Sacks for use with the second edition of In the Mind’s Eye, October 23, 2008. 

 

 “Unfortunately, I did not discover this wonderful book [In the Mind’s Eye by Thomas G. West] before I wrote Thinking in Pictures several years ago. I recommend it to teachers, parents and education policymakers. West profiles people with dyslexia who are visual thinkers, and his conclusions on the link between visual thinking and creativity are similar to mine.”

 

-- Temple Grandin, “The List,” The Week magazine, March 3, 2006, describing why she has included In the Mind’s Eye on her list of  her six favorite books. 

 

“Dear Tom: Thanks for sending me your epilogue [to the second edition of In the Mind’s Eye].  It was wonderful. I think that visual thinking in both autism/Asperger and dyslexia are very similar. Your descriptions match the descriptions I get from people on the autism spectrum. I share your concern that educators do not understand the creative visual thinking mind.  I give talks to parents and teachers all the time and I emphasize that they need to develop a child's strengths. I am really pleased that you are going to use my quote.  I love the Oliver Sacks foreword. Sincerely, Temple Grandin”

 

-- Email of August 17, 2009. Dr. Grandin is a professor of animal science and is author of the memoir Thinking in Pictures (dealing with her life with autism) and the best-selling book Animals in Translation. An HBO cable TV film based on Grandin’s life debuted February 6, 2010, starring Claire Danes. The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews -- being nominated for 15 Emmy Awards and winning seven. 

 

“Thomas West brings to life the fascinating capacities and syndromes that arise from our visual-spatial imagination. His book proves beyond doubt that we are not all points on a single bell curve of intelligence.”

 

-- Howard Gardner, PhD, letter of October 15, 1996. Dr. Gardner is author of many books, including Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (BasicBooks, 1983) and Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century (Basic Books, 1999). A MacArthur Prize Fellow, he is affiliated with Harvard University Graduate School of Education, Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Veterans Administration Medical Center.

 

Additional Reviews and Comments -- In the Mind’s Eye

 

“The computer is the most malleable tool we’ve ever invented. The Turing revolution, which brought it to us, has proceeded over its 60-year history to absorb field after field of human endeavor. First was simple number crunching. Then text processing, table making, pie charting, data basing, and a host of other, more sophisticated, fields have gone digital with the new tool as human brain amplifier. Visualization is the latest domain to become “ordinary” this way. Tom West argues that the legitimacy of visualization as a first-order attack on problem solving is therefore being established after generations of quiet use by only some creators--and some of the best at that. He claims that visualization is not only a legitimate way to solve problems, it is a superior way: the best minds have used it. West urges us to join the dyslexics of the world and use pictures instead of words. In the process we get fascinating glimpses of how other minds have worked--minds that have changed the world.”

 

-- Alvy Ray Smith, PhD, electronic mail message of November 20, 1996. Dr. Smith was co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, former Director of Computer Graphics at Lucasfilm, Ltd., and Graphics Fellow, Advanced Technology, Microsoft Corporation. At Pixar, he formed the team that proceeded to create Tin Toy, the first 3-dimensional computer animation ever to win an Academy Award. This team later produced the first completely computer-generated motion picture, Toy Story. At Microsoft, he designed the multimedia authoring infrastructure for Microsoft third party developers and content producers. While he was a Regent for the National Library of Medicine, he was instrumental in inaugurating the Visible Human Project. 

 

“In the Mind’s Eye . . .  [is] scholarly, encyclopedic and endlessly fascinating. . . . [It] is a great public service and one long overdue. Every family concerned about a learning problem--or even the usual problems of dealing with a teenage student--should have it in the house. . . . If I were dictator, every teacher everywhere would have to pass a test on it.”

 

-- Loren Pope, “The Learning Disabled of Today Will Be the Gifted of Tomorrow,” in Colleges That Change Lives (Penguin, New York,  2000 and 2006).

 

“. . . I entirely agree with [Dr. Doris Kelly] when she says that [In the Mind’s Eye] is ‘about 20 years ahead of current educational thinking.’ Many of us have spent long hours considering all the things that dyslexics are supposed to be weak at. What Tom West reminds us of is that we need also to consider dyslexics’ strengths. . . .   At present, so he implies, education is in the hands of those who possess all the traditional skills; and since, not surprisingly, they assume that others are like themselves, the needs of some very gifted thinkers whose brain organization is different are not being adequately met. I very much hope that both teachers and educational planners will read this book and take its message seriously.” 

 

-- T.R. Miles, Ph.D., in Dyslexia Contact, June 1993, pp. 14-15. Dr. Miles, Professor Emeritus, University College of North Wales, and Vice President of the British Dyslexia Association.

 

“I want you to know that reading your book and the conversations we had at the SIGGRAPH conference were pivotal in the history of our project. We rewrote much of our material based on insights gained from your book. Previously, we had not realized fully how central the role of visualization was to what we were trying to do. We were already on the right path without really knowing it. . . . In our project CALCULUS& Mathematica, we have learned the effectiveness of teaching the concepts visually using graphic software prior to verbal explanations. Our students have gained a deeper understanding of the subject and they can recall and apply the material long afterward, which is rare for students taught with conventional methods.”

 

-- Dr. J. Jerry Uhl, Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, telephone conversation of September 29, 1993. Dr. Uhl was active in the National Science Foundation-sponsored reform of calculus teaching at the university level. With W. Davis and H. Porta, he was author of the interactive courseware, CALCULUS&Mathematica (Addison-Wesley, 1994), using high-level, general-purpose mathematics software along with graphic computers. Initially viewed as radical, the innovative approaches used in this courseware have been widely adopted and are now in use by many modern calculus courses and textbooks. 

 

“Thanks so much for sending the material. . . . There is a lot of overlap in points we have both been making for years. I have often argued in my public talks that the graduate education process that produces physicists is totally skewed to selecting those with analytic skills and rejecting those with visual or holistic skills. I have claimed that with the rise of scientific visualization as a new mode of scientific discovery, a new class of minds will arise as scientists. In my own life, my ‘guru’ in computational science was a dyslexic and he certainly saw the world in a different and much more effective manner than his colleagues. . . .”

 

-- Larry L. Smarr, Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Illinois, electronic mail message of August 6, 1994. With W.J. Kaufmann, Dr. Smarr is author of Supercomputing and the Transformation of Science, Scientific American Library, W.H. Freeman and Company, 1993. 

 

“There is a great deal in this book which is pertinent to the study of the highly able. The author points out that this century’s focus on what is normal, and pushing children towards those norms, may have obscured an understanding of the high degree of individual differences, masking many forms of giftedness which then may go undetected. He urges us to cultivate these awkward individuals for their unusual gifts to improve creativity in the sciences as well as the arts. West’s weave of case studies and ideas to promote his arguments is intriguing and convincing. If what he says is true, then the waste of high ability is very much worse than we might have thought. But using his reasoning, if we were to change our educational outlook to a more positive and humane one, then millions more children would be enabled to develop into creative, productive, and fulfilled adults.”

 

-- Review by Joan Freeman, European Journal for High Ability, vol. 4, no. 2, 1993. 

 

“Tom West argues convincingly that brains which learn differently may contribute a unique set of talents to the world. Although these brains may present a variety of educational challenges, this book stresses the importance of individual differences and biological variation for adaptation to future environmental challenges. We should consider the design of educational environments within this context.”

 

-- Gordon F. Sherman, Ph.D., former Director, Dyslexia Research Laboratory, Department of Neurology, Beth Israel Hospital, Harvard Medical School; past President, the International Dyslexia Association. Electronic mail message of December 3, 1996. Head, Newgrange School and Educational Outreach Center, Princeton, NJ. 

 

“At last, here is a book that can be whole-heartedly and enthusiastically recommended to all our readers. Thoroughly researched, clearly and delightfully written, it says many of the important things about visual thinking that we have long been waiting to hear . . . . Arguably, it represents the most significant turning point in educational thought this century. Everyone with concern for the future of education in this country, and particularly those involved with the education of dyslexics, should read it -- now.” 

 

-- Susan Parkinson, editor, newsletter of The Arts Dyslexia Trust (United Kingdom), November 1992.

 

“If you accept [Thomas West’s] arguments, then the period of the domination of Western scientific thought by printed papers and mathematical formulae may be just another transitory period, perhaps akin to that of the introverted and argumentative world of medieval scholasticism before the new vision of the Renaissance and the practical empiricism of the Enlightenment.”

 

-- Lord Renwick, Chairman, European Informatics Market (EURIM), Vice-President, Past Chairman, The British Dyslexia Association. Electronic mail of October 30, 1996. 

 

“The original title is In the Mind’s Eye. The Japanese title Geniuses Who Hated School is a wildly different translation. However, people who are considered geniuses may have great powers of visual thought. . . . There is a possible relationship between the great visual thinker and the poor reader or math student. . . .  Many visual thinkers have trouble adjusting to conventional education systems. This is the logic behind the two titles. . . . [The author] raises . . . an important question, asking us to look again at what are fundamental abilities in a time when computers can do the simple work in place of humans and to reconsider the educational system while keeping in mind the variety of human brains that exist.”

 

-- Review in Kagaku Asahi, the monthly Japanese science magazine, August 1994, p. 92. Review translated by Yoshiko G. Doherty.

 

“Every once in a while a book comes along that turns one’s thinking upside down. In the Mind’s Eye is just such a book. . . .   What is unique about West’s essay is that he weaves . . . disparate areas together to show that technological change is affecting what we value as intelligence.”

 

-- Roeper Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, September 1992, p. 54.

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More on the American Library Association Award

 

In January 1999, In the Mind’s Eye by Thomas G. West was selected for the Choice magazine gold seal award as an Outstanding Academic Book, and one of the “best of the best” for 1998 -- along with just 12 other titles in the broad Psychology category (including books on neuroscience, intelligence testing, language impairment, mental health and psychiatry). Choice magazine is the monthly review service published by the Association of College and Research Libraries of the American Library Association. Each year, the editors of Choice select the “best of the best” from the approximately 6,500 titles reviewed during the previous year. In 1998, 623 titles were selected within 54 academic categories. Titles are selected based on the following criteria: overall excellence in presentation and scholarship; importance relative to other literature in the field; distinction as a first treatment of a given subject; originality or uniqueness of treatment; importance in building library collections. (Choice, Jan. 1999, p. 801.)

 

Other books receiving the Choice gold seal award for “best of the best” in 1998 included: Lynn Margulis, Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth (Freeman); Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (Norton); Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica (Chatto and Windus); Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All (Addison-Wesley); Martin Gardner, The Last Recreations: Hydras, Eggs, and Other Mathematical Mystifications (Copernicus, Springer-Verlag); Per F. Dahl, Flash of the Cathode Ray: A History of J.J. Thomson’s Electron (Institute of Physics); Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, Privacy On Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption (MIT Press); Victor M. Spitzer and David G. Whitlock, Atlas of the Visible Human Male: Reverse Engineering of the Human Body (Jones and Bartlett). (Choice, Jan. 1999, pp. 823-841)

 

Following is the full text of the original review of In the Mind’s Eye as it appeared in the April 1998 issue of Choice (p. 1458):

 

“West, Thomas G. In the mind’s eye: visual thinkers, gifted people with dyslexia and other learning difficulties, computer images and the ironies of creativity. Updated ed. Prometheus Books, 1997. 397p bibl index afp ISBN 1-57392-155-6, $27.95. West’s outstanding book examines the play between the visual strengths and verbal weaknesses of 11 gifted individuals, including such persons as da Vinci, Faraday, Einstein, Edison, Churchill and Yeats. These case studies demonstrate that, in the past, those who were able to make their genius known in spite of verbal shortcomings were the exception rather than the norm and succeeded only through extraordinary resourcefulness, perseverance and good luck. In a society that has traditionally been centered on the word, persons with such deficiencies have often found themselves marginalized. The author’s thesis is that the hegemony of the word is being contested by a growing visual culture and society is undergoing profound changes as a result. These changes are being led by a new generation of visual thinkers (many of whom have had difficulty with verbal skills) who employ the television screen, computer graphics, virtual reality, and other relatively inexpensive tools of digital technology. West’s thesis is skillfully argued and illustrated with an abundance of examples. Impressive bibliography and resource list (complete with Web sites); will appeal to a wide audience. General readers; upper-division undergraduates through professionals. -- R. M. Davis   35-4810   BF426   97-19570 CIP” 

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APPENDIX B

 

 Appendix B -- Patience Bragg Thomson and Bragg Thomson Family. 

 

Preliminary notes about the stories and materials to be provided: Quotation about WWI German guns (from the book Crystal Clear, below). Books about the Thomson and Bragg parents and grandparents. The Royal Institution, headed by Sir Lawrence Bragg, with the RI Lecturing Guide, by  Bragg and by Michael Faraday, RI head long ago. Four Nobel Prizes -- especially for x-ray crystallography and the fundamental beginnings of modern molecular biology. Proposal for further research concerning this family (opportunity to fully document and develop insights based on a remarkable case study that could have shed light on the links over generations between high level creativity, professional accomplishment, visual thinking and dyslexia). The BBC documentary on the Nobel award to Sir Lawrence Bragg (many years afterward because of WWI). (“Why no Darwins invited to this party? There will be a separate party for the Darwins because there are so many in that family.”) Bragg on Nazi list of those to be arrested in UK after the planned Nazi invasion. Noted in study by Bragg (senior), political leaders at time of WWI took pride in knowing no science; top schools then taught mainly or only Greek and Latin texts (which Churchill noted that he was unable to do); this little-known adverse selection factor should be studied as well. Students stamping feet at new ideas in physics from the senior Bragg. Early Nobel Prize was awarded to J.J. Thomson, the grandfather, instead of Edison or Tesla (who were on the same short list). Members did not want the Athenaeum Club to have reciprocal access relationships with other London clubs -- but very happy to have reciprocal access arrangement with the Cosmos Club in Washington, DC. Science from observations in the real world to provide analogies and insights of significance: privy and location study of WWI guns; soap bubbles observed in ‘washing up’ behave like atoms; oil and petrol mixed for lawn mower seen to behave like metals. Oxford book club story: when West, as visitor to Bragg Thomsons, was asked to join the group meeting one evening the host was retired surgeon and famous 4 minute mile runner, Sir Roger Bannister. New leadership and adverse changes at the Royal Institution. President of the BDA conference story. Books by family members, to be provided (listed below): Hugh, Peru discoveries. Alice, origins of “Alice  Springs,” Australia, Telegraph Friday (later Times again) newspaper column, help with Sue Parkinson obit. Ben, innovative entrepreneur in Scotland.

 

The Bragg-Thomson books and interviews. (Most are currently in use by West. To be provided to NLM-HOM archive much later.) Several examples: 

 

Hunter, Graeme, 2001. Interview with Patience Thomson, Wallingford, March 15, 2001. Unpublished MS of 37 pp. Given to West by Patience Thomson March 7, 2003. First hand details of family life that sometime provide insights into innovative scientific work. For example, about her father, Sir Lawrence Bragg, PT says: “He needed maximum time to think about his ideas and to plan his lectures and books. Even when he was doing domestic chores like oiling the locks or doing the washing up is mind would be working on some theory in his head. I think he found that formal social engagements, to some extent, were an interruption of the life that he enjoyed. He loved all of the outdoor pursuits, but when he did go for walks, I’m sure he was pondering ideas. I mean, it’s well-known that it was when he was striding along the Backs [river banks at Cambridge University] that he had his idea of how the dots on the x-rays [photographic] plates could be interpreted in terms of the 3 dimensional arrangement of atoms in a molecule.” (p. 2)

 

Caroe, G. M., 1978. William Henry Bragg, 1862-1942, Man and Scientist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. An excerpt: “The research work of 1913–14 had brought the joint award to father and son the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915. . . . WL [the son] got the news in France. The old curé on whom he was billeted got up a bottle of wine cellar to celebrate with. The Prize, and the sharing of it, was instantly gratifying and encouraging; but WHB [the father] had no more time for his own research work. . . . War work was claiming him.” (Caroe, p. 81.)

 

Glazer, A. M. and Patience [Bragg] Thomson, 2015. Crystal Clear, The Autobiography of Sir Lawrence & Lady Bragg. Oxford: Oxford University Press. An excerpt: “In consequence of the excellent sound ranging of the English. I forbid any battery to fire alone when the whole sector is quiet, especially in east wind. Should there be any occasion to fire, the adjoining battery must always be called upon, either directly or through the Group, to fire for a few rounds.”  June 23, 1917. Captured order of the day, German Army, WWI, referencing the wartime scientific work of Sir Lawrence Bragg, quoted in Crystal Clear, p. 92. 

 

Thomas, John M., FRS, and Sir David Phillips, KBE, FRS, editors, 1990. Selections and Reflections: The Legacy of Sir Lawrence Bragg, Including contributions by Nobel Laureates: Linus Pauling, Lord Todd, Dorothy Hodgkin, Max Perutz, Francis Crick, Sir Nevill Mott, Sir Aaron Klug, James D. Watson, Lord Porter and Sir John Kendrew. London: The Royal Institution of Great Britain. 

 

Thomson, Alice, 1999. The Singing Line. London: Chatto & Windus. “The Story of the Man who Strung the Telegraph across Australia, and the Woman who gave her Name to Alice Springs.” Written by Alice, the daughter of David Thomson and Patience Bragg Thompson -- the great-great-granddaughter of the original Alice. An account of a modern journey across Australia, from Adelaide to Darwin, following the track of the first telegraph line laid down by Charles Todd in the 1870s, the husband of the original Alice. 

 

Thomson, Hugh, 2003. The White Rock; An Exploration of the Inca Heartland. Woodstock & New York: The Overlook Press. Written by Hugh, the son of David Thomson and Patience Bragg Thompson. A review excerpt: “It is a measure of Hugh Thompson’s skill as a writer, historian, and explorer that The White Rock is such a pleasure. . . . This is a moving and meticulously researched account of the Inca people’s rise, conquest of a continent, and tragic annihilation by the conquistadors of the 16th century.” – The Spectator, London

 

Recently, West was very sad to learn of the death of a very dear friend, Patience Bragg Thomson, who did so much to help dyslexics in the UK and around the world -- and did so much to shape a positive approach to the abilities and strengths of dyslexics. The Times obituary is below.

 

OBITUARY -- Patience Thomson obituary

 

Dyslexia pioneer who taught minor royals and young offenders, founded a publishing house and helped set up a hospital unit

 

Wednesday December 09 2020, 5.00 pm GMT, The Times Obituaries

 

Patience Thomson knew she was on to something with her publishing company for “reluctant readers” when grateful parents sent her letters.

 

Patience Thomson had every reason to believe her children would be high achievers. Her parents and her husband’s parents were distinguished Cambridge scientists who had won Nobel prizes. She herself had taken her A-levels at 16, won an exhibition to Cambridge to study modern languages and translated Adolf Hitler’s private correspondence while working for the Foreign Office. Yet she despaired when it emerged that her son, Ben, could hardly read and write as a child.

 

A generation later, after Thomson had developed into one of Britain’s foremost educationists on dyslexia, Ben Thomson (her chief “guinea pig”) had read astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh, become chief executive of an investment bank, founded Scotland’s largest political think tank, Reform Scotland, and now invests in food and drink companies including Planet Organic and Montezuma’s chocolate.

 

His mother understood better than most the different ways that dyslexic children’s brains worked because she would spend hours playing with youngsters who had the condition, which renders reading and writing difficult because of problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words.

 

David Thomson, Hugh Thomson, Patience Thomson, Ben Thomson, Alice Thomson and Katie Tait (neé Thomson) [Caption for photo, not shown.]

 

In those days children would feel “stupid” compared with their peers, and would even be told as much. Thomson would build up their confidence, turning her house upside down as she invented games to play. Scarves would be knitted for teddies, dolls’ houses built and puppet shows put on. She would take her pupils on nature trails and spend hours talking to them “conspiratorially”.

 

More than 20 years of working closely with dyslexic children taught her two important lessons. The first was to accept and celebrate children as they are and not make them think they needed fixing. The second was that any dyslexic child could potentially enjoy reading just as much as any other child. This realisation led her in 1998 to found the publishing company Barrington Stoke for “reluctant readers”.

 

The highly colourful stories she published were in a shorter format. Illustrations were not too detailed so that the children could form their own pictures in their imaginations. The key change was that the language was more visual. Most revolutionary of all, Barrington Stoke was advised by an editorial board of dyslexic children. One child told her to change the sentence, “I hate it when girls cry, I find it really embarrassing,” because, he said, “‘embarrassing’ is a hard word and it’s not a word we use anyhow. It would be better if you said ‘I hate it when girls cry, it makes me want to puke’.”

 

Thomson charmed authors, including Michael Morpurgo, Michael Rosen and Julia Donaldson, into writing stories for her, and knew she was on to something when she began to receive letters from grateful parents saying: “This is the first book my child has ever read from beginning to end.” Many of the parents would be dyslexic themselves because the condition is genetic and were grateful that the books helped them to read to their children for the first time. This year Lark by Anthony McGowan and published by Barrington Stoke became the first book aimed at dyslexic children to win the Carnegie Medal, known as the “children’s Booker prize”.

 

Thomson played a leading role in the slow transition from the condition being perceived as a learning difficulty to the championing of many dyslexic children as creatively gifted. She liked to recall showing a child a picture of a dinosaur and asking him what letter the word started with. He replied “B”, not because he mixed up B with D, but because B stood for brachiosaurus. She said that dyslexics have a propensity for lateral thinking and complex problem solving that makes their thought processes sought after in many professional fields. She was thrilled when one of her former pupils found employment as a “computer whizz kid” in the City, but liked to tell the story that he turned up several hours late for his first day at work because he got on the wrong train and ended up in Oxford.

 

Patience Mary Bragg was born in Manchester, the youngest of four children, in 1935. Her father, William Lawrence Bragg, won the Nobel prize for physics in 1915 with his father and Thomson’s grandfather, William Henry Bragg, for their work analysing structures using X-rays, which helped our understanding of many substances. They were the first father and son team to win the Nobel prize, while William Lawrence was the youngest winner in history at the age of 25. Her mother was Alice, née Hopkinson, a barrister, journalist and mayor of Cambridge.

 

Patience was brought up in Cambridge, where her father was a professor of physics at the Cavendish laboratory. There, under his aegis, Francis Crick and James Watson worked on the research that led to the discovery of the helical structure of DNA.

 

Decades later, while munching a croissant in a park with her granddaughter Agnes, Thomson was asked by the child what she did in the war. She recalled putting pins on maps on the wall to show where the Allied armies had got to. “Our teacher’s husband was shot down and killed in a raid over Germany and we had to be especially nice to her. At home, the sitting room was piled high with musty-smelling clothes and blankets for bombed-out families. We propped them up with wooden clothes horses to make tunnels and secret dens.” She recited her times tables in an air-raid shelter at the bottom of the garden.

 

Patience was educated at the Perse School in Cambridge and from the age of 14 at Downe House School for girls in Berkshire. She sat her O-levels and A-levels together at 16 and won an exhibition to Newnham College, Cambridge (her mother’s alma mater) to read French and German.

Her future husband, David Thomson, lived next door when they were children and their families were close friends. They began dating as young adults and had only been out together four times when he proposed. The couple were married in 1959.

 

Her husband worked for the investment bank Lazard. He was also from a distinguished family of scientists; his father, GP Thomson, won the Nobel prize for discovering the wave properties of the electron, and his grandfather JJ Thomson won the Nobel effectively for his work discovering the electron. David survives her along with their four children: Ben; Alice, a columnist and interviewer for The Times; Hugh, an author, explorer and documentary film-maker; and Katie, who helps to run Maggie’s, a charity that provides psychological support for cancer patients. As a mother, she had a talent for turning family traumas into adventures for her children. She formed an especial bond with her 14 grandchildren.

 

In 1977 the Thomsons moved out of London to rural Oxfordshire, where Patience had a notion of growing her own fruit and vegetables with chickens ranging free. She soon tired of the “good life” and volunteered at Turners Court, a local young offender institute where she discovered that many of the boys could not read or write. She turned the air blue, and caused much hilarity, at a dinner party hosted by the then chancellor Denis Healey by recounting what her first pupil told her: “Miss, he called me an illiterate c***, and no one will tell me what illiterate means.” She made it her mission to teach the boys to write a letter and enlisted her children as their penpals. She was amazed at how quickly they grew in confidence after composing their first faltering missives.

 

Thomson in 1993 when she was the principal of Fairley House

DENZIL MCNEELANCE FOR THE TIMES [Caption, photo not shown.]

 

After taking a masters degree in special education at Bangor University Thomson was determined to gain acceptance for a condition that was still dismissed as an “excuse” for middle-class parents to cover for the “laziness” of their well-educated children. She began working in a unit at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, in the days when dyslexia was still seen as a medical problem.

 

Her daughter Alice wrote in The Times: “Dyslexics were always sitting at our kitchen table when I came home from school. There were dustmen who couldn’t read road signs, plumbers who had learnt their trade without ever resorting to a manual and chefs who had been flummoxed by French. There was minor royalty and there were the children of Greek shipping magnates.”

In 1989 Thomson became principal of Fairley House, a rapidly expanding specialist school for children with dyslexia which is now based in Lambeth, south London. Here she used the latest techniques, such as “mind maps”, to help the children organise their thoughts.

 

She campaigned for dyslexic children to be taught the study and revision skills that would enable them to perform well in exams. “She was one of the pioneers of teaching these children beyond the rudimentary aspirations,” said Bernadette McLean, past principal of the Helen Arkell dyslexia centre.

Thomson retired from Fairley House in 1997 to found Barrington Stoke with her daughter-in-law, and Ben’s wife, Lucy Juckes, who had worked in publishing for Bloomsbury. Thomson’s book 101 Ways to Get Your Child to Read (2009) became a bestseller.

 

Thomson was close friends with the dyslexia pioneer Helen Arkell, who had taught her son, Ben. Years later, Thomson returned the favour by using her royal connections to persuade Princess Beatrice, who is dyslexic, to become an ambassador of the Helen Arkell Dyslexia Charity. An avid reader and enthusiastic poet, Thomson taught her last dyslexic child at the age of 83. Conspiratorial to the end, she told her pupils that she liked speaking to them more than adults.

 

Patience Thomson, teacher and dyslexia pioneer, was born on September 11, 1935. She died of natural causes on November 21, 2020, aged 85.

___________________________________________________________

 

 

APPENDIX C

 

Overview in a Time of Change -- The Context as Outlined in a Recent Commencement Address

 

Dear friends, I thought some of you might be interested in the talk I gave six months ago at a nearby high school for college bound dyslexic students. I had agreed to do the talk long before the virus changed everything. The students and teachers put together a nearly complete graduation experience via Zoom -- even including throwing caps in the air at the end. Very impressive. Again, showing talents for creative solutions in adversity. Now  with vaccine programs started and a new government, we all may begin to show resilience and new hope for the future. -- TGW

 

Commencement Address -- Siena School -- June 9, 2020 -- Thomas G. West

 

Thank you Sophie for your kind introduction. I also want to thank Jilly and all the staff of Siena School -- and especially the class of 2020. I am greatly honored to be your speaker today. 

 

Initially, I puzzled about what to say to you today -- the first “virtual” commencement -- at a time of many difficulties and dangers. I realize that I must fully acknowledge that what you are seeing now is indeed, in so many ways, The Worst of Times. But I hope to be able to show that this, in some ways, may also be seen as The Best of Times -- for you and your class. 

 

In The Worst of Times -- it is, indeed, a time for resilience and fortitude. You are having to deal with a global pandemic. You have been locked in, away from school and your friends, having to continue classes virtually, facing an uncertain future. In recent months, all over America a great many have lost their jobs. In recent days there have been protests and demonstrations in DC and all around the country -- and, indeed, all around the world. 

After a long wait, some places are slowly “reopening” -- but even this has many hazards and dangers. 

 

In spite of all of this, I’m going to be bold to say that these could be seen also, in some ways, as The Best of Times. In the long history of human kind, we are told, dyslexics seem to have had a special role. According to some researchers, dyslexics sometimes seem unusually well suited to big changes and to being able to see opportunities inside of adversity. They are particularly good at rethinking situations in an original way. They are good at not being stuck with conventional views and conventional solutions. They have trouble reading and memorizing old knowledge -- but they are often really good at creating new knowledge.

 

My own story is that I came into this field (as is so often the case) with the testing of our two sons -- who started having dyslexia-related problems in school in the earliest grades. As a worried parent, I got myself tested. I did not learn to read until about the fourth year of primary school -- and have always read very slowly -- but I had been totally unaware of the larger pattern of dyslexic traits.

 

I soon realized that our family included at least three generations of dyslexics. My father was a brilliant and highly skilled artist and teacher -- but with many classic dyslexic traits. My mother was also a highly skilled artist who won top prizes. They had met in art school. Both had great visual talents.

 

When I began my own serious study of dyslexia -- I immediately looked to the dyslexics who were successful in various fields. I was less interested in “fixing” the problems. Rather, I was more interested in understanding areas of distinctive strength and talent. I wanted to look at the fields where dyslexics were successful. I wanted to see what we could learn from them. 

 

First I saw that many things have been changing in fundamental ways -- many that favor dyslexics. All the things that dyslexics have difficulty with are becoming less and less important in the world of work. And the things that dyslexics are good at are becoming more and more important. Shortly, my interest in strengths and talents led me to meet some extraordinarily amazing people and directed me to looking into some new and exciting areas of work. 

 

One of the first places I looked was computer graphics (including simulators for airplane pilots, film animation, video games, 3-D structures for architects and surgeons and data visualization) -- the remarkable melding of ancient forms of art and story telling -- with the newest high-speed computer graphic technologies. I attended the conferences -- and there were major technical advances every year. Right away the people I met in the computer graphics conferences explained to me that probably half the people in the industry were dyslexic. 

 

I met a woman who was responsible for the computer graphics in major films like Titanic and The Fifth Element. She told me that she had assembled a small group of the most talented computer graphic artists and technologists. They dealt with the most difficult problems in the films. She had hired them for their extreme talents based on samples of their work. She had ignored their paper credentials. Soon, she discovered that entire team was dyslexic -- one hundred percent. 

 

This taught me a lesson -- that dyslexics can be super stars when they find their special areas of talent -- and when they find the right industry to put their talents to use.

 

This also taught me that one of the most important things is to be able to retain one’s spirit -- one’s resilience -- and not be beaten down by many early failures -- and not be convinced that you can’t move on to higher levels of accomplishment -- sometimes very high levels.  

 

Indeed, when I talked to highly creative and successful dyslexic people in the sciences and business and elsewhere, they say the higher up you go in an area of strength, the easier it gets. 

 

A wonderful example of great success after repeated failures is Jack Horner -- the famous paleontologist who has been advisor to Stephen Spielberg for his four Jurassic Park films. I got to know Jack over the years at several conferences and I have visited him twice at his digs in northern Montana. Jack was mostly a failure in lower school and high school. His high school English teacher gave him a grade of “D minus, minus, minus.” The teacher said you barely passed but “I never want to see you again.” Jack said he sent this teacher a copy of his first book (written with help from a co-writer, of course). Indeed, Jack says he has written more books than he has read. 

 

Although Jack had failed a lot, he never felt a failure. Why? Because he won all the science fair prizes. He built a Tesla coil -- and he also built a rocket. When he first told me this I just assumed he used a small model rocket. But he said, “Oh no, it wasn’t a small model rocket. It was 5 feet tall and it blasted to 27,000 feet.” I said, “Jack you could have shot down an airliner!”

 

In Montana, if you have graduated from high school you could start college. Jack failed in college 7 times but he never gave up. He took a low-level job cleaning and preparing fossils. He kept searching the dry wilds of Montana. He could not get funding from professional grants. But he asked a local beer company and got the funding he needed -- to eventually make important discoveries. In time, his work was respected and he became famous. He designed the dinosaur museum exhibits in Bozeman, received honorary degrees and started teaching paleontology.

 

He would have his 19 graduate students write their papers and put them in the computer so Jack could have his computer read the papers to him. He said that his mission was to get these graduate students to “think like a dyslexic.” You didn’t want them to clutter their minds with “other people’s thoughts,” he said. He wanted them to observe nature directly and see what was there in front of them in the fossil evidence. 

 

He tried to teach them how to think “out of the box.” He said that normally dyslexics think “out of the box” -- because “they have never been in the box.” I think Jack’s example is a great one because it shows that he is definitely not suited to conventional academic studies. But he was very well suited to understanding nature and science -- seeing clearly what the fossil evidence revealed. 

 

Another great example is Mary Schweitzer, one of Jack’s grad students -- who is also dyslexic. One year Jack and his team had found a very large set of fossil bones from a Tyrannosaurus Rex at the face of a high cliff in northern Montana. It was in a remote area so it was hard to get people and equipment in and out. They found that the fossil femur (that is, the upper leg bone) of the T Rex (when covered with protective plaster of Paris) was so big and heavy that the loaned helicopter couldn’t lift it. So they had to cut this femur in half. 

 

They sent one half to Mary. They didn’t treat it with any chemicals as they normally do. Mary looked inside this bone and what she saw immediately was a deposit of calcium inside the bone -- like the deposits of calcium found inside bird bones when they are ready to make egg shells. So Mary knew right away that the T Rex had been a pregnant female. But there was more. Inside the bone Mary also found tiny flexible blood vessels and the remnants of red blood cells. Mary and her assistant said they could not sleep for weeks because they thought they would never be believed. 

 

She published her findings in Science magazine and indeed she was attacked. The critics said it is not possible for such things to survive for more that 60 million years. However, later, other scientists repeated her discoveries and admitted that her work was legitimate. So, Mary Schweitzer, Jack’s dyslexic grad student, started a whole new subfield of science -- molecular paleontology -- one never imagined possible before.

 

Another amazing story is about William J. Dreyer, a dyslexic molecular biologist at the California Institute of Technology, “Caltech.” Some years ago Bill contacted me and said he had read my book and thought that I understood how he thinks (“no one else does,” he said). He suggested, “Next time you’re in the Los Angeles area come and visit. I want to tell you my story.” Turns out that Bill’s story was very interesting indeed.

 

Bill started off as a dyslexic ski bum. But he took some tests and realized he had some areas of special ability, especially in visual thinking. He started studying biology and he soon realized that he could understand what was going on in the laboratory better than others. Because he could use his powerful dyslexic imagination to see how the molecules fit together in various ways, he developed a new theory related to the human immune system. 

 

He told his professors which experiments they should do and what the results would be. They helped him write his papers, based on his new theories. For 12 years, he gave talks about these new theories. Many professionals in the field were angered by these talks; it was all so new that they could not understand; they thought it was heresy. 

 

Later, another scientist, working in Switzerland doing experiments that were illegal in United States at the time, proved that Bill’s new theories were correct. And this other scientist received a Nobel Prize. Bill told me, I think honestly, that he was not upset about not receiving the Nobel Prize. He told me that once you receive the prize your life is not your own -- everybody wants a piece of you. Bill said that he was happy to be vindicated and to know that his theory was correct and was eventually accepted by everyone in the field.

 

But there’s still more to Bill’s story. Bill had a dyslexic grandson named Brandon King. Brandon was in high school flunking everything, depressed, taking medication, fighting with his parents, feeling very low. So his grandfather asked him to come and visit and help with his research using Brandon’s computer skills. Each day Bill talked to Brandon and said this is what I want you to do today. Since you are good with computers, I want you to write this little search program -- but before that you need to know this biology . . . 

 

Shortly, Brandon started to help in the laboratory at Caltech as a volunteer. Then he was part-time employee. Eventually he was a full-time employee helping with the computer side of the biology laboratory at the Caltech. Soon, according to Bill, Brandon was doing “post doc” level work at the laboratory -- and he still hadn’t graduated from high school. Eventually Brandon went on to college at Berkeley (because they had the best LD support program) and was able to graduate with honors and start his own business. 

 

Because of my books and talks, many stories of successful dyslexics have come my way. The field is full of paradoxes and surprises. Great writers who cannot spell. High level mathematicians who don’t know their math facts. A Nobel Prize winning biologist who had been in “special ed” and thought she was stupid. It is important for educators and test designers to understand that there are whole areas of talent that they do not know how to measure or comprehend.

 

Over many years stories of dyslexic entrepreneurs like Richard Branson  have been written about in the business press. This is not new. However, what is new is that in the last couple of years there have been formal reports written by major management consultant firms. A report by one of the big four management consultant companies (EY -- formerly Ernst and Young) states the case that what businesses want in the future are the skills and talents and strengths that are common among dyslexics. 

 

With the new fast, powerful computers many of the clerical tasks that our educational system trains human beings to do are now being done faster and more cheaply by machines -- especially with massive data available in the cloud along with “deep learning” and artificial intelligence (AI). 

 

Businesses realize that what they now need from their human employees is the innovation, creativity, big picture thinking and other abilities that are common among dyslexics (but seem to be rare among certain non-dyslexics). 

 

These are the kinds of things that some of us been saying for many years. But it is wonderful indeed to hear these from established management consulting companies. I think it is important for you, the class of 2020, to acknowledge, of course, the many great problems and stresses of our time. But along with all your own difficulties with dyslexia, remember that you have many advantages in ways of thinking that others do not have. 

 

So I want you to see that it may be possible to view the problems as opportunities as well -- to show the world -- and to show yourselves -- what you really can do.

 

Thank you

__________________________________________________________

 

APPENDIX D

 

Selected Videos Online

 

Several videos are available on the web which deal with visual thinking, visual technologies, the talents of dyslexics and other different thinkers -- together with the books and articles by Thomas G. West. Several videos are listed here with additional information. An up-to-date listing can be found on Google by entering the words: “Thomas G. West dyslexia.” This wording avoids confusion with several others with the same name. Each with the same middle initial (G for Gifford) but different middle names. For example, one writes on politics in Texas, another is an art historian in New York City.) -- TGW

 

(1) On YouTube, “Dyslexia: An Unwrapped Gift.” Shot in “The Chained Library” of Hereford Cathedral in England, this video features Thomas West (with other experts and advocates) along with several dyslexic British teenagers who were filmed when they were coming to understand their own special areas of talent. Silva Productions, 1999, a classic film still popular and often shown in UK education circles. Widely believed to be the best documentary for capturing the attention of dyslexic teens -- as well as suggesting the new world of visual technologies where many dyslexics currently thrive. Provided on YouTube in two parts, about 9 minutes each. 

 

(2) In December 2010, West was asked to travel to New York to be filmed as part of a new author series developed for the website called “AT&T Tech Channel” -- Science & Technology Author Series, “Thinking Like Einstein.” About 17 minutes. Other than West’s two books, generally, the books discussed on this site are very technical. On YouTube.

 

(3) “A New World Shaped By Dysexics.” Video of one of five talks for the Dyslexia Association of Singapore (DAS), November 2014. On YouTube.

 

(4) “The Power of Dyslexic Visual thinkers with Computer Data Visuaization.” DAS, Singapore, November 2014. On YouTube.

 

(5) “Dyslexia Spells Suceess: with Mr. Thomas West, Interview 3.” Centre for Dyslexia, New Delhi, India. Filmed at the IDA conference, Portland, Oregon, November 2019. Topics mentioned during the brief interview of about 8 minutes: West’s personal experience and the early role of the kindly reading teacher when dyslexia was unknown; no diagnosis as dyslexic until he was 41 years old; late blooming pattern was apparent during late high school and early college; early memorization education was very difficut, but higher concept-based education becomes increasingly easy (or, early school was hard, adult work is comparatively easy); noted that the major feature film by star actor Amir Khan led to widespread understanding of dyslexia in India in recent years; paradox that dyslexics can become some of the best writers with clear and simple writing of substance with vivid sound of language and imagery; that it is now recognized that time is on the side of dyslexics because their strengths are more valued by employers for their creativity and big picture thinking while low level reading and clerical tasks are now being done extremely fast and extremely cheaply by the newest powerful computer systems, with “deep learning” and AI. On YouTube.

 

 

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APPENDIX E

 

Summary Slides, Basic Approach

Note: The slides in presentations provided by West are usually made up of images of people, places, books and other graphic material -- with just a few key words or phrases to be discussed informally by the speaker. However, occasional longer text slides, like those below, have been incorporated in recent years to emphasize certain concepts and points of view, especially when they are different from what many in the audience might expect.

Selected Text Slides Used in Recent Talks by Thomas West, 2019 and 2020

*****************

• Some want to teach mainly reading in order to bring dyslexics up to normal levels with “basic skills.” 

• But, instead, some of us want to study the “super stars” to learn how they did it. Indeed, how similar they are to ourselves.

• Studying success, we hope to learn things that are useful to dyslexics and  others, especially in a rapidly-changing global technological and economic context with massive data, “deep learning” & AI.

• Basic skills have no market value. (Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics, 1948.)

******************

• Many dyslexics and strong visual thinkers seem poorly adapted to the old technologies of words and books, memorizing old knowledge. 

• But many seem perfectly adapted to the new technologies of complex information visualized in computer graphic images and simulation, creating new knowledge, seeing what others cannot see.

• Need to find ways to help students identify and employ their distinctive capabilities. Look to the highly successful. What to teach. How to teach.  

***************

Tell the Young Dyslexics

• Time is on your side. All the things you have had trouble with are becoming less and less important. All the things you are good at are becoming more and more important. (See EY business consultant reports.)

• Machines are now doing the reading and rapid recall and clerical tasks. Humans should not to do machine work. Rather, humans need to visualize, see the big picture, understand, recognize patterns, consider slowly and ponder what it all means, where to go and how to get there. (Versus narrow specialist training as basic things change -- and then change again.)

**************

Samuel Torrey Orton in 1925, paper on “Word Blindness”

• Iowa, Mobile Psychiatric Units (Orton almost became an engineer.)
• He requested to see those “failing in their school.” (142 were referred.)
• Patient MP, 16, “inability to read.” But Orton could see that he was bright. 

• Orton wrote: “Stanford-Binet method [then new] . . . did not do justice to the boy’s mental equipment . . .  the test is inadequate to gauge . . . facile use of visual imagery of . . . complex type . . . good visualizing power . . . his replies were prompt and keen.” 

*****************

Desire for New Tests and Measures

As I told a group of young dyslexic students: “We need to develop a new series of tests where the dyslexics will get the top score and the non-dyslexics will get the bottom score.” I had not been sure how many had been paying close attention. But to my surprise, my assertion brought spontaneous and enthusiastic applause. Their reaction tells us a lot about what they have been through – and how much they hunger for recognition of the things that they can do well.

*****************

Often Nobel Prize winners seem to immediately understand what we are talking about when discussing visual thinking, visual technologies, dyslexia and the advantages of seeing things differently. 

Many school psychologists and conventional educators do not. Often they are trained to design courses and tests that ignore or discourage difference. 

****************

Dyslexics are unlike non-dyslexics -- but they are also unlike each other, with highly varied traits -- an essentially heterogeneous group, hard to measure and categorize. (Dr. Norman Geschwind) 

• Stories: We should listen to individual stories in depth first, then collect data. As a good medical history tells you what to look for and what to measure and what data to collect.  Anecdotes, and family histories, may lead to treasures of understanding.*

• Sometimes we count the wrong things. Many dyslexic talents are invisible to conventional tests and measures. (So the resulting data may appear to be solid and scientific. But, instead, the data might actually confirm errors, seen as if they were facts, or may entirely miss the point.) Diversity is not a pathology.

• Many talk of a “scientific survey.” In old science: researchers want to generalize based on large populations. Small percentages do not matter. However in new science: Small percents do matter. Individuals matter. Differences matter. Nano scales matter. There is sensitivity to initial conditions. The new focus of precision medicine. The power of the small.

* Of course, insights gained from anecdotes and family histories must always be tested properly using appropriate methods and measures. However, these sources should be seen as valuable in gaining insights not ordinarily available with conventional methods, especially when the findings are opposite from those expected. 

*******************

Need to Return to Visual Thinking in Education – As with Engineers: 

“Until the 1960s, a student . . . was expected by his teachers to use his minds eye to examine things that engineers had designed -- to look at them, listen to them, walk around them and thus to develop an intuitive ‘feel’ for the way the material world works. . . .”

“By the 1980s, engineering curricula had shifted to analytical [mathematical] approaches. . . . As faculties dropped drawing and shop practice . . . working knowledge of the material world disappeared from faculty agendas. . . and the nonverbal . . .  intuitive understanding essential to engineering design atrophied.” 

(Eugene S. Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind’s Eye, MIT Press, 1992).

**************

Visualization seen as important in new ways of teaching mathematics

“I want you to know that reading your book and the conversations we had at the SIGGRAPH [computer graphics] conference were pivotal in the history of our project. We rewrote much of our material based on insights gained from your book. Previously, we had not realized fully how central the role of visualization was to what we were trying to do. We were already on the right path without really knowing it. . . . In our project Calculus & Mathematica, we have learned the effectiveness of teaching the concepts visually using graphic software prior to verbal explanations. Our students have gained a deeper understanding of the subject and they can recall and apply the material long afterward, which is rare for students taught with conventional methods [using memorized mathematics].” 

– J. Jerry Uhl, PhD, Math Department Head, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

**************

Dyslexia, visual thinking and visual technologies: varied levels of interest observed in these ideas and concepts while giving talks over more than 25 years.

• Nobel Prize winners and high-level, creative scientists are often interested; conventionally trained educators and school psychologists are usually not interested.

• Groups like NASA Ames, the Max Planck Institutes, Oxford and Cambridge University researchers, NLM-NIH, the Singapore Dyslexia Association, GCHQ in the UK and Hong Kong doctors are interested – these are practitioners, innovators, discoverers, practical users.

• Many conventional tests and measures do not capture these talents. Need new tests. How to recognize and develop high potential . . . How to show the way. . . For dyslexics, for other different thinkers, for all of us -- to show the path, innovating for major problems, in a new digital age of AI . . .

• Concerning a really revolutionary discovery in science and technology. When you seek the origins of these discoveries, you should not be surprised to find a dyslexic. They may not be full of previously memorized knowledge, Often the dyslexics can observe closely with an open mind and can see what others cannot see. (Especially an advantage for Nobel Prize winners, of course.)

 

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APPENDIX F

 

“Brief Quotations to Provide Background and Context” 

From “Visualization Research Agenda Meeting,” 

National Library of Medicine, February 15-16, 2000.

Misconceptions Widespread --

“Concerning the question of whether technically creative people will ever be comfortable with artistically created people. I have seen two very different working environments, up close, that give two very different pictures. Pixar is an excellent example of how the two types can and do work harmoniously together -- with equal respect, dignity, salary, promotion opportunities, company ownership and mutual admiration. 

My other experience is Microsoft, which, frankly, just does not ‘get it’ about artists. The technologically creative people here are awesome and Microsoft is the best run company I’ve ever seen, but the people here don’t respect artists in that deep way I just described at Pixar. They seem to believe the really good talents in the world are technical and if you can’t cut it then you do other things, like art. In other words, the culture here doesn’t, not yet anyway, welcome the other side. I’m trying to change this, but it isn’t so yet.” 

-- Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, interview, in ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, May 1999.

Recent trends, broad implications, now reversing talents -- 

“Until the 1960s, a student in an American engineering school was expected by his teachers to use his minds eye to examine things that engineers had designed, to look at them, listen to them, walk around them and thus develop an intuitive feel for the way the material world works and sometimes doesn’t work. 

“By the 1980s, engineering curricula had shifted to analytical [and mathematical] approaches, so that visual and other sensual knowledge of the world seemed less relevant. As faculties dropped drawing and shop practice from their curricula and [professors] deemed plant and factory visits unnecessary, working knowledge of the material world disappeared from faculty agendas and therefore from student agendas, and the nonverbal, tacit, and intuitive understanding essential to engineering design atrophied.” 

-- Eugene S. Ferguson, Engineering and the Minds Eye, the MIT press, 1992.

Special ability, fundamental in creative science, often ignored -- 

Spatial ability has been given only token attention as an important dimension of cognitive functioning. Research on the structure, identification, and development of spatial abilities has been conducted by a few researchers around the world [but] often ignored by the psychological and educational community. In addition, special ability has played only a modest role in educational assessment and instruction. 

-- Institute for the Academic Advancement of Youth, Center for Talented Youth, Johns Hopkins University.

Professional implications, screening out talent -- 

“The engineering profession is being denied potentially innovative engineers by the present school system. As it is now structured, it screens out and discourages students who have abilities similar to those of the large number of presently practicing engineers, most of whom graduated before 1960. That innovative group, trained on vacuum tube technology, developed semiconductor electronics lasers, optical communications, satellite communications -- and put a man on the moon. I believe that a significant portion of these engineers are right brain dominent hand or compensated dyslexics. The type of students entering engineering school now is different from the student of the 1940s and 1950s. There is far more screening out today of right brain and moderately dyslexic students. Unfortunately too many companies will only hire graduates with high grades -- which is no indication of an engineer’s ingenuity. These potential employers should instead keep an open eye keep and open mind about right brain and dyslexic students, who could fill positions where their innovative and intuitive approaches to problems could be utilized.” 

-- Walter W. Fry, retired electrical engineer formerly with the Brookhaven National laboratory, “Speak Out.” IEEE Spectrum, December 1990. 

Note: Above observations possible in this time period because these innovative engineers were then alive. Some 30 years later, most of these engineers are gone. All the young engineers have been screened by standardized tests -- and have been trained to focus on mathematical approaches rather than “hands on” visual learning. So all are now able to memorize well and past modern tests. But perhaps few are able to do really major innovation. Similar might be said of the older doctors who attended the Markle Foundation reunion, where many told West of their own dyslexia or the dyslexia of near family members. See item 24 above. Need to provide more discussion on this speculation. Compare UK leadership prior to WWI where top government people prided themselves on knowing no science; they were all trained mainly in Greek and Latin literature and proud of reading major ancient texts in the original Greek every few years. (Get quotation on this from Bragg senior. Also, similar to observation of Prof. John Stein, below, about highly innovative dyslexic Oxford dermatology professor. Modern selection methods may effectively select out some of the most creative and individuals in various professional groups. So much depends upon what kinds of tests and section methods are used during certain historical periods.) -- TGW. 

Parallel efforts, Finding Talent at Oxford University––

Oxford University is currently mounting an effort to try to find ways to identify highly talented students who would not pass the usual screening mechanisms currently in place. One specific example given is a dyslexic dermatologist who has been a leader in his field, teaching at Oxford with many innovative papers and professional awards. Because of his weaknesses in test taking, however, he would not be admitted to Oxford today. They want to see how screening may be altered to change this situation. 

-- Professor John Stein, lecture in physiology, Oxford University, personal communication, London, June 1999.

A longer term expectation––

I have often argued in my public talks that the graduate education process that produces physicists is totally skewed to selecting those with analytical [and mathematical] skills and rejecting those with visual or holistic skills. I have claimed that with the rise of scientific visualization as a new mode of discovery, a new class of minds will arise as scientists. In my own life, my guru in computational science was dyslexic and he certainly saw the world in a different and much more effective manner then his own colleagues. 

-- Larry Smart, National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Personal communication. [Get date. See his email.]

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APPENDIX G

Acknowledgements

Most of the presentations, events and publications listed above mainly result from the vision, energy, advocacy and leadership of a small number of highly committed individuals. [Very preliminary. More to come -- along with main connections for each. -- TGW]

Sue Parkinson -- Founder, the Arts Dyslexia Trust, arranged for many talks for art and scientific groups in the UK. 

Jo and Richard Todd -- Key 4 Learning, consultants, GCHQ, UK Government 

Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide -- Dyslexic Advantage, book, websites. 

Patience Bragg Thompson -- Publisher, teacher, scientific family. 

Lord (Harry) Renwick -- advocate for dyslexics, Vice Pres. BDA. 

David and Dr. Angela Fawcett -- journal editor, author, professor. 

Lee Siang -- CEO, Dyslexia Association of Singapore

Deborah Hewes, Head of Publications, Dyslexia Association of Singapore

William J. Dreyer, PhD -- Professor, Caltech, dyslexic molecular biologist, innovative research led to Nobel Prize, started seven biotech companies

Marc I. Rowe, MD -- dyslexic pediatric surgeon, top award, Ladd Metal

John R. (Jack) Horner -- dinosaur researcher, Spielberg film consultant, Bozeman, Montana -- recently, teaching at college in California

Kate Griggs -- co-founder with Richard Branson, Made By Dyslexia, UK, 

Rod Nicholson -- author, Positive Dyslexia

John Stein -- Oxford University, Dyslexia Trust

Susanna Cederquist -- Swedish language book, Dyslexia plus Talent equals Truth; former consultant on dyslexia for Swedish Royal Family

Richard Branson -- dyslexic entrepreneur, co-founder of Made By Dyslexia

 

_____________________________________________________________

APPENDIX H

Draft Memoir for Dr. Lindberg Book

Note: Below, a requested memoir for the new book, Donald A.B. Lindberg, M.D.: Tributes to his Career and Contributions, to be published by IOS Press, Amsterdam. Near final draft, with several changes by the volume editor before final revisions for camera-ready print version. Draft, March 10, 2021. Please do not cite or quote this draft version. -- TGW

 

 

Personal Memories of Donald A. B. Lindberg, MD,

Visual Thinker and Medical Visionary

 

Thomas G. WEST

 

Keywords: Donald A. B. Lindberg, visual thinking, computer graphics technology, dyslexia 

 

 Corresponding author: thomasgwest@gmail.com

 

Introduction

 

From the late 1980s until his retirement in 2015, I was privileged to observe the forward thinking and astonishing depth, range, and liveliness of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) under the direction of Dr. Donald A. B. Lindberg. 

 

As an outsider, I observed from my point of view as an ordinary library researcher. I mainly utilized NLM’s History of Medicine collections for information about early scientists like Michael Faraday and medical pioneers such as Dr. Harvey Cushing. Initially, I used the old paper index catalog cards, microfilm and the early NLM mainframe computer information systems to research and prepare the manuscript for my first book, In the Mind’s Eye, published in spring 1991 [[1]].

 

I first met Dr. Lindberg at a gathering after a lecture in NLM’s Lister Hill Building. He asked about my work. I explained that my research focus concerned the talents of dyslexic individuals -- together with visual thinking in the history medicine and science. I was surprised to discover that Dr. Lindberg also was interested in these topics. 

 

I later learned that these interests were partly a reflection of his personal history. Don’s father was an architect. Don was trained in a highly visual specialty, pathology, and some family members are dyslexic. As is often the case, this kind of personal history helps some to understand and appreciate the puzzling mixed strengths and weaknesses that accompany these life patterns. 

 

I also was fascinated that Don’s interests included then-rapidly developing computer graphic technologies as well as the hidden talents of dyslexics -- who often see things differently, to innovate and sometimes make scientific discoveries before conventionally trained experts in some fields. Over time, I began to appreciate that Dr. Lindberg had a special ability to see where things were going and to attract highly talented and creative people for his staff, NLM’s Board of Regents, and the Library’s diverse, innovative projects.

 

Over the years, Dr. Lindberg assumed leadership positions in several major areas -- archiving massive amounts of genetic code information [within the National Center for Biomedical Information (NCBI)], providing research information in clinicaltrials.gov, and even leading a federal government-wide effort -- the High Performance Computing and Communications Program (HPCC). He once remarked to me how difficult it was to deal with 500 HPCC emails a day. 

 

Dr. Lindberg’s interest in visual thinking and dyslexia was evidenced when he asked me to be the after-dinner speaker at a meeting of NLM’s Board of Regents [2]. He accorded me the honor of describing the ideas I developed during my research and writing. I began my BOR speech with the following words: 

 

“ My talk this evening is about ‘a return to visual thinking.’ My subtitle ‘new technologies, old talents and reversed expectations,’ encapsulates my main thesis -- that as we begin to use the newest technologies in really powerful ways (which we have hardly begun), we will begin to tap into some of our oldest and most ‘primitive’ neurological (visual spatial) talents. In so doing, we will begin to see ourselves and our world with very different eyes -- leading, in time, to fundamentally different attitudes towards education and concepts of intelligence, as well as the skills and talents that are considered to be the most valuable. . . .”

 

 

Advanced Applications

 

At NLM in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I witnessed the rapid changes in computer systems happening all around us. Dr. Lindberg seemed to be simultaneously interested in newest technologies and at the same time, he respected the insights and sophisticated knowledge of early researchers and traditional cultures. For example, one morning I chanced to attend another lecture in NLM’s Lister Hill Building. The speaker was a sleepy young computer programmer and software engineer. He had been up all night, as he said, releasing to the World Wide Web thousands of copies of a new computer program he and a coworker designed -- called a ‘browser.’  

 

As it turned out it was ‘Mosaic;’ the first web browser of its kind. The young speaker was Marc Andreessen, then working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Later, he became famous in the computer world for the company Netscape and the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.  Of course, these initiatives helped enable access to the Internet and revolutionized mass communication -- and I was privileged to see the very first day -- largely because of NLM and its forward-thinking Director.

 

Thinking Like Einstein on the Hokule’a

 

During his career, Dr. Lindberg came to be known as a major innovator in using computers in healthcare research and practice. Under his direction, NLM pioneered broad access to medical information with Medline and PubMed. But Don also promoted a deeper understanding of less well-known groups with programs such as ‘Women in Medicine’ and ‘Native Voices.’

 

‘Native Voices’ exemplified how Dr. Lindberg promoted the investigation of the traditional forms of medicine, widely ignored previously. In later years, I was thrilled to see that NLM played a major role in a visit to Washington, D.C., during the round-the-world journey of the traditional Polynesian canoe the Hokule’a -- a double-hulled sailing canoe that enabled the early Polynesian peoples to travel among the islands of the broad Pacific Ocean.

 

I was delighted to see Dr. Lindberg’s interest in this area. Previously, I followed the renewed practice of traditional navigation methods and the significant influence of its rebirth in generating pride and reviving traditional Polynesian culture. Of course, the early traditional navigators used the stars and other natural signs. However, traditional navigators also taught themselves to feel long-distance ocean swells to maintain a heading -- and how the absence or ‘shadow’ in these swells could indicate the presence of an island, out of sight, over the horizon. I wrote about these insights in my second book, Thinking Like Einstein [3]. Indeed, the intended full title for the second book was to have been Thinking Like Einstein on the Hokule’a.

 

Dr. Lindberg was well aware how traditional cultures used visual abilities in highly sophisticated ways -- with a minimum of technology and a sophisticated integration of deeply understood natural forces. Needless to say, I was amazed and delighted when the Hokule'a tied up for several days at the Washington Canoe Club on the Potomac River in the middle of Washington, DC. Nainoa Thompson, the chief traditional navigator, gave a major talk at NLM about traditional navigation methods. 

 

Similar to Andreessen, NLM provided a stage for an important person (who was not well known outside of Polynesia) to provide fresh perspectives and ideas. In a way, both talks were so typical of Dr. Lindberg’s NLM. 

 

Moreover, I enjoyed several conversations with Nainoa at the Canoe Club where he confirmed his special visual spatial skills in traditional navigation probably were linked to his dyslexia. We talked about our common dyslexia experiences and the dyslexia of some family members. It all seemed to support the theory from Harvard neurologist and dyslexia researcher, Norman Geschwind, M.D., who suggested the visual-spatial abilities often seen among dyslexics yielded an array of socio-cultural benefits [4].

 

 

Dr. Lindberg’s Prescient Leadership

 

Over time, I beheld how prescient Dr. Lindberg was in providing leadership during an era of enormous change and rapid progress. Don used his broad interests and deep understanding of the potential of computer systems in the service of medical knowledge and practice. 

 

One especially forward-looking conference was organized in mid-February 2000. At Dr. Lindberg’s direction. The ‘Visualization Research Agenda Meeting -- The Impact of Visualization Technologies --Using Vision to Think’ considered how: ‘new visualization technologies are giving us new ways of seeing and understanding: bringing diverse worlds together, transforming the nature of education and work, redefining what we understand is talent and intelligence.’ The meeting focused on the implications of visualization technology for education and professional training as well as how to build an appropriate research program. 

 

It was a small but diverse meeting with only 22 attendees. NLM’s participants included Dr. Lindberg, Alexa McCray, Michael Ackerman, and Steve Phillips. Other attendees represented: five institutes at the U.S. National Institutes of Health; two from the Smithsonian Institution; three from computer graphics organizations; and six persons with knowledge and experience regarding dyslexia, giftedness and the brain’s evolution. 

 

Among those in attendance was Alvy Ray Smith, PhD, a strong advocate for the power of computer graphics in many spheres. Dr. Smith was one of the two founders of the Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, CA. Dr. Smith was a member of NLM’s Board of Regents and helped with the Visible Human Project and other related programs.

 

Other attendees included William J. Dreyer, Ph.D., California Institute of Technology, who provided a striking example or the power of dyslexic visual thinking in science and medicine. Dreyer had been a classic dyslexic when young; his reading, spelling and arithmetic test scores all were substandard. But having performed well on other tests, Dreyer went on to study biology -- and gradually realized he could tell his professors what experiments to do and what the results would be. 

 

Previously, Dreyer revealed that his dyslexic imagination enabled him to visualize processes in molecular biology and chemistry that led to a new and controversial theory about the human immune system. Dreyer espoused the theory for about 12 years -- providing concepts based on data from instruments that he designed and built himself. However, Dreyer’s data was in a form so new and unconventional that almost everyone in his field could not understand what he was talking about. 

 

Years later, Dreyer was vindicated and proven correct. When Susumu Tonegawa was awarded a Nobel Prize (physiology or medicine, 1987) for work he had done in Switzerland, his innovative sequencing work demonstrated (through experiments that were illegal in the U.S. at the time) that Dreyer’s and his colleague’s predictions were correct. In the words of two scientific historians of this period: ‘This experiment marked the point of no return for the domination of the antibody diversity question by nucleotide studies: it was Susumu Tonegawa’s final proof of the Dreyer-Bennett V-C translocation hypothesis through the use of restriction enzymes’ [5].

 

Dr. Lindberg’s views on dyslexic insight were summarized in a quotation he kindly provided for the back cover of my third book, Seeing What Others Cannot See. 

 

‘West argues convincingly that dyslexics . . . seem to fail in elementary school learning while excelling at the broader level of graduate school. Many whose stories he recites were smashing successes in business. West urges that this is because of extra gifts in visual learning and thinking. He goes beyond praising dyslexics’ hidden strengths in visual thinking and learning, their ability to see what others cannot see -- he demands that we stop hiding the imaginative strengths of all children under their weaknesses in reading.’ -- Donald Lindberg, M.D., Director Emeritus, National Library of Medicine [6].

 

Markle Scholars in Academic Medicine, Fifty-Year Reunion

 

A major conference where Dr. Lindberg and I were on program provided insights into the history of medical education. The 50^th reunion of Markle Scholars in Academic Medicine occurred from September 17-19, 1998 in Phoenix, Arizona.

 

Besides Dr. Lindberg and myself, other speakers included: Gerald M. Edelman, Scripps Research Institute (Nobel Prize winner); and Howard Gardner, Harvard Graduate School of Education (MacArthur Prize winner). Markle Scholars were professors identified by their medical school deans as the best teachers in the U.S. and Canada for several decades after World War II. 

 

In my talk, I spoke primarily about visual thinking among creative scientists and some then-recent developments in computer graphic technologies. However, I also mentioned how visual thinking and associated innovation sometimes were linked to dyslexia and other related learning differences. 

 

Remarkably, during the course of the three-day conference, many (nearly one half of the attendees and their spouses) spoke to me about their own dyslexia (two surgeons from Johns Hopkins, for example) or told stories of dyslexia among their family members or their more creative and innovative coworkers.

 

As I look back, I am enormously grateful for the privilege to know Dr. Lindberg and his wife Mary. It is now often said, rightly, that both presided over the Golden Age of the National Library of Medicine. 

 

Dr. Lindberg’s vision was broad and deep, often including an early consideration of diverse topics that only later became evident in the mainstream. Don took over a massive medical library primarily designed to serve various medical specialists -- and he pushed the boundaries, using the newest technologies, to serve the nation and, eventually, the world.

 

References

 

[1]. West TG. In the mind’s eye, creative visual thinkers, gifted dyslexics and the rise of visual technologies. 1^st Ed. Amherst, NY.: Prometheus Books; 1991. 3rd Ed. Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group; 2020.

 

[2]. West TG. A return to visual thinking: new technologies, old talents and reversed expectations. Bethesda, MD.: NLM Board of Regents Meeting; May 26, 1993. 

 

[3]. West TG. Thinking like Einstein: returning to our visual roots with the emerging revolution in computer information visualization. Amherst NY.: Prometheus Books; 2004. 

 

[4]. Geschwind N, Galaburda AM. Cerebral lateralization: biological mechanisms, associations, and pathology. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press; 1987, p. 97-104.  

 

[5]. Tauber, AI, Podolsky SH. The generation of diversity: clonal selection theory and the rise of molecular immunology.Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press; 1997, p. 207. 

 

[6]. West TG. Seeing what others cannot see: the hidden advantages of visual thinkers and differently wired brains. Amherst, NY.: Prometheus Books; 2017. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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APPENDIX I

Short Title Listing of Numbered Topics and Events

1. Northern California IDA Conference, 2002

2. Max Planck Institutes Conference, 1993; Proceedings, 1994

3. NYC Orton Dyslexia Society Conference, 1993

4. Netherlands Design Conference, 1993

5. GCHQ, First Diversity Day, 2006

6. Green College, University of Oxford, ADT

7. Royal College of Art, London

8. Glasgow School of Art

9. Uppsala, Dyslexia Policy Conference, attended by Queen of Sweden

10. University of California, Berkeley

11. Education Conference, Harvard & MIT

12. MIT Image Conference, Mandelbrot, 2001

13. MIT at Getty, 2005

14. ADT London, various dates

15. Taiwan, 3 cities, full day program

16. SIGGRAPH, Canada, various dates

17. Hong Kong (then Taiwan)

18. Board of Regents, NLM, speaker

19. Ed. Testing Service, Princeton

20. Pixar, 5 visits, two talks

21. Oxford, Magdalen talk

22. NASA Ames

23. Singapore, 2014

24. Markle Reunion, 1998

25. Mall Gallery,ADT, 1994

26. Sweden, June 2019

27. Global Summit, Made By Dyslexia, 2018

28. Hawaii Conference, W. Baker, 1998

29. Lindberg conf., BOR Room, Alvy (tapes)

30. Confederation of British Industry, 1995

31. Dyslexic Doctor 2020

32. Japan NHK, Jack Horner

33. RASP Book, 2011

34. Italian Dyslexia Association, Rome

35. Orton Dyslexia Society, Boston 1996

36. Wadsworth Center (NY CDC), Albany

37. Freshman Year Experience Conf., 1994

38. SWOCS on Eide Book

39. Chautauqua talks, 2003

40. Interview docs, Dreyer, Rowe

41. Future Reversals, IDA reprint, 1992

42. Krasnow Inst., Wu letter, 2015

43. Southwest Branch IDA, 2005

44. Patience Bragg Thomson and family -- and books (below)

45. Beyond the Ivy League, L. Pope chapter on LD (to come)

Appx. A. Reviews & Comments, bio

Appx. B. Bragg family, books, Crystal Clear

Appx. C. Siena Talk, 2020

Appx. D. Videos, on web

Appx. E. Word slides from talks

Appx. F. Acknowledgements

Appx. H. Draft for Dr. Lindberg Book

Appx. I. Short List of Numbered Topics

 

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