PRELIMINARY DRAFT -- Note: The following set of 14 pages is part of a new revised draft intended to provide some basic examples and context (along with three Appendices) from the more extensive archive listings now in preparation. Updated, May 25, 2023. – TGW
A Time of Fundamental Change:
The Larger Context of Advanced Visual and AI Technologies,
“A Return to Visual Thinking” and
Reconsidering Different Ways of Learning
Brief Excerpts and Samples from Archive Listings
Having been asked to give talks to many different groups in different countries, remarkably, West noted that the higher up he would go -- among Nobel Prize winning scientists, for example -- the more likely he would find those who readily understood patterns in unexpected weaknesses along with very high-level strengths, frequently featuring strong visual thinking as a major factor.
He gradually realized that many low-level scientists and professionals mainly know what they have been taught; while for very high-level scientists, it is a great advantage to think differently and to see patterns that others do not see, patterns that are often initially resisted and misunderstood by those with conventional training.
Thomas G. West has been privileged to be given an insider’s view of the sometime relationships between high-level capabilities together with various unexpected weaknesses and learning difficulties. With the newest advances in AI now in the headlines, he finds new relevance of fundamental issues that he has been dealing with in his books and talks for more than 30 years.
With his early books, articles and talks about visual thinking, visual technologies, dyslexic talents and other learning differences, West found that he was quickly swept up in waves of fundamental change in attitudes and approach. Indeed, some indicators came quite early -- for example:
West’s first book, In the Mind’s Eye, was published in April 1991. Recently, he was going through some old papers and found this note about some early reactions to the book: “October 17, 1991. West attended a meeting at the National Institutes of Health Image Processing Group lecture series this afternoon at the NIH Clinical Center. While there, Margaret (Bonnie) Douglas, who managed the lecture series, mentioned that his book was causing a sensation among her colleagues and associates -- chiefly made up of those programmers working with computer medical imaging, data visualization and related matters. She said their department librarian had never seen such a long waiting list for one book. The book cover had been displayed with new arrivals at the library and a few had heard his talk the previous May, but other than word-of-mouth, Bonnie found it hard to explain how people had learned of the book. ‘It certainly seems to have touched a nerve somewhere; perhaps you will have a cult book on your hands, she remarked.’ ”
Reconsidering Different Ways of Learning:
Recent Advances in AI, Calling for Urgent Action.
What Can Be Learned for Today’s Education from The Most Successful Visual Thinkers and Dyslexics?
What Can Humans Do Better Than Machines?
Currently, some educators are asking:
“Won’t Students just use ChatbotGPT to Cheat?
“Yes, but only if we continue to assess students in the same outdated ways. . . . Soon ChatbotGPT will be as expected and ubiquitous as spell check. Spell check empowers poor spellers by preventing their difficulties from impacting their ability to effectively communicate. In the near-term the same will be true for individuals who have difficulty organizing their ideas through written expression. . . .
“AI could (SHOULD) Change the Ways We Measure Potential
“ChatbotGPT4 can outperform the vast majority of people on some of our most consequential standardized exams. It scored 700/800 on the SAT Math section, in the top 10% of the bar exam, in the 85% percentile of the LSAT and a 4 and 5 on the AP Calculus and AP Biology Exams. It even aced the Sommelier exam. Interestingly, it did not fare as well on the AP language exams which require higher levels of creativity and interpretation.
“In a world where a computer can outperform the vast majority of humans on these exams, how can they possibly be an accurate prediction of who will be successful? In fact, they would seem to only predict who has the skills that can be better performed by computers. Dyslexic learners stand to be the beneficiaries of this shift in what is important and how we measure it.” (J. Clark, Chair of the International Dyslexia Association, email to IDA group of school heads, April 2023.)
As machines have long ago replaced assembly line workers and most bank tellers, we may not have been surprised to see an erosion of opportunities for those with certain clerical skills. But many of us may not have been ready to see that there may be great changes in the highest levels of managerial and professional roles as well. One of the fathers of computing and control systems, Norbert Weiner, in his book Cybernetics, saw it coming from the first. Writing in 1947, he explained,
“The first industrial revolution was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery. The new modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions. Of course, just as the skilled carpenter, the skilled mechanic, the skilled dressmaker have in some degree survived the first industrial revolution, so the skilled scientist and the skilled administrator may survive the second. However, taking the second revolution is accomplished, the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that is worth anyone’s money to buy.”
After more than 75 years, this is an especially sobering view. Much has come about that was unexpected since Weiner’s somber analysis, but the basic form and direction of this trend is remained unchanged – recently exploding into everyday life.
It is clear that not only clerical and other low-level functions are threated but also many functions formally thought to require high intelligence, many years of study and advanced professional degrees. Clearly, the conventional world of work is being turned upside down and we must begin to change conventional thinking and consider new plans of action.
However, we may be surprised to see help from unexpected quarters. Indeed, some of those who have had the most trouble in the old educational systems, may soon begin to show the way forward in the new worlds of education and work. Some suggestive examples are provided below.
A Short Archive Listing with a few Examples of Significant
Past Talks, Events, Media and Documents
“Dyslexia Is Britain’s Secret Weapon in the Spy War”
(1) In June 2006, Thomas G. West was honored to be invited to be the main speaker at the first ever “Diversity Day” conference in Cheltenham, England, for the staff of GCHQ, the code-breaking descendants of Bletchley Park (the World War II Nazi code breakers and the source of “Ultra,” the extremely secret intelligence source for Winston Churchill, never revealed to the public until the 1970s). According to one employee at GCHQ, “while people with neuro-diversity may be viewed as ‘odd or weird,’ they are ‘fully accepted’ at GCHQ.”
GCHQ officials and cyber experts make it quite clear that their dyslexic employees, among others, are viewed as highly valued workers. As one spokesperson said in an article for the Daily Mail, “Dyslexia Is Britain’s Secret Weapon in the Spy War: Top Codebreakers Can Crack Complex Problems Because They Suffer from the Condition. . . . Most people only get to see the jigsaw picture when it’s nearly finished while the dyslexic cryptographists can see what the jigsaw looks like with just two pieces.” (Also see section in West’s third book, Seeing What Others Cannot See, “Seeing the Puzzle with Only Two Pieces -- Learning Differences at GCHQ,” West, 2017, pp. 147-150.)
The following Saturday after the GCHQ diversity conference, there was an informal gathering for several employees and their families -- with a pub lunch and a walk around the village -- where one teen-aged son said, “Now I finally begin to understand my father.”
At one point, after the walk, West found himself sitting with a group of seven at the edge of our host’s garden, gradually discovering 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 the Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze” (involving the significance of “the dog that did not bark”).
It is apparent that organizations such as GCHQ (and possibly NSA in the US) are important places to better understand unexpected patterns in extraordinarily high performance and to seek connections between visual thinking, dyslexia, autism and other forms of different thinking.
This approach is especially important since conventional professional literature and training is often focused exclusively on correcting academic weaknesses and problems without consideration of a range of special talents and capabilities. (More for this archive is to be provided later concerning this important GCHQ meeting and related corporate organization management policies. Full credit to JT and RT at K4L -- TGW.)
Invitations to Speak from the Varied Worlds of Visual Thinkers
West is the author of three books, In the Mind’s Eye, Thinking Like Einstein and Seeing What Others Cannot See. From 1991 to 2021, he has given hundreds of presentations in the U.S., and 19 countries in Europe, the Middle East and the Asia/Pacific Region.
Early on, West found that he was invited to provide presentations for a variety of high-level institutions and organizations as part of a new awareness of fundamental change with respect to visual thinking and visual technologies -- along with new ways of thinking about the distinctive talents and capabilities of dyslexics and other different thinkers.
Real World Perspectives
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.
However, during this time many conventional experts, specialist academics and practicing professionals seemed to find it difficult to understand and appreciate these changes in perspective. They had been trained to rely on traditional tests and conventional measures and a conceptual framework that favors conventional verbal and mathematical academic capabilities along with extensive memorization -- instead of visual thinking and “thinking in pictures” -- that is, the manipulation of images or changing processes over time in three-dimensional space, in the imagination, especially in science, engineering, mathematics and other fields.
These experts have long highly valued students who could easily memorize old knowledge -- but they often have very little understanding of those who may be best suited to creating new knowledge.
“A Return to Visual Thinking” as a New Beginning
New Views of Knowledge, Ability and Potential
These changes in awareness were partly based on the rapidly emerging great power of the new computer graphic and related technologies during this period. However, this new awareness was also based on a renewed recognition of the power of the visual thinking as used by earlier scientists, engineers and inventors, such as Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla and others.
Thus, “A Return to Visual Thinking” was the main theme of an annual meeting of European scientists -- and West’s invited presentation for this meeting -- for the 50 Max Planck Institutes in Germany in 1993.
Over time, West noticed that when he spoke about visual talents and learning differences in highly positive ways, with credible positive examples, some of those in his audience felt free, often for the first time, to talk about considerable strengths and hidden dyslexic weaknesses in themselves, their family members and their most talented co-workers.
Remarkably, West noted that the higher up he would go -- among Nobel Prize winning scientists, for example -- the more likely he would find those who readily understood these patterns in unexpected weaknesses along with very high-level strengths. (He later realized that a lot of low-level scientists and practitioners mainly know what they have been taught; while for very high-level scientists, it is a great advantage to think differently and to see patterns that others do not see.)
For example, the Markle Scholars in Academic Medicine, the Fifty-Year Reunion (item 2, below). In a striking and unexpected example, during the course of the conference, among these highly praised, award-winning physicians and highly regarded medical school professors, roughly half of those attending spoke to West of their own dyslexia, the dyslexia of talented coworkers or the dyslexia of highly creative members of their own families.
Accordingly, the events and documents listed in this archive might serve, in part, as an informal preliminary survey of the development of these fundamental observations in various scientific and technical occupations in various parts of the world over some three decades.
See the sample items and events listed below for some of the best examples of how these changes in perspective were recognized, adopted and promoted by high-level organizations such as MIT and NASA Ames in the US, GCHQ and some universities in the UK, along with the Max Planck Institutes in Germany and other parts of Europe.
It is considered important to preserve these primary source archive materials for further systematic study of the early years of these important trends -- trends that are likely to increase in importance with the continuing rapid growth of computer power and connectedness along with advanced applications of AI (recently more in evidence now than ever before).
Long Predicted, Major Work Transformations Have Arrived
As machines increasingly take over low level clerical and professional tasks, the creativity, innovation, visual and big picture thinking often seen among dyslexics, and other different thinkers, should be expected to increase in relative value. (This trend is even more apparent recently as AI programs such as ChatGPT4 are now seen as capable of taking over certain search, analysis and reporting tasks, with amazing speed but not always with the highest levels of accuracy and truthfulness -- since they generally only repeat, without proper fact checking, what is available on the web – most recently producing a flood of news stories and broad speculations.)
However, even before current trends, it is notable that in recent years dyslexia has increasingly come to be viewed as an advantage in many technical, scientific and entrepreneurial business fields. Business consulting firms like EY have generated reports documenting that many employers are now looking to hire creative and innovative dyslexics. The job search service LinkedIn now has a check box for “dyslexic thinking” as a positive trait for job hunting and it is said that more than 10,000 have checked the box in recent years.
In a sense, it may be argued that, at best, well-trained professionals have long struggled to help dyslexics master reading and basic academic work – while few have helped dyslexics to develop the high-level skills and capabilities that seem to be common, in various forms, among some dyslexics – skills that should be in greater demand as the low-level reading, search, report preparation and many conventional academic tasks are increasingly done much faster and more cheaply by machines. This was predicted from the earliest days of computing -- but now it has clearly arrived.
It is also expected, remarkably, that the shift to big picture and visual thinking may also serve to highlight the value of some traditional modes of thought found among some indigenous peoples and disadvantaged groups. (See the “Native Voices” references to ancient traditional Polynesian navigation methods mentioned in the section prepared for the National Library of Medicine book on the career of Donald A.B. Lindberg, MD, provided here as Appendix A.)
Early Recognition for a Different Point of
View -- “Best of the Best”
West’s 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 some 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. Over some 30 years, West has provided hundreds of presentations for scientific, medical, art, design, computer and business groups in the US and 19 other countries.
The interest in these topics, across many different fields and disciplines, has been an indicator of the timeliness and broad impact of these perspectives and publications -- largely initially based on the remarkably prescient original work by the neurologists Dr. Samuel Torrey Orton in the 1920s and Dr. Norman Geschwind 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 overlooked. . . . 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 of West’s first book, In The Mind’s Eye. With over 30 years in print, the book continues to be what they call in the trade an “evergreen” -- a book that never dates and never stops selling. The two previous revised and expanded editions (Updated Edition and Second Edition) each contain Epilogues with some 40 to 50 pages of new material.
Selected Additional Examples of Events and Documents
(2) Markle Scholars in Academic Medicine, Fifty-Year Reunion, September 17-19, 1998, Arizona Biltmore Resort. Speakers included, among others: Donald A.B. Lindberg, MD, Director, 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 were identified by medical school deans as the best medical school professors and teachers 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. However, 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 received later from a Canadian physician, another Markle Scholar; to be provided for the archive. -- TGW)
(3) 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 name tag -- for discussion with other attendees. The conference handout (to be provided separately for inclusion in the archive) includes 210 images with attendee 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; he was 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 atomic and molecular structure, and later, the well-known discovery of the structure of DNA. (This image was supplied to West by Bragg’s daughter, Patience Bragg Thomson, former head of a school for dyslexic students in London. This family includes, over five generations, many visual occupations, many dyslexics and four winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics.)
West was familiar with the book Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoit Mandelbrot and was impressed with this very new and innovative form of mathematics. West hoped to be able to speak with him during the small three-day conference. In fact, as it turned out, West had several conversations with him. Dr. Mandelbrot talked about the hostility he had encountered from most conventional mathematicians, especially at Harvard University, where he had been teaching at the time. He then moved on to Yale University where, in contrast, they showed respect for Mandelbrot’s highly innovative approach to mathematics.
West mentioned his own interest in highly talented visual thinkers and dyslexics in science and mathematics 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 then most modern computer graphics technologies (actually starting with the most primitive early forms of computer graphics, well before others, because he was working for IBM at the time). These aspects are seen as signature indictors of the creative work of a classic visually-oriented approach as seen among many dyslexics.
(4) Discovering PCR. In recent years, PCR has been in use everywhere in relation to testing for Covid-19. The following story shows that sometimes you don’t understand what you have been given – because you think it is some sort of error or mistake. Non-dyslexics sometimes miss things because they tend to see things based mainly on what they have been taught to see. In contrast, many dyslexics think in pictures and sometimes they see things that non-dyslexics do not see or cannot see – or, indeed, do not allow themselves to see. (The passage below is quoted from the book Seeing What Others Cannot See, by T.G. West, 2017, pages 69-71.)
“Many years ago, during a family trip to Colorado, a friend told me a story that provides an inside look at how scientists work. I was just beginning serious research for my first book and we were discussing creativity and the process of discovery. He was a well-known cancer researcher and taught at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
“He told me he would sometimes prefer to forget this story. I asked if it had ever been written down anywhere. He said no. He and all of his associates found it too upsetting to recall or record -- but he told me it was alright for me to tell the story.
“Years ago, one of his friends was a young researcher in a biochemistry laboratory and was performing a procedure intended to destroy DNA, the molecular blueprint for self-replication carried in all living cells. She was annoyed, however, at not being able to make the procedure work as intended.
“Each time she measured the results of her work, she came up with more DNA than she started with. The researcher tried again and again. But each time she was disappointed to discover that she had more DNA rather than less once again. Her coworkers were sympathetic and tried to help her. But no solution to the problem could be found. She eventually dropped the project and went on to other tasks.
“Some years later, another scientist in a different laboratory successfully developed a new method to create DNA, making many copies— and he subsequently received a Nobel Prize for his discovery. The young researcher and her former colleagues are still asking themselves how it is that they did not recognize what was really going on when her project repeatedly failed.
“The story of the second scientist is now well known in scientific circles. The discoverer was Kary B. Mullis, who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with another scientist, Michael Smith. Mullis received the prize for his development of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) that makes it possible to rapidly make thousands or millions of copies of specific DNA sequences. The improvements provided by Mullis have made the PCR technique of central importance in molecular biology and biochemistry.
“According to the Nobel Prize presentation at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: ‘Using this method it is possible to amplify and isolate in a test tube a specific DNA segment within a background of a complex gene pool. In this repetitive process the number of copies of the specific DNA segment doubles during each cycle. In a few hours it is possible to achieve more than 20 cycles, which produces over a million copies.’
“Of course, the story is so upsetting because she had the discovery right there in front of her, but she was so focused on her seemingly failed project that she could not see the value of her experiment’s results.
“Such stories teach us. Sometimes a gift is seen only as a problem, something that would be quickly wished away had we the power. Sometimes the most important thing is to be able to recognize the gift for what it is, even though it was not requested or desired. For this to be possible, it is helpful (in spite of one’s training) not to be wholly focused on the narrow interests of the moment—no matter how serious the task, no matter how large the grant, no matter how urgent the deadline. One has to be open to new possibilities, to looking at things a different way, to being able to see what you have been given, even when it is not what you asked for.
“The role of chance or fortuitous accident is one of several themes that recur repeatedly in the literature of creativity, especially creativity in the sciences. I do not assume that all creativity is necessarily associated with some form of learning disability or learning difference. However, I do believe that a number of traits associated with dyslexia, other learning differences, and especially high visual-spatial talents may tend to predispose some individuals to greater creativity than might exist otherwise.
“Being able to do what others want you to do, in the way they want you to do it, is seductive. If you can, you will. But if you cannot, you will have to find another way. It is a form of accidental self-selection. If it is possible to do it in the same way, successfully, often a new way will not be tried.
“Thus, if a truly original method is needed, the conventionally successful student or researcher may be the last one to find it. Sometimes only among those who have repeatedly failed is there a high likelihood of success.”
This is the end of a short 14-page draft providing samples from the archive listings (with the following Appendix A, and others). Selected from some 165 total pages of listings to date. -- Thomas G. West
Emails: thomasgwest@gmail.com and thomasgwest@aol.com
Blog: inthemindseyedyslexicrenaissance.blogspot.com
Mobile: 202 262 1266
APPENDIX A
Note: The brief chapter below was requested for the comprehensive book on the Dr. Lindberg’s life and career, with many authors, representing several professional groups, published February 1, 2022, by IOS Press, Amsterdam.
Transforming Biomedical Informatics and Health Information Access B.L. Humphreys et al. (Eds.) © 2021 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/SHTI211027
Personal Memories of Donald A.B. Lindberg M.D., Visual Thinker and Medical Visionary
Thomas G. WEST1 Washington D.C. U.S.A.
Keywords. Donald A.B. Lindberg M.D., visual thinking, computer graphics technology, dyslexia, U.S. National Library of Medicine
1. 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 Donald A. B. Lindberg M.D.
As an outsider, I observed from my point of view as an ordinary library researcher. I mainly used NLM’s History of Medicine collections for information about innovative 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 of 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 were 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 remarkable ability to see where things were going and attract highly talented and creative people for his staff, NLM’s Board of Regents, and the Library’s diverse, inventive 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), providing research information in clinicaltrials.gov, and even leading a federal government-wide effort - the High-Performance Computing and
1 Corresponding author: thomasgwest@gmail.com
T.G. West / Personal Memories of Donald A.B. Lindberg M.D. 417
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 these 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. . . .”
2. Advanced Applications
At NLM in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I witnessed the rapid changes in computer systems happening worldwide. Dr. Lindberg seemed to be simultaneously interested in the 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 Netscape and the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Of course, these initiatives helped enable access to the Internet. They revolutionized mass communication - and I was privileged to see the very first day - primarily because of NLM and its forward-thinking director.
3. Thinking Like Einstein on the Hokule’a
During his career, Dr. Lindberg became known as a significant innovator in using computers for 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 significant 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.
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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 of how traditional cultures used visual abilities in highly sophisticated ways - with a minimum of technology and a sophisticated integration of profoundly understood natural forces. 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.
Like 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 everyday 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].
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, Ph.D., 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.
T.G. West / Personal Memories of Donald A.B. Lindberg M.D. 419
Other attendees included William J. Dreyer, Ph.D., California Institute of Technology, who provided a striking example of the power of dyslexic visual thinking in science and medicine. Dr. Dreyer had been a classic dyslexic when young; his reading, spelling, and arithmetic assessment scores were substandard. But having performed well on other tests, Dr. 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, Dr. Dreyer revealed that his dyslexic imagination enabled him to visualize molecular biology and chemistry processes that led to a new and controversial theory about the human immune system. Dr. Dreyer espoused the theory for 12 years - providing concepts based on data from instruments that he designed and built himself. However, Dr. 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, Dr. 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 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].
5. 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 50th reunion of Markle Scholars in Academic Medicine occurred from September 17-19, 1998, in Phoenix, Arizona.
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 three-day conference, many (nearly one half of the attendees and their spouses) spoke to me about their dyslexia (two surgeons from Johns Hopkins, for example) or told stories of dyslexia among their family members or their more creative and innovative coworkers.
420 T.G. West / Personal Memories of Donald A.B. Lindberg M.D.
As I look back, I am enormously grateful for the privilege of knowing Dr. Lindberg and his wife, Mary. Rightly, it is now often said both presided over the Golden Age of the National Library of Medicine.
Dr. Lindberg’s vision was broad and deep, often including early consideration of diverse topics that only later became evident within the mainstream. Don took over a massive medical library primarily designed to serve various medical specialists - and using the newest technologies, he pushed the boundaries 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. 1st 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.
APPENDIX B
Foreword and Selected Reviews and Comments -- 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 abilities]. 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. The late Dr. Sacks, a British neurologist who resided 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). A later book is titled The Mind’s Eye (2010).
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
“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.
Dr. Smith has recently released a new book, A Biography of the Pixel, which provides a detailed history of how pixel-based images have come to dominate all aspects of the modern world. “The Great Digital Convergence of all media types into one universal digital medium occurred, with little fanfare, at the recent turn of the millennium. The bit became the universal medium, and the pixel -- a particular packaging of bits -- conquered the world.” (From the publisher, MIT Press, August 2021.)
“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.
“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.”
-- Dr. J. Jerry Uhl, Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, telephone conversation of September 29, 1993. The late 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.
“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 Dane. The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews -- being nominated for 15 Emmy Awards and winning seven.
“Perhaps when we encounter the prodigious gifts in someone who masters different mediums, someone such as Michelangelo, what we are seeing is the rare convergence of spatial and object thinking in the mind of a genius. According to Thomas G. West in his book In the Mind’s Eye, Leonardo’s abilities as a visual spatial thinker were so vast that he anticipated scientific and technological advances by [more than] a hundred years in the areas of anatomy, physiology, mechanical engineering, and astronomy. West writes, ‘Visual spatial talents are, in some important cases, indispensable for the highest levels of original work in certain areas of science, engineering, medicine and mathematics.’ Other sculptors rejected the marble that Michelangelo used to carve the David. He saw the statue inside it.”
– Temple Grandin, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions, Riverhead Books, Penguin Random House, 2022, pp. 173-174.
“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 (Basic Books, 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.
“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 [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 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.
“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.
“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.”
-- Dr. J. Jerry Uhl, Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, telephone conversation of September 29, 1993. The late 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.
APPENDIX C
Selected Text Slides
On Visual Thinking and the Strengths of Dyslexics
Selected Text Slides Used in Recent Talks by Thomas G. West.
Most of West’s talks are made up of images, and sometimes video clips, which he discusses in an informal manner. However, some key points work better by discussing short text slides – a few of which are provided below.
*****************
• Some want to teach mainly reading in order to bring dyslexics up to normal levels with “basic skills.”
• But, instead, others want to study the dyslexic “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, high speed links, “deep learning” and AI.
• “Basic skills have no market value.” (Norbert Weiner, author, 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 simulations, creating new knowledge, seeing patterns that others cannot see.
• We 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 recent EY business consultant reports saying employers now want dyslexic talents and skills.)
• 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 increasingly narrow specialist PhD training and career paths -- as basic things change and then change again.)
**************
Samuel Torrey Orton, MD, in his 1925 paper on “Word Blindness”
• In Iowa, Dr. Orton organized Mobile Psychiatric Units (Dr. Orton, a strong visual thinker, almost became an engineer.)
• He requested to see those “failing in their school.” (142 were referred.)
• Patient MP, 16, had an “inability to read.” But Orton could see that he was very bright.
• Orton wrote: “the Stanford-Binet method [then in 1925 a new test of “IQ”] . . . did not do justice to the boy’s mental equipment. . . . The test is inadequate to gauge . . . facile use of visual imagery of . . . complex type . . . [the boy had] good visualizing power . . . his replies were prompt and keen.”
**************
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 mind’s 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 [mainly 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 Mind’s Eye, the MIT press, 1992.
*****************
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 in 3D space.
Many school psychologists and conventional educators do not. Often they are trained to design courses and standardized tests that ignore or discourage seeing things differently.
***************
• 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, personal 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 and research may appear to be solid and scientific. But, instead, the “hard data” might actually confirm errors and misunderstandings -- wrongly 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 groups and percentages do not matter, they say. However, in new science: Small percentages do matter. Individuals matter. Differences matter. Nano scales matter. There is sensitivity to initial conditions. Individuals are the new focus of “precision medicine.” Recognizing the power of the small.
*******************
Dyslexia, visual thinking, thinking in 3D space and visual technologies: varied levels of interest have been observed in these ideas and concepts while giving talks in the US and 19 countries over more than 25 years.
• Nobel Prize winners and high-level, creative scientists are often the most interested; conventionally trained educators and school psychologists are usually not interested.
• Groups that are interested are: NASA Ames, the Max Planck Institutes in Germany, Oxford and Cambridge University researchers in England, the U.S. National Library of Medicine-NIH, the Dyslexia Association of Singapore, GCHQ code breakers in the UK and Hong Kong medical doctors. 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, and for other different thinkers, for all of us -- to show the path, innovating for major problems, especially in a new digital age of AI . . .
• Concerning any really revolutionary discovery in science and technology: When you seek the origins of these most unexpected and most original discoveries, you should not be surprised to find a dyslexic. Because they are perhaps less full of previously memorized knowledge and conventional patterns of thought, and mostly think in pictures, 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 -- because, they must, almost by definition, see things differently than conventional scientific thinkers.)
APPENDIX D
Selected Publications and Suggested Readings
On Visual Thinking, Strengths of Dyslexics and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Selected Publications
Walker, Darren, and Hemant Taneja, March 30, 2023. “Build AI Guardrails Before We Crash,” Washington Post, page A23. This editorial page opinion piece in the Post is just one among a rapidly growing number of articles, group letters and other indicators of serious concerns about the extremely rapid growth and increasingly wide spread use of new AI systems like ChatGPT and other similar systems. An excerpt: “The artificial intelligence revolution has arrived. . . . We see leaders in every field placing bets, by the billions, on what comes next. . . . The time has come for new rules and tools that provide greater transparency on both the data sets used to train AI systems and the values built into their decision-making calculus. We are also calling for more action to address the economic dislocation that will follow the rapid redefinition of work.” -- Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation and author “From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth.” Hemant Taneja is CEO of General Catalyst and the author of “Intended Consequences: How to Build Market-Leading Companies with Responsible Innovation.”
Eide, Brock, MD, MA, and Fernette Eide, MD, 2023. The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain. Revised and Updated. New York, NY. Plume, An imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC. “The Dyslexic Advantage had a profound and positive impact on my life since it explained ‘me’ to me for the first time.” -- Dr. Robert Ballard, Explorer-at-Large for the National Geographic Society and author of Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found Titanic.
West, Thomas G., 1991. In the Mind’s Eye, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.
West, Thomas G., 1992. “A Future of Reversals: Dyslexic Talents in a World of Computer Visualization,” Annals of Dyslexia, Orton Dyslexia Society, vol. 42, pp. 124-139.
West, Thomas G., 1994. “A Return to Visual Thinking.” In 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. Gottingen, Germany, November 1993. (Paper published in German: Ruckkehr zum visuellen Denken, Forschung und Wissenschftliches Rechnen: Beitrage anlasslich des 10. EGV-Benutzertreffens der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Gottingen, November 1993.)
West, Thomas G., 1999. “The Abilities of Those with Reading Disabilities: Focusing on the Talents of People with Dyslexia.” Chapter 11, Reading and Attention Disorders: Neurobiological Correlates. Edited by Drake D. Duane, MD, Baltimore, MD: York Press, Inc.
West, Thomas G., 2004. Thinking Like Einstein: Returning to Our Visual Roots with the Emerging Revolution in Computer Information Visualization. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
West, Thomas G., 2005. “The Gifts of Dyslexia: Talents Among Dyslexics and Their Families,” Hong Kong Journal of Paediatrics (New Series), 10, 153-158.
West, Thomas G., 2009. In the Mind’s Eye: Creative Visual Thinkers, Gifted Dyslexics and the Rise of Visual Technologies. Second edition. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, distributed by Penguin Random House. (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 overlooked. . . . It stands alongside Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind as a testament to the range of human talent and possibility.”)
West, Thomas G., 2014. “Amazing Shortcomings, Amazing Strengths: Beginning to Understand the Hidden Talents of Dyslexics,” Asia Pacific Journal of Developmental Differences, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 2014, pp. 78-89. (A publication of the Dyslexia Association of Singapore (DAS). DAS initiated a multi-year program “Embrace Dyslexia,” intended to take advantage of the distinctive talents of dyslexic children and adults, as a form of economic competitive advantage. Long a leader in technology and commerce, Singapore intends to lead the world in this effort as well. In November 2014, Thomas G. West was invited to visit Singapore for a week to give five talks as part of the kick-off for the “Embrace Dyslexia” program.)
West, Thomas G., 2022. “Dyslexic Talents in Times of Adversity.” Asia Pacific Journal of Developmental Differences. Vol. 9, No. 2, July 2022, pp. 194-203. Based on the June 2020 graduation talk given at The Siena School, Silver Spring, Maryland.
End. Short version of archive listing with examples. Total 34 pages. Preliminary draft with revisions and additions. Most recent revision May 25, 2023. To date, the long version of the archive listing includes 168 total pages; 45 numbered descriptions of documents, media, presentations and events; with 7 appendices, labelled A to G.
