“You can start Monday”
Turning Points -- Many dyslexic strengths and special abilities are never recognized. But some are. What can we learn from lives that were forever changed when some special strength or ability is suddenly recognized and important new life pathways are opened, sometimes for very high accomplishment?
Note: The following interview section is from William J. Dreyer, a professor at The California Institute of Technology whose work led eventually to a Nobel Prize – a prize, remarkably, for someone else, Susumu Tonegawa, in 1987 -- who proved that Dreyer’s controversial theories were correct by doing experiments in Switzerland that were illegal in the USA at the time. It is notable how important visual thinking was to Dreyer’s own life and work – and how he was interested in which scientists at Caltech were visual thinkers and which were not visual thinkers – and, in addition, how he used the book In The Mind’s Eye to explain the connections between visual thinking, dyslexic strengths and original scientific discovery (sometimes resulting in Nobel Prizes, as listed below).
DREYER: No one had told me that Reed [College] was supposed to be for very smart kids and that it was hard to get into. So I went out there the next day, slightly hungover. This would have been ’48, probably. And I said to the director of admissions, whose name was Bob Cannon, “I heard about Reed last night, and I’d like to come here.”
COHEN: Do you mean that you just took yourself from Eugene up to Portland the next day?
DREYER: “No. Sorry. I was at home in Portland. That’s where my mother lived. I was due to go back to Eugene the next Sunday. So he said, ‘Well, how are your grades?” And I told him what I just told you. And he said, “Oh. And you want to come here?’ And I said, “Well, I heard about it last night, and it sounds great.”
And he said, “Well, how would you like to take some ability exams?” I said, “Fine.” And these were tough. They were basically ability [tests], but included so-called verbal [tests], which I hadn’t viewed myself as being good at. But [there were] logical questions and whatnot. And because the tests were tough, they gave me a long time, [and a lack of time] is always my downfall on the simpler tests.
COHEN: I find this very interesting. You went over there and they didn’t say, “I want to see your record; I want to see all this stuff,” and then dismiss you?
DREYER: Well, but wait. So I took the test and took it back to him. And he said, “Well, here are the grade sheets. Grade it.” Well, I kept them for about thirty seconds and then handed them back to him. He said, “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to grade your own test?” I said, “I did. I just counted the wrong ones.” And there weren’t very many; there were only a few. I had gotten most of them right. He said, “My God. You’ve done better than anyone I’ve ever seen. You have applied. You can start Monday.”
Source: William J. Dreyer, Interview Excerpts – Edited by Thomas G. West – June 2024. Provided for background to show the “turning point” in Dreyer’s life – and possibly to show the great advantage to ensure that a wide range of tests are available to all students to identify strengths and abilities beyond the conventional academic tests. Although widely ignored by conventional academic measures, high visual abilities, can lead to deep insights in molecular biology and elementary physics.
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Interview with William J. Dreyer, Pasadena, California
Five sessions with Shirley K. Cohen. February 18, 19, 23, 26, March 2, 1999.
Begin Tape 1, Side 1 [With quotation conventions as provided.]
COHEN: Thank you for coming, Professor Dreyer. You expressed some interest in giving us an introduction before we start the interview, so why don’t you go ahead and do that.
DREYER: OK. Well, the introduction has to do with [the fact that] I’ve come to realize that scientists—and people in general—have very different ways of thinking. I was just at UCLA two days ago with people studying brain imaging, and only one or two of them understand this now—it’s so new. They tended to want a uniform brain, with everyone having the same anatomy and thinking the same way. That isn’t at all true; it’s amazing how different people can be. And in particular, the book that I loaned you—In the Mind’s Eye, by Thomas G. West [In the Mind’s Eye: Visual Thinkers, Gifted People with Dyslexia and Other Learning Difficulties, Computer Images and the Ironies of Creativity, Amherst NY: Prometheus (1997)]—is about the only one I’ve ever seen that deals with the subject of people who have extreme visual imagery in the way they think. I wanted to preface all of this with this little story, because when you start asking me about schools and whatnot, it has a profound implication.
COHEN: But of course you didn’t realize this when [your schooling] was going on.
DREYER: I knew I was different in the way that I thought, but I didn’t realize why I was so dumb at spelling. . . . And rote memory and arithmetic and so forth. The first time I realized how different . . . brains could be . . . . was when I bumped into Jim Olds at a dinner party back in the late sixties. Jim Olds was a professor here [Bing Professor of Behavioral Biology, 1969 – d. 1976]. He’s famous for his pleasure center work. He was a professor here and so was I. A speaker talked about the way we think and compared it to holography. Jim was across the table from me. I said, “Oh, yes. When I’m inventing an instrument or whatever, I see it in my head and I rotate it and try it out and move the gears. If it doesn’t work, I rebuild it in my head.” And he looked at me and said, “I don’t see a thing in my head with my eyes closed.” We spent the rest of the evening, over wine and so forth, trying to figure out how two professors—both obviously gifted people at Caltech in the Biology Division—could possibly think at all, because we were so different.
So then I took this up with Roger Sperry [Hixon Professor of Psychobiology 1954-1984, emeritus, d. 1994], and I realized that I had some amazing shortcomings as well as some amazing gifts. I took it up with some of the students, one of whom was Mike [Michael S.] Gazzaniga [Director, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Dartmouth], who is still around writing, and a few others that came out of Sperry’s group of postdocs and grad students. And they typically said, “Oh, no. There’s no difference. Everyone does this imaging. We’re all the same.”
So I never could document this, and my wife [Janet Roman Dreyer] is the same way. It’s called dyslexia, typically, because you have a strange inability to do stuff. If you are thinking in images, then a spreadsheet doesn’t work; your brain doesn’t compute well. If you’re smart, you can do all kinds of things if you work hard on it. I can learn how to spell if I work hard at it, but it doesn’t come naturally.
The reason [is because] there’s no image to it. Let me mention that [there were] other people at Caltech who never realized this about themselves. Dick Feynman [Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics, d. 1988] was one. And Murray Gell-Mann [Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics, emeritus] doesn’t realize that he’s totally different from what Dick Feynman was, in the way he thinks algebraically.
This is why I think it’s interesting for Caltech to be aware of these differences that Tom West documents. Einstein thought in images, and Feynman did his work in physics in diagrams, as you well know. But other physicists just couldn’t understand it. So I have some of those problems—with other biologists not being able to understand me—and I’ve come to understand a little bit more why. That’s the preamble.
Listed below are Nobel Prize winners at Caltech mentioned by Dreyer. (Quotations from the Nobel Prize website):
Roger Sperry “Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his breakthrough discoveries on functional specialisation of the hemispheres; the other half of the prize was jointly given to David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel for their studies on visual information processing.”
Richard Feynman “In 1965, Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel prize in physics with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirÅ Tomonaga for ‘fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles.’ Feynman diagrams were part of this work.”
Murray Gell-Mann – “Murray Gell-Mann . . . was an American physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969 for his work pertaining to the classification of subatomic particles and their interactions.”
William J. Dreyer – Dreyer’s fundamental work was proven to be correct by Susumu Tonegawa who was able to perform experiments in Switzerland that illegal at the time in the USA. “The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1987 was awarded to Susumu Tonegawa ‘for his discovery of the genetic principle for generation of antibody diversity.’ ”
William J. Dreyer – Obituary from Reed College
“William Jakob Dreyer ’52, April 23, 2004, in Pasadena, California, after a long illness. William received a bachelor’s degree from Reed in mathematics, and a doctorate in biochemistry in 1956 from the University of Washington. He was a research biochemist for six years at the National Heart Institute and National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Disease, leaving in 1963 to join the Caltech faculty as professor of biology. His innovative research as a molecular immunologist, and his support of technology, were instrumental in the rise of the biotech industry. Of his 21 patents, that of an automated protein sequencer was most critical to co-founding Applied Biosystems with his graduate student, Lee Hood. . . .” Appeared in Reed magazine: November 2004.
Above research assembled by Thomas G. West, author of In the Mind's Eye, Thinking Like Einstein and Seeing What Others Cannot See. Email: thomasgwest@gmail.com. Mobile: 202 262 1266 Blog: inthemindseyedyslexicrenaissance.blogspot.com
