In the Mind's Eye, Dyslexic Renaissance

2012-01-15T19:40:00.000-05:00

Greetings to you all,

I apologize for the long gaps in my entries for this blog. However, I plan at least a brief flurry of activity in the next few weeks. There seems to be a significant shift in attention toward the talents of dyslexics -- the topic that has long interested me and many of you. So, as they say, "stay tuned." You may find the short piece below of some interest as well.

I was invited to prepare this "Foreword" for Forgotten Letters, an anthology of poemsand prose by dyslexic writers. Edited by Naomi Folb, Aarhus, Denmark, the bookwas published by RASP, 11 Thameswalk, Hester Road, London SW11 3BG, England, inOctober 2011.

Included in the anthology is a prose excerpt from the second edition of In the Mind's Eye,“Amazing Shortcomings, Amazing Gifts,” and poems by Pulitzer Prize-winningpoet, Philip Schultz. His book, MyDyslexia, W.W. Norton and Company, 120 pages, was also published in 2011.(Forgotten Letters is available fromAmazon Books UK and http://www.indiegogo.com/Forgotten-Letters.)

All best wishes for the new year,

Tom
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Foreword

There are many puzzles and paradoxes linked to dyslexia. Oneof the most strange of these is that some of the best writers are dyslexic.

How can this be so? How can those who struggle so with wordsbecome such masters of words? Well, good writing is not spelling, reading aloudand rapid recall of memorized texts.

Good writing often requires an ear for the sound oflanguage. Good writing often requires a strong visual imagination with powerfulimages and metaphors communicated through the words. Often the best writing isvery plain, using well the most simple language. Also, good writing requiresfresh language -- not the usual string of conventional terms and syntax. Goodwriting is thoughtful and sometimes surprising in its content and form.

Oddly, the difficulties experienced by dyslexics sometimescan lead directly to becoming advantages in the best writing.

Dyslexics are a heterogeneous group. They are unlikenon-dyslexics. They are unlike each other. But there are many common elements.

They often, almost by definition, learn to read late andvery slowly (often after a long and difficult struggle). This way they neverlose the sound of language in their head – as happens with rapid and efficientreaders.

They often have powerful visual imaginations -- seeingpictures in their minds as they read or speak. Some of the best storytellerssay they never remember the words of a story. Rather, they have a movie runningin their head and they simply talk about what they see. You don’t have to bedyslexic to do this. But dyslexics seem to do this naturally -- whether theywant to or not. But as one can readily see, if you do not or cannot remembertexts as texts -- but only see images -- then the words are likely to bedifferent each time. Sometimes fresh. Sometimes shockingly apt.

In recent years, some researchers are discovering that theparticular formation and wiring of dyslexic brains may lend itself to retaininginformation mainly in story form. These same wiring patterns may also create atendency to make connections between distant and apparently unrelated things.These long-line connections in the brain can produce fresh and unexpectedmetaphors and similes (as well as entrepreneurial insights and scientificdiscoveries).

Often I have heard the phrase, “they see things that othersdon’t see or cannot see.” I have heard the phrase a thousand times, in athousand different settings. It is not only having strong powers ofobservation. There is something going on in these larger than usual, slowmoving, apparently overly connected brains that yields perceptions and insightsoften denied to non-dyslexics -- who may see the unexpected connection whenshown. But they would never see it on their own.

Some say dyslexics are prone to ponder. Non-dyslexics mayhave a look, see what they have been taught to see, say the expected words andquickly move on -- scoring high on conventional tests. (This drives artistscrazy. So many of the clever students learn the words to say about a paintingand then they think they understand it. But they never learn to really see it.)

Dyslexics often have trouble learning to do anythingautomatically -- which can be a problem. It can be very slow. Whether trainingthe movements of their body (in an Olympic sport) or observing nature (in aliterary or scientific puzzle), they have to think and think hard. Big brainswith many connections move slowly -- but they can do jobs fast brains cannotdo.

They see the big picture. Those who ponder hold on to anidea or problem or puzzle for a long time, turning it over and over. Inliterature, sometimes they come up with a fresh and deep insight. (In scienceor technology, sometimes they come up with a remarkable and unexpecteddiscovery.)

It is a commonplace that the best artist or writer is anoutsider, observing human events at the edge. Again, many non-dyslexics cantake on this role. But many dyslexics, because of their deep humiliations fromthe earliest days, naturally assume the role of distant observer. Thetruth-talking commentator who is not caught up in the race. They have felt theotherness from the start.

In my own research on talents among highly successfuldyslexics, my literary friends were shocked and disbelieving when I told themthat the most severely dyslexic person I came across was the Irish poet WilliamButler Yeats. It teaches us. Even in times unfriendly to formal poetry, hislines show up in songs and commentaries and book titles. He said that he oftenstarted with a rhythm, a pulse, and the sense then followed. He never lost thesound of the language.

And everywhere you look there are vivid metaphors andimages. About his early life, Yeats said: “I was unfitted for school work. . .. My thoughts were a great excitement, but when I tried to do anything withthem, it was like trying to pack a balloon in a shed in a high wind.” A fewyears before his death, he observed: “It was a curious experience . . . to have an infirm body and an intellect morealive than it had ever been, one poem leading to another as if . . . lightingone cigarette from another.”

I am honored to introduce this volume of the work ofdyslexic writers -- sometimes harsh and angry, sometimes beautiful as a song,sometimes so short and powerful that you feel you have been punched with aboxer blow. But always fresh, truth telling, full of vivid and unexpectedsounds and images.

Thomas G. West

August 2011

Contacts, websites: E-mails, thomasgwest@gmail.com,thomasgwest@aol.com. See also “Dyslexia: The Unwrapped Gift” (parts 1 and 2) on YouTube and“Thinking Like Einstein,” in the author series on the website “AT and T TechChannel.”

Narrows 1942, New Version

2011-09-21T08:06:00.000-04:00

Note: The story below is based onresearch currently being conducted by Thomas and Margaret West for a futurebook on Charles Massey West, Jr., and Anne Warner West, their lives and theirart.

The Narrows, 1942

by Thomas G. West

It wasn’t the top prize. But itwas major recognition in a major show.

In the fall of 1942, it was a showand catalogue that mainly honored Grant Wood, who had died earlier that sameyear. Wood had already become an icon of American painting. With images such as“American Gothic,” “Daughters ofRevolution” and “Good Influence” he had linked humor and satire with pride inthe simplicity of middle America, using a flat, almost plastic palate, withsmooth forms, high contrast and deep shadows -- not commonly seen again untilthe Pixar computer animation films some 70 years later.

The top prize at the Fifty-ThirdAnnual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Art Institute ofChicago had gone to Edward Hopper for “Nighthawks,” a canvas that was to becomeitself another icon of American painting. Lonely people in a bright diner in adark cityscape -- familiar in numerous magazine articles, satirical imitationsand young persons’ wall posters -- culminating as the central focus of themajor show on Hopper in the East Wing of the National Gallery, Washington, DC,that closed January 21, 2008.

Art historian and commentatorRobert Hughes called Hopper the most important painter of the period and it isnoteworthy that “Nighthawks” is the lone image that spans the backs of hismulti-tape video history of American painting.

It is also notable howpivotal “Nighthawks” was inHopper’s professional life. One writer notes in the National Gallery showcatalogue: “In May 1945, having become famous and successful after his triumphwith ‘Nighthawks,’ Hopper was inducted into the National Institute of Arts andLetters.” (Barter, 2007, p. 211.)

For West in 1942, it was not thetop prize, but there he was, shoulder to shoulder with the top prizewinners --prizewinners who have come to represent, over time, the very best of distinctlyAmerican art.

West’s short biographical sketchwas listed in facing pages with other short sketches of the top prizewinners.Hopper’s bio noted that his “early work aroused so little interest that he gaveup painting for several years.” InWest’s bio, his hometown is spelled incorrectly but his study at thePennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia (PAFA, attended1931-1934; the oldest and most prestigious art school in America) is noted alongwith his then current teaching position and his award in 1934 of the CressonMemorial Traveling Scholarship for 4 to 6 months of study in Europe.

It is true that the year beforethe “The Narrows” had already been shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington,DC, and published in Art Magazine. Butthis was somehow different.

In the Chicago show catalogue,there are black and white photographs of the winning paintings. Hopper’s“Nighthawks” is in the middle of the booklet, Plate VII, “Awarded the Ada S.Garrett Prize.” One page leaf awayis “The Narrows” by Charles M. West, Jr., Plate IX, “Awarded the HonorableMention for Landscape.”

Also listed in the show cataloguewere paintings by well-known and not so well known artists of the period whosework was shown but did not win any prize at that exhibition. (The fullcatalogue listing is quoted below, indented (without quotation marks); commentsfrom this writer are in brackets.) Some of those listed were associated withthe Pennsylvania Academy (many now known as Pennsylvania Impressionists) orwith the Brandywine School of painters near Wilmington, Delaware.

HenrietteWyeth, born Wilmington, Delaware, 1907; lives in San Patricio, New Mexico, 233[ref. number for paintings exhibited in this show], Portrait of N.C. Wyeth.[Daughter of N.C. Wyeth, sister of Andrew Wyeth.]

PeterHurd, born Roswell, New Mexico, 1904; lives in San Patricio, New Mexico, 133,Prairie Shower. [Husband of Henriette Wyeth; much later famously commissionedto do portrait of LBJ.]

WalterStuempfig, Jr., born Philadelphia, 1914; lives in Collegeville, Pennsylvania,218, Family Reunion. [West’s classmate at the PAFA]

FrancisSpeight, born Windsor, North Carolina, 1896; lives in Roxborough, Pennsylvania,217, Scene in West Manayunk. [West’s teacher at the PAFA; both were students ofDaniel Garber. Speight and his wife Sarah were long time close friends ofCharles and Anne West (Sarah was their classmate). Sarah Speight painted aportrait of the young Charles West (at art school) that now hangs in the WestGallery in Centreville. The West family also owns a painting of a Manayunkscene by Francis Speight. ]

Donald M.Mattison, born Beloit, Wisconsin, 1905; lives in Indianapolis, 167, Good-by.[West’s boss at the time. As director of the John Herron Art Institute inIndianapolis, Indiana, Mattison had recruited West, at the University of Iowa,as raising young star teacher.]

Thomas[Hart] Benton, born Neosho, Missouri, 1889; lives in Kansas City, 59, NegroSoldier.

GeorgiaO’Keefe, born Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, 1887; lives in New York, 180, Red Hillsand Bones.

It was not the top prize. But itwas a long way to have traveled for the boy from Centreville -- a small rivertown on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that had been in many ways unchanged formore than a century. The town of 2000 on the Corsica River in a timeless ruralarea of farmers and watermen on the Delmarva Peninsula, had long been a virtualisland between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean (reachable from Baltimoreor Annapolis on the Western Shore only by slow ferry boat or ancient steamer;the two bridges across the bay were not built until the 1950s and the 1970s).

Born in 1907, the young CharlieWest had spent his boyhood mostly in the town’s nearby wharf area (not far fromthe family home on Chesterfield Avenue) -- not unlike Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyerand Huck Finn -- following the river traffic, absorbing outrageous localsuperstitions from the cooks, deck hands and travelers, seeing melodramas atFord’s Floating Theater -- escaping his four older sisters and his no-nonsense,small-town businessman father.

(Ford’s Floating Theater was atiny theater on a barge towed from river town to river town around theChesapeake Bay. It is said to be the actual basis for the stories later used inthe musical “Showboat.” Charles did several watercolors and paintings of thisfloating theater.)

(Among Charlie’s close boyhoodfriends in Centreville was the African American Bush Gaines. They remained goodfriends throughout their adult years. On at least one occasion, Bush tookCharlie to the “Colored-Only” dance hall in Centreville’s “Sandy Bottom” area(the location, near the intersection of South Commerce and Little Kidwell, isnow empty). Long gone, the dance hall, called the “Paladoria Inn,” became thesubject of one of West’s most loved but least-seen paintings (of the samename). The painting is clearly patterned (in many respects) on the painting “LaDanse Au Moulin-Rouge” and especially the “Moulin Rouge -- La Goulue” posterboth by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec -- the latter with distant audience, livelydancer in the middle ground and cartoon-like characterization of a man in thenear foreground.)

It wasn’t the top prize. But inthe fall of 1942, at the age of 35, the recognition received at the Chicagoshow was special indeed -- a kind of watershed, a balance point in his life asa painter and artist, one generation off the farm.

It was only 11 years before thathe had won a full scholarship to attend art school in Philadelphia and thePennsylvania Academy Country School at Chester Springs, PA.

It was only 8 years before that hehad been awarded the top art school prize to travel and study and paint inEurope -- almost losing his life from appendicitis as the grand ship steamedtoward France.

At the hospital in Paris, afterhis operation, he was befriended by a Hungarian Countess and her rich Americanhusband -- and was invited to recuperate at their grand chateau near Paris. Inso doing, he saw, first hand, the last days of a style of life -- with lushgardens, expensive cars, grand estates and grander parties -- that was to endforever only five years later.

In his painting, West loved thedash and freshness and vitality of the French Impressionists of the 1870s, 1880sand 1890s. He saw it as a style well suited to the rural landscapes and riverscenes that he had known all of his life.

Two years before he had married afellow art school student, Anne Dickie Warner. Their first son had been born inMarch of 1941. A second would follow in August of 1943.

The man who later became the headof the Pennsylvania Academy sent a note to the former student: “Dear Charlie: Ican only take time for the merest word this morning, but the Chicago ArtInstitute catalogue has just come to my desk and I see that you have crashedthrough again. Heartiest congratulations and best wishes for all the Wests!Sincerely Yours, Joseph T. Fraser, November 11, 1942.”

When the Chicago show closedDecember 10, 1942, America had been at war for its first full year. The artschool closed. West was retrained to become a draftsman in the local warindustries in Indianapolis.

Thirty years later -- afterteaching painting, sculpture and history of art at several schools andcolleges, eventually resettling his young family in his own hometown -- at theend of December 1972, at the age of 65, West’s life was at an end. He wasburied, with a small family service, along side his parents in the family plotin Centreville, as geese flew overhead in the cold of early January.

His wife Anne turned a smallbuilding, former law offices on Lawyer’s Row in the center of the town, into agallery to honor her husband's paintings and those of others.

West’s father’s dream was that hisson would become a lawyer, the top of the social scale of the smallagricultural town and county, a northern-most outpost of very Southern ruralattitudes and traditions.

It is no small irony that West’spaintings -- his art and his career so much a puzzle to his father and virtuallyeveryone else in this essentially provincial town and rural county -- finallyended up at the center of the law offices that face the old Queen Anne’s CountyCourthouse. There, property deeds had been exchanged and fought over forhundreds of years -- landownership long having been in the area the main path to wealth and socialposition.

Anne Dickie Warner West --descended from an old Quaker family of artists and engineers from Wilmington,Delaware, and, previously, Philadelphia (years before the arrival of WilliamPenn) -- lived on for another 34 years of painting and travel and grandchildrenand family visits in Centreville and then Chestertown -- passing away in hersleep in the afternoon of November 10, 2006, at the age of 97, just a month shortof her 98th birthday.

References

Art Institute of Chicago, 1942.Catalogue of the Fifty-Third Annual Exhibition of American Paintings andSculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Barter, Judith A., 2007. “Travelsand Travails: Hopper’s Late Pictures” in Edward Hopper, Boston,MA: MFA Publications, pp. 211-225. The book was published in conjunction withthe exhibition “Edward Hopper,” organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Art Institute of Chicago.Other sections of this book were written by Carol Troyen, Janet L. Comey,Elliot Bostwick Davis and Ellen E. Roberts.

Huisman, P., and M.G. Dortu, 1964.Lautrec by Lautrec. A Studio Book, TheViking Press. New York, NY. (The Moulin Rouge poster and paintings arereproduced on p. 67 and pp.80-81.)

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Note: A series of photographs ofpaintings by Anne and Charles West, Jr., is available on the web. Instructions:Go to Google, click on images, picasa, request “Charles M. West, Jr.,” thenclick on this image to bring up the full set of 38 images, request slide showwith full screen and commentary text below.

Contact: thomasgwest@gmail.com,thomasgwest@aol.com, mobile 202-262-1266.

Blog: http://inthemindseyedyslexicrenaissance.blogspot.com. (See also “Dyslexia: The Unwrapped Gift” onYouTube and Thinking Like Einsteinon the website “AT&T Tech Channel.”)

New version, revised, August 2011.

2011-09-20T22:03:00.000-04:00

About Dyslexics: Two Books, One Talk and A Sage Mathematician

(1) Blurb written for The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlockingthe Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brainby 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 many years studying the talents of dyslexics, I was pleased to gain fromthe Eides’ systematic investigation a deeper understanding of how and whydyslexics often have a major advantage, working at high levels in manydifferent fields -- and why there is so much misunderstanding amongconventional educators and employers. Linking their broad clinical experiencewith the newest brain research, they illuminate many puzzles -- such as whythere are so many dyslexic entrepreneurs, why so many dyslexics choose to studyengineering or philosophy, why dyslexics often see the big picture and seelinkages 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 whyreading impairments should be seen as only a small part of the pattern -- thatdyslexia is not simply a reading problem, but a different form of brainorganization, yielding remarkable strengths along with surprising difficulties.With new technologies and new business models, we can now see how the oftenremarkable talents of dyslexics will be in greater demand while theirdifficulties will be increasingly seen as comparatively unimportant. I am enormouslygrateful to the Eides for explaining why and how this is so -- Thomas G. West,author of In the Mind’s Eye and ThinkingLike Einstein” (See Amazon.com listing andseparate but related website “Dyslexic Advantage” which has, among othersthings, many videos of famous dyslexics talking about their dyslexia and/ormajor accomplishments.)

(2) Harvard-MIT Conference, Learning and the Brain,“Preparing 21st Century Minds: Using Brain Research to Enhance Cognitive Skillsfor the Future,” Boston, November 18-20. 2011. Talk by Thomas G. West, “SeeingWhat Others Do Not See: Engines of Discovery for the 21st Century,” Sunday,November 20,1:45-3:00 pm. The wording of the original invitation is worthnoting: “We are writing to see if you might be available in the afternoon ofNov. 19 or Nov. 20 to present on your book In the Minds Eye . . . and how those with learning disorders maybenefit from their gifts, such as visual and creative thinking, in thetechnological 21st century, instead of considering them as having deficits[only].” The overall description: “The November conference will explore thecognitive abilities and 21st century skills that will be necessary for studentsto succeed in the future, including such skills as visual learning, criticaland creative thinking, innovation, problem solving. . . . It will also look atthe talents gifted students and those with ADHD, autism and dyslexia bring theto the 21st century along with new technologies for identification andintervention.” Speakers include Howard Gardner, Edward Hallowell, Jerome Kaganand Ellen Winner, among others. (See http://www.learningandthebrain.com/)

(3) Excerpts from the “Foreword” by Thomas G. West preparedfor Forgotten Letters, an anthology ofpoems and prose by dyslexic writers. Edited by Nim Folb, Aarhus, Denmark, to bepublished by RASP, London, England, October 2011. “There are many puzzles and paradoxeslinked to dyslexia. One of the most strange of these is that some of the bestwriters are dyslexic. How can this be so? How can those who struggle so withwords become such masters of words . . .? Good writing often requires an earfor the sound of language. Good writing often requires a strong visualimagination with powerful images and metaphors. . . . Oddly, the difficultiesexperienced by dyslexics sometimes can lead directly to becoming advantages inservice of the best writing. Dyslexics are a heterogeneous group. . . . Butthere are many common elements. They often, almost by definition, learn to readlate and very slowly (after a long and difficult struggle). This is partly thereason that many never lose the sound of language in their head -- as sometimeshappens with rapid and efficient readers. . . . Many dyslexics find it verydifficult to do things automatically -- which can be a problem. . . . Whethertraining the movements of their body (as in an Olympic sport) or observingnature (in a literary or scientific puzzle), they have to think and think hard.Big brains with many connections move slowly -- but they can do jobs fastbrains cannot do. They see the big picture. . . . In my own research on talentsamong highly successful dyslexics, my literary friends were shocked anddisbelieving when I told them that the most severely dyslexic historical personI came across was the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. . . . Everywhere youlook there are vivid metaphors and images. About his early life, Yeats says: ‘Iwas unfitted for school work. . . . My thoughts were a great excitement, butwhen I tried to do anything with them, it was like trying to pack a balloon ina shed in a high wind. . . .’ I am honored to introduce this volume of the workof dyslexic writers -- sometimes harsh and angry, sometimes as beautiful as asong, sometimes so short and powerful that you feel you have been punched witha boxer blow. But always fresh, truth telling, full of vivid and unexpectedsounds and images.” Writers include Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, PhilipSchultz. See his new book, My Dyslexia, W.W. Norton & Company, 2011, 120 pages. (Seehttp://www.indiegogo.com/Forgotten-Letters and Amazon Books.)

(4) Recently reading a book on the 2008 financial crisis, Iwas amazed to see five or six references in the final chapter to a rebelmathematician who had warned Wall Street mathematicians and economists decadesearlier that their models would work for a while and then they would cease towork and would create or trigger a major disaster. This mathematician is the high-visual creatorof the new field of fractal geometry, the late Benoit Mandelbrot. “In aSeptember 2009 article . . . Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugmanlambasted . . . economists’ chronic inability to grasp the possibility ofmassive swings in prices and circumstances that Mandelbrot had warned ofdecades earlier.” (In The Quants -- How a New Breed of Math WhizzesConquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It,by Scott Paterson, Crown Business, 2010, p. 291.) There is mounting evidencethat this highly creative, innovative, big-picture-thinking mathematician wasalmost certainly dyslexic, as he told me personally in a joke at an MITconference years ago. (See In the Mind’s Eye, “Waiting Patterns, A ‘Nomad by Choice,’ ” pp.286-289 and “The Mandelbrot Set” final page of photo set facing p. 289.) (Seealso the very high quality production on Mandelbrot, “Fractals -- Hunting theHidden Dimension,” WGBH NOVA, on the web at PBS and on DVD.)

Contacts and websites: emails, thomasgwest@gmail.com, thomasgwest@aol.com,mobile, 202.262.1266, blog, http://inthemindseyedyslexicrenaissance.blogspot.com.See also “Dyslexia: The Unwrapped Gift” (parts 1 and 2) on YouTube and “ThinkingLike Einstein,” author series, on website AT&T Tech Channel.

Baruj Benacerraf, M.D., 1920-2011

2011-08-04T12:03:00.001-04:00

“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 to Thomas G. West about his book In the Mind’s Eye. Dr. Benacerraf passed away August 2, 2011, in Boston, aged 90. He 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) had a special facility with visualizing space and time -- an ability that he believed contributed greatly to his scientific research and discoveries.

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The excerpt below is from the Epilogue of the second edition of In the Mind’s Eye (2009, pp. 346-349) -- and features more recent comments about dyslexia and talent from Dr. Baruj Benacerraf --

Talent Meeting

For several years a small group of researchers has been interested in trying to establish an empirical basis for the hypothesis that dyslexics are more talented in certain areas than non-dyslexics. In recent years, some of these researchers have worked with The Dyslexia Foundation (formerly the National Dyslexia Research Foundation) to move this research agenda forward.

Accordingly, a small meeting was convened at the MIT Conference Center near Boston, Mass. The conference was built around Geschwind’s hypothesis “that the same brain organization that led to language disabilities for dyslexics might also lead to certain high level abilities.” The goal of the conference acknowledged “that Geschwind’s theory – dyslexics may have special talents or unusual abilities as compared to their non-dyslexic peers – while compelling, needs to be examined with increased scientific rigor.” The meeting participants and planners totaled 22 individuals – including dyslexia researchers, a facilitator and a number of successful dyslexics (a scientist, a photographer, an actor, an accountant, an economist, a TV producer, an educator, a computer graphics artist and inventor). The basic idea was that researchers should listen to the dyslexics as they discuss their successes and strengths – in order to begin to develop new ways of investigating these talents within a scientific context.

According to the meeting report, all the participating dyslexics “agreed that dyslexia is not just reading but a different way of thinking, of processing information; they ‘see’ things differently from non-dyslexic individuals. This could be an ability to make inferences more quickly than non-dyslexics, a visual-spatial approach to problem solving that may be unique to dyslexics, or some sort of unique perception or processing ability.” The general agreement that dyslexia is more than reading is noteworthy. It is even more noteworthy that the capacity to ‘see’ differently comes up in such discussions with truly remarkable frequency -- whether the field is radiology, MR imaging, ultrasound, dermatology or art fraud detection and authentication.

Advantages to be Studied

Similar observations came from Dr. Baruj Benacerraf -- who is dyslexic, a former head of New York’s Dana Farber Cancer Institute and a Nobel Prize winner in immunology. He was invited to the MIT conference center meeting but was unable to attend. However, he expressed great interest in the dyslexia and talent project -- and said he would be happy to work with the group sometime in the future. Indeed, he made several statements during a telephone conversation that he said he would be happy to have included in the meeting report.

He said (in paraphrase): “Yes, there is definitely a positive side to dyslexia and this should be studied. One can deal with the problems with special techniques and lots of hard work. However, he asserted that there are definite advantages -- seemingly often having to do with distinctive ways of perceiving space and visual material. But these advantages have not been studied. They seem to be little understood and are rarely developed explicitly.” As an example, he spoke of his daughter who is a specialist in ultrasound imaging. He said “she can see things that others cannot or do not see.”

Dr. Benacerraf originally learned of his own dyslexia through the traits diagnosed in his daughter and grandson -- not an uncommon pattern. Of course, he was aware all along of his own reading, spelling, handwriting and other difficulties. In part, he attributes his success in science to his dyslexia – since he believes the dyslexia allows him to have a better sense of time and three-dimensional space than others in his field.

Impossible Figures, Possible Measures

Many valuable insights came out of the MIT Conference Center meeting. However, perhaps the most important development was the general agreement that the thin edge of the wedge in talent research had already been recognized and replicated. Several researchers at the meeting indicated that they had hoped, years ago, to uncover hidden talents among dyslexic children and adults they were studying. They were then greatly disappointed not to be able to document these expectations using conventional testing instruments and measures. However, based on the results of two studies discussed at the meeting, it seems evident that finding talents among dyslexics may require different forms of measurement. In other words, real talents are evident in life and work, but the usual methods of assessing talent do not appear to be appropriate for the task.

Several years ago, one group of researchers hoped to better understand aspects of these talents by comparing visual abilities among dyslexic and non-dyslexic school children. To their surprise and consternation, the first set of tests indicated the dyslexics were mostly slower and less accurate than the non-dyslexic students. There was one exception, however. In one part, the test of what is called “impossible figures” (line drawings of objects not possible to construct in 3D space) the dyslexic children were faster but no less accurate.

Some thought that this was an unimpressive finding. Others felt that this finding might be very important indeed – that it may be all that is needed to make a break into a deeper understanding of the dyslexic kind of brain and its distinctive (and hard to measure) special capacities. This task, unlike others, seemed to tap into apparently distinctive dyslexic abilities -- seeing things as wholes rather than parts and an ability to perform better on novel tasks.

Briefly, it appeared that the other more conventional visual-spatial tests included a number of merely mechanical “traps” which tended to slow the dyslexics and make their answers less accurate -- such as filling in the right circle on the wrong line of the answer sheet. On the other hand, the “impossible figure” tasks seemed well suited to the distinctive abilities of the dyslexics – as well as being relatively free of mechanical “traps.”

With this in mind, a second study was carried out – with substantially similar results, largely replicating the previous study. The results of the two studies were reported in Brain and Language in an article titled: “Dyslexia Linked to Talent: Global Visual-spatial Ability.” In the discussion, these authors observe:

“Given that individuals with dyslexia typically read slowly, . . . the finding that individuals with dyslexia are faster than controls on any task is surprising. The compelling implication of this finding is that dyslexia should not be characterized only by deficit, but also by talent. Global visual-spatial processing (what we refer to as ‘holistic inspection’) may underlie important real-world activities such as mechanical skill, carpentry, invention, visual artistry, surgery, and interpreting x-rays or magnetic resonance images (MRI). Linking dyslexia to talent casts this condition in far more optimistic light than linking it to a deficit only. . . . The discovery of talent associated with dyslexia may eventually lead to more effective educational strategies and help guide individuals with dyslexia to professions in which they can excel.”

Thus, perhaps we might conclude, in spite of initial appearances to the contrary, that in fact the authors of this study and their associates are indeed way out in front by looking at the talents of dyslexics: not only out in front of most other researchers -- but perhaps even out in front of the popular and business press as well.

__________________________

Wild Side of Math Models

2011-08-03T14:34:00.001-04:00

I had written about the late Benoit Mandelbrot in In the Mind’s Eye long ago because of his revolutionary and extremely visual approach to mathematics. More recently, I have been learning that he was almost certainly dyslexic -- which he had partly admitted to me in a joke during an MIT conference we both attended years ago. Then, more recently, I learned more of the extensive practical applications of his fractal concepts -- used, for example, in all cell phones.

But if that were not enough, I now read that he had warned against the mathematical models that crashed Wall Street in 2008. He is referred to several times in Scott Patterson’s book, The Quants -- How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It.

According to Patterson, “For years, critics on the fringes of the quant world had warned that trouble was brewing. Benoit Mandelbrot, for instance, the mathematician who decades earlier had warned the quants of the wild side of their mathematical models -- the seismic fat trails on the edges of the bell curve -- watched the financial panic of 2008 with a grim sense of recognition.” (p. 295)

Finding Interconnections

2011-08-02T22:51:00.000-04:00

I keep re-reading sections of a new book that is being published this month. I had an advance copy and was asked to write a blurb (below) for the cover. However, on re-reading sections, I am again even more amazed at the aptness of the observations of the authors -- telling me new things about people whose work I have admired for a very long time.

The blurb --

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 2011.

“This book is destined to become a classic. After 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 the 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 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”

Some sections from their book --

“Several published research studies support the idea that individuals with dyslexia, as a group, show special talents for finding similarities and likenesses. . . .

“. . . Strength in detecting relationships of correlation or cause and effect is a useful skill in many fields, including science, business, economics, investment, design, psychology, leadership, and human relationships of all kinds. . . .

“. . . Another dyslexic scientist who has demonstrated an acute perception of the interconnectedness of nature is Dr. James Lovelock. Lovelock is best known as the formulator of the Gaia hypothesis, which states that the climatic and chemical components of the earth’s crust and atmosphere interact to form a complex system that maintains the earth in ‘a comfortable state for life.’ Lovelock was the first to posit such connections when he noticed subtle correlations in the variations of the chemical composition of the earth’s atmosphere and oceans. While other scientists before Lovelock had recognized that the earth’s atmosphere was almost perfectly suited for biological life, none had realized that this special balance was maintained by the interactions of a tightly linked network of chemical processes: they’d observed the same parts, but missed the interconnections that form the whole system.

“. . . Lovelock already had a Ph.D. in physiology when his growing interests in environmental science and climatology led him to pursue a second doctorate in biophysics. Ultimately, it was this blending of professional perspectives that suggested to him that the earth’s biosphere might be understood and studied as if it were a kind of physiological system.” (Dyslexic Advantage, pp. 81-92)

A Dyslexic Poet -- William Butler Yeats

2011-07-22T19:26:00.000-04:00

Recently, I was rereading the profile of William Butler Yeats from In the Mind’s Eye. I was reminded of what an interesting man he was -- and how much his story can teach us, even now. Below, I have inserted a section from that profile.

In the absence of basic knowledge of how to deal with dyslexia, several courses of action are possible. Both Faraday and Edison dropped out of school and were educated by their mothers, more or less--later taking personal responsibility for their own extensive self-education. Einstein's relationship with the conventional school system alternated between grudging toleration and active resistance, until he too dropped out, but at a much later and more risky stage; fortunately, his experience at the unusual progressive school at Aarau allowed him to get back on track, to some extent, reviving his serious interest in his studies and allowing him to pass his university entrance exams on his second attempt. Patton was tutored at home until he was ready to enter the conventional stream. Churchill limped through the conventional upper-class educational system, but his real education does not seem to have begun until he started his own self-study program as a young adult, while stationed with the British Army in India.

In the time of Yeats, Churchill, Patton and Einstein, in contrast to the time of Faraday, school systems had become more pervasive and it had become increasingly difficult to skirt the conventional system without severe consequences. In the face of the squeeze of conventional and universal educational methods, Yeats seems to have accidentally found himself in an acceptable and helpful alternate route: stay in less demanding institutions until one's special abilities have begun to mature. During the early years in London, Yeats may have, in fact, been better off at a school that was less challenging, at least initially, in order to give him time to develop at his own pace and in his own way.

Parents and teachers may fault schools for not teaching certain skills at the expected ages. In most cases of learning difficulties, the best strategy seems clearly to be early identification and remediation. But in some cases, where delayed maturity in some specific area is a major factor, it may be best to take the pressure off and merely wait for a while. In these cases, it may be that too much pressure on remediation of certain skills, too early, is not only wasteful but destructive, especially when the pressure comes from a heavy-handed classroom teacher rather than a specially trained tutor.

After the move from Ireland to London, Yeats' first school was run by a clergyman who was more concerned with gentility and athletics than scholarship. Regarding one student who was poor in Greek but good in cricket, Yeats explains that the head master would comment: “Oh, leave him alone.” As for Yeats himself:

“I was unfitted for school work, and though I would often work well for weeks together, I had to give the whole evening to one lesson if I was to know it. My thoughts were a great excitement, but when I tried to do anything with them, it was like trying to pack a balloon in a shed in a high wind. I was always near the bottom of my class, and always making excuses that but added to my timidity; but no master was rough with me. I was known to collect moths and butterflies and to get into no worse mischief than hiding now and again an old tailless white rat in my coat-pocket or my desk.”

One suspects that sometimes it may be better to let some things slide, at least for a while (but always trying to make progress in certain areas of strength). If the neurologists are correct about the possible advantages of delayed maturation and the process of gradually learning to “guess” better based on greater life experience (among other things), then it would appear that the dyslexic (and those more or less like them) could sometimes use to advantage plenty of extra time. That is, if maturation really is a major factor in the course of development for the gifted dyslexic (with or without identification and remediation), then perhaps the first best guide is to be patient and make educational arrangements that do the least damage to the child's self-concept while ensuring that high-quality content is provided in any way possible--until the late bloomer is suddenly ready to take off, racing past many of his peers.

Yeat's recurrent reference to his active mind is accompanied in the above passage by an apt and powerful metaphor, as one might expect--“it was like trying to pack a balloon in a shed in a high wind.” It is also notable that he described himself as near the bottom of his class--and that he chose to use a small animal for distraction in class exactly as Susan Hampshire had done as a student. In varied times and varied situations, the incidental similarities between the people we are considering can be quite striking.

The advantages of the earlier (less demanding) school may be more apparent in comparison with his later school experience. At 15 years of age, Yeats went to a new school at Harcourt Street in London which was much more difficult and demanding than his previous London school had been. He explains:

“I had not thought it possible that boys could work so hard. . . . Even had I never opened a book not in the school course, I could not have learned a quarter of my night's work. I had always done Euclid easily, making the problems out while the other boys were blundering at the blackboard, and it carried me from the bottom to the top of the class; but these boys [at the Harcourt Street school] had the same natural gift and instead of being in the fourth or fifth book were in the modern books at the end of the primer; and in place of a dozen lines of Virgil with a dictionary, I was expected to learn with the help of a crib a hundred and fifty lines. The other boys were able to learn the translation off, and to remember what words of Latin and English corresponded with one another, but I, . . . made ridiculous mistakes; and what could I, who never worked when I was not interested, do with a history lesson that was but a column of seventy dates? I was worst of all at literature, for we read Shakespeare for his grammar exclusively.”

The irony is poignant. But the work was unrelenting. He learned his Latin lesson well once and then he was chided for not knowing it all the time. “No one knew that I had learnt it in the terror that alone could check my wandering mind.”

A curriculum more ill-designed for Yeats' kind of mind can scarcely be imagined. All of the subject matter seems to have been converted into cold data to be memorized (where those with skill only in memory could still shine), while Yeats' areas of interest and strength, whether literature or history, were transformed into further frigid and lifeless difficulties.

Even his skill in geometry, the touchstone for so many of our visual thinkers with learning difficulties, was discounted for Yeats, not only by his school and peers, but also by his own otherwise supportive father: “ ‘Euclid,’ he would say, ‘is too easy. It comes naturally to the literary imagination. . . .’ ” In spite of this, Yeats' interest in geometric concepts persisted in curious ways in his subsequent creative work. This interest also provides a glimpse at his propensity for a curious form of visual thinking in this later work.

For example, one of the dominant images he used in some of his most admired later poems was that of the “gyres.” These were seen as two cones or vortices, one inverted inside the other, so that each vortex, according to Yeats’ description, formed “from itself an opposing vortex, the apex of each vortex in the middle of the other's base. . . .” This visual image was used to embody the basic concept of generalized inverse proportion or reciprocal action--that is, in various aspects of life and nature, as one thing increases, another diminishes, and vice versa.

Thus, curiously, the poet draws on deep mathematical concepts to find patterns to shape his poetry. Thus, one of Yeats’ most important images is a kind of three-dimensional geometric model, one which entails a form of conic sectioning--where any moment in time is a slice through the two cones (perpendicular to the axis of rotation), giving two circles, one increasing in area as the other decreases in area over time--as one circle shrinks to a point and another point expands to an ever larger circle.

So, we have come full circuit. Earlier, we considered visual-thinking scientists, mathematicians and inventors who thought in analogies and images like a poet. In Yeats, we see a poet who repeatedly uses major images and archetypal analogies that are in effect three-dimensional geometric models--essentially mathematical patterns in their conception and application.

Eventually, Yeats, like so many dyslexics, had to make the best of his very limited academic and professional options. And also like so many dyslexics, he chose to pretend to his parents that his decisions were more a matter of personal preference than bitter necessity. (After all, the appearance of being in control is really quite important.) Thus, when Yeats told his father that he would not go to Trinity College Dublin as three generations had before him, he preferred to have it seen as self-assertion or rebellion--but he confided: “I did not tell him that neither my classics nor my mathematics were good enough for any examination.”

Yeats went on to arts college because he had few other options. Yet, unlike his more conventionally successful peers, he was driven on by an unflagging, childlike enthusiasm and a relentless passion. Yeats never did learn many of his “basics.” He probably never would have done well on anyone's examinations of achievement. However, in time, he became the leading poet in the Irish Literary Renaissance and the central playwright in the establishment of the Irish National Theater. He made extensive use of traditional Irish legends and tales, but he never could learn to speak Gaelic. He had hated studying history as it was taught but became a major figure in the making of history and sat as a Senator in the new Irish Parliament. He followed his father's advice and did not concern himself with making money, yet he directed the committee that selected the designs for the distinctive coin series of the new Irish state. He was slow to read. Yet, in time, he learned to compose a distinctive and musical verse that is still among the most widely read English poetry of this century. He never became anything like a scholar. Yet, in time, his work would be recognized by a Nobel Prize for Literature and hundreds of scholarly books would be written about his life and works. In time, he learned to write. But he never learned to spell.

The Puzzle of My Own Early Education

2011-06-17T21:52:00.001-04:00

Suffield Academy Alumni Leadership Award -- Presentation April 18, 2011 -- by Thomas G. West, Class of 1961

I want to thank the Alumni Association, Headmaster Cahn and the Suffield Academy Community for this award. I am especially grateful for this honor because, when I was student here, I imagine there was no one in our class less likely to be honored decades later.

“I was happy as a child. . . . I have been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school [made] a sombre grey patch upon the chart of my journey. . . . All my contemporaries and even younger boys seemed in every way better adapted to the conditions of our little world. They were far better both at the games and the lessons. It is not pleasant to feel oneself so completely outclassed and left behind at the beginning of the race.” (Churchill, My Early Life, 1930, pp. 38-39.)

These are not my words. They are the words of Winston Churchill writing in 1930 of his early life and education. His greatest test and chief accomplishments were not to begin until 9 years later. But his words perfectly reflected my own feelings at the very beginning of my three years at Suffield. Fortunately, those three years provided, in many ways, a major turning point in my life -- and my feelings were quite different three years later.

I had arrived as a slow walking, slow talking country boy from a rural and very Southern part of the Eastern Shore of Maryland -- now considered highly fashionable and largely unspoiled -- but then considered backward and economically depressed. My older brother and I were from this border state -- but for the New England and New York boys, we might as well have come from Mississippi or Alabama.

We worked very hard. And I was highly motivated. In my early schooling, I had learned to read imperfectly and very late and had unusual difficulties with many school subjects. This was a puzzle to my teachers and a worry to my otherwise supportive parents. Even in a comparatively undemanding rural school system, I could barely keep up. I could hardly read anything out loud. Foreign languages were a humiliation. I could learn almost nothing by rote. I could not memorize. I could not retain exact texts. I had to have time to ponder and think. I had to understand. I needed to know the story. I had to visualize. Then, I would never forget.

I knew nothing of my own dyslexia at the time. I was not diagnosed until some 20 years later. But I did know that there were many things that I could not do -- that were quite easy for others. I saw Suffield as my chance to catch up -- and fill in some of the gaps. Initially, my greatest ambition was to avoid being at the bottom of the class.

But over time, things began to change. The talented teachers, the disciplined routines, the absence of distractions at Suffield helped me to focus and learn how to build on my own strengths. And, although I was never any good at team sports, doubtless the (required) regular practice and exercise helped me to grow and develop in many ways as well.

Gradually, the increasingly high level content began to change what was wanted and what I could produce. Gradually, everything changed. The higher level curriculum began to play to my strengths rather than my weaknesses.

Before, I had trouble with arithmetic and math facts, but in time I came to love geometry, log tables and the slide rule. (Yes, this was long before pocket calculators and computers. So hard to believe.) I had trouble with foreign languages, but loved linguistics and the history of language. I still had lots of trouble with spelling and my slow, faltering reading -- but I began to see that I seemed to have a special knack for following logical arguments, complex story lines and higher level conceptual thinking.

Gradually -- strangely -- by the senior year, I felt that I was getting more out of the readings than many or most of my classmates. I can still recall, in some detail, almost all of the readings we did during that senior year.

After Suffield, I went to a small liberal arts college (Gettysburg) which proved to be the right place, on the whole, for the further growth of the abilities initially developed at Suffield. Remarkably, I majored in English Literature and Philosophy (so many books to be read and understood) and later did graduate work in International Relations.

After graduate school and military service, I was employed by several engineering and consulting companies where I worked in early computer management information systems (NIMH and NIDA), surveys of medical care quality (SSA), energy policy (DOE), international trade (DOC) and, eventually, renewable energy development projects, resource surveys and training for engineers in Egypt funded by USAID.

Throughout these work experiences, I found ways around my weaknesses and ways to exploit my talents. I had little technical training, but -- usually working with engineers, economists or computer programmers -- often I found I could easily understand most technical concepts and programs. I could write about them, explain them in ordinary language and, eventually, manage them as well.

However, I didn’t really begin to understand the patterns of talent common among dyslexics -- until our own two sons started having problems in their early years of primary school. The idea that they were going to go through what I had gone through -- this was a great emotional shock for me. Suddenly, I realized that I had to understand this thing that had been running my life -- and, in part, the life of my dyslexic artist father as well as other family members, more or less.

So I had myself tested for dyslexia. I attended dyslexia conferences and started the research that eventually became the book, In The Mind’s Eye. I learned that almost all the professionals in the field wanted to fix reading problems, but that they mostly ignored the special talents that many dyslexics have. My research and book focused on these talents as no other book had done before -- the neurological foundations, the case studies and profiles of famous people and the growing role of new computer graphic information visualization technologies.

To my surprise (and to the delight of my publisher), over time, the book became a classic -- an “evergreen,” as they say in the trade, a book that never stops selling.

I suspect that the strong focus on dyslexic talents is the reason that the book is still very much alive today -- and still regarded as radical new thinking -- twenty years (this month) after it was first published. Even the university librarians liked it -- it was selected as one of the “best of the best” for the year by the American Library Association (one of only 13 books in their broad psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience category). With 16 printings and a new second edition in English, the book has been translated into both Japanese and Chinese. A Korean translation will be available later this year.

Over time the book came to be highly regarded in many quarters. To my great delight, Oliver Sacks (the famous author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) came to write in the foreword to the new edition: “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.”

During these years, I have been invited to give talks and workshops for scientific, medical, art, design, computer and business groups in the U.S. and overseas, including groups in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan and twelve European countries.

Also, I came to be asked to write a regular series of articles on the broad effects of visualization technologies for a quarterly publication of the international professional association for computer graphics artists and technologists -- an organization with many creative dyslexics. These articles were finally collected into a book with the title: Thinking Like Einstein.

I am now working on a third book, this one dealing with high level creativity and brain diversity -- including dyslexia and Asperger syndrome among other alternative modes of learning and thinking -- focusing on individuals and families, including one British family with (over five generations) many visual thinkers, many dyslexics and four Nobel Prize winners.

Attitudes toward the special talents of dyslexics have been changing, but very slowly. Gradually, non-dyslexics are beginning to see why it is important to have dyslexics involved in their businesses or their scientific research. As is often observed, they “see things that others do not see or cannot see.”

During the years since my book was first published, dyslexia is gradually coming to be seen, remarkably, as a significant advantage in an increasing number of fields -- often linked to success in design innovation, entrepreneurial business and scientific discovery. One of the founders of the modern study of molecular biology was dyslexic and described to me how he used his powerful visual imagination to observe the interaction of molecules and see new patterns 12 years ahead of all others in the field.

The National Science Foundation is currently funding a Harvard-Smithsonian study of when and where dyslexia may be an advantage in doing science, especially within astrophysics. In the field of computer graphics and simulation, dyslexic artists and technologists are often leading innovators. Recently a new website and book have been published with the tile, "Dyslexic Advantage." A world famous professor of paleontology tries to teach his graduate students how to “think like a dyslexic” so they can see patterns invisible to others, sometimes doing things long thought impossible. The rest is “just memorization,” he says, without innovation or significant new discovery.

No one could be more surprised that I am with the wide and continuing interest in my books and the ideas they contain. However, I have never forgotten that my first steps along this path were taken here at Suffield Academy. And, as I started my book research long ago, it was more than a small comfort to know that Winston Churchill, for all his major achievements as a leader in time of crisis, had also -- once -- been at the bottom of the class -- feeling “completely outclassed and left behind at the beginning of the race.”

__________________________________

Contact: Thomas G. West, author of Thinking Like Einstein and In the Mind's Eye (One of the "best of the best" for the year, American Library Association; new revised edition with Foreword by Oliver Sacks, MD, released September 2009). Research Scholar Study Office 1W-16C, National Library of Medicine. Institutional address: Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, Member of the Advisory Board, 4400 University Drive, MS 2A1, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia 22030-4444.

Email: thomasgwest@gmail.com or thomasgwest@aol.com.

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

Videos: Two videos are available on the web which deal with visual thinking, visual technologies and the talents of dyslexics -- along with the two books by Thomas G. West:

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

(2) Recently placed on YouTube, “Dyslexia: An Unwrapped Gift.” Shot in “The Chained Library” of Hereford Cathedral in England, this video features Thomas West along with several dyslexic British teenagers who were filmed while 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. Still widely believed to be the best documentary for capturing the attention of dyslexic teens. Provided on YouTube in two parts, about 9 minutes each.

Awards: In 2008, the Wye River Upper School, Wye Mills, Maryland, established the annual student prize: “The Thomas G. West Achievement in Digital Arts and Technology Award.” In 2010, West was presented with the Siena Cypress Leadership Award given by the Siena School, Silver Spring, Maryland. The award honors “individuals who make significant and lasting contributions to the education of children and young adults with learning disabilities.” In 2011, West was selected to receive the Alumni Leadership Award by Suffield Academy, Suffield, Conn. Recipients of the award are recognized for their “ability to make a significant, lasting, and positive impact on the world” together with their “attainment of professional excellence, demonstrated leadership, . . . and contributions to the betterment of our society.”

Kids Designing Tests for Dyslexic Talents

2011-06-17T09:45:00.003-04:00

Greetings. Sorry for long delay. More to come now, finally. I will start again with a brief story that stays in my mind. Recently, I gave a talk at a school for young dyslexics. In my slide series I made reference to the need for new assessment tools to properly measure the talents of dyslexics. Then, I rephrased my statement and said: "I want to design a test where dyslexics will get the top score and non-dyslexics will get the bottom score." To my surprise, the room broke out into loud spontaneous applause. I had not expected this. It had never happened like that before. Clearly, they are hungry for this. And I realized this was a project the kids should work on. Have them just jump in. Try to figure out what they are good at -- and how to measure it. They will repeat what is already known -- but it will be theirs. They will know how they got there. But they will probably come up with many new things as well -- or new attention to things that were thought to be unimportant. They will likely use new technologies and approaches not used by the well-trained professionals. They will be highly motivated. It would be like hands-on ("problem based") medical training. You start with the patient and just keep asking questions. They will better understand the old tests. They will be proud of creating some new tests and approaches. They will be proud of their own thoughtful observations. They would learn much. We would learn much. I think of this daily.

Part 1, Nikola Tesla, Thinking in Pictures and Asperger Syndrome

2010-09-09T19:36:00.002-04:00

“When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever; the results were the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception.”

Initially, Nikola Telsa was of special interest for us because of his extraordinarily powerful visual imagination. As he says, his imagination appears to have been so highly developed that he could create complete models of devices in his mind, building them and running them as if they were real (My Inventions, 1919). But it is probably of no small consequence that he seems to have experienced, initially, this powerful ability to visualize things not as a useful talent or wonderful gift but instead as a problem.

An Unusual Affliction

Tesla explains: “In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thought and action.” He makes clear that although these images were powerful in their projection, not hallucinations. “They were pictures of things and scenes which I had really seen, never of those I had imagined. When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety. . . . These certainly were not hallucinations . . . for in other respects I was normal and composed.”

The son of a Serbian Orthodox priest, Tesla was relatively well educated in literature, science and mathematics and had a strong practical inventive inclination. He was a lonely man with many odd habits and strong compulsions. For example, at each meal he would have to calculate the cubic area of each bite of food before eating it. Similarly, he had to finish reading whatever he started, even when it ran into many volumes, whether or not he had lost interest or had decided that he was getting little return for his effort.

In 1884, he immigrated to America during a time of great excitement over technical innovation with the telephone, electric light and other new inventions. He even worked for Thomas Edison for a while (with extraordinary energy and dedication) when he first arrived in America, but finally had to leave Edison's company to pursue his own highly innovative but incompatible ideas—inventing, eventually, the entire alternating current electric power system used around the world today. (Edison was furious that Tesla’s system proved to be vastly superior to his own direct current system and he did everything he could to discredit the system that Telsa had sold to Westinghouse.)

In order to control his strong visual imagination in his youth, Tesla experimented with various mental exercises and, quite literally, flights of the imagination. In time, it became clear that the “affliction” was the negative side of what turned out to be a special and unusual talent. He continued these exercises “. . . until I was about seventeen when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radically opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient.”

Tesla explains that if something is constructed before it is fully developed and worked out in the mind, then the experimenter is often distracted by comparatively unimportant details of apparatus construction. In Tesla's words: “The moment one constructs a device to carry into practice a crude idea he finds himself unavoidably engrossed with the details and defects of the apparatus. As he goes on improving and reconstructing, his force of concentration diminishes and he loses sight of the great underlying principle. . . .”

Powers Beyond Belief

Some might question Tesla’s claims. He was known to have a tendency to make extravagant statements, especially to eager young reporters. We know also that Tesla was a great showman when demonstrating his new electrical devices to the public--more like a magician than an engineer or scientist. Yet his tricks were based on scientific and engineering knowledge that was not known by others in his field until decades later. Also, many of the extravagant tales and devices, like laser beams, long distance microwave power transmission and ocean thermal electricity generation, are only comparatively recently coming into serious consideration and use.

For many, Tesla’s claims were hard to believe (although those who did believe in him, in contrast, accorded him almost cult leader-like status). However, we now have reason for taking Tesla at his word. He does provide some justification for why this should be so: “Why should it be otherwise? Engineering, electrical and mechanical, is positive in results. There is scarcely a subject that cannot be mathematically treated and the effects calculated or the results determined beforehand from the available theoretical and practical data. The carrying out into practice of a crude idea as is being generally done is, I hold, nothing but a waste of energy, money and time.”

Models in Mind and Machine

We are now learning that Tesla was, in most respects, to be believed. It is perhaps a sign of our times that what might be seen as a bizarre tale spun by Tesla in a magazine article published in 1919, is now, over 80 years later, exploding into prominence at the center of industry and commerce. Tesla argued that it is a waste of time and money to build a model or prototype of anything until a number if variations have been tested in a powerful visual imagination such as his own. Virtually the same point is being made in recent years by designers, engineers and managers--but this time they are talking about the machine equivalent of Tesla's remarkable and unusual imagination--that is, what is now known as “3D computing.”

With three-dimensional computing, working models of aircraft, automobiles, golf clubs or nuclear power plants can be (and have been) constructed inside a powerful graphic computer and displayed on a screen. These models can be operated and tested and modified much as Tesla was apparently able to do with his imagination alone. Proponents claim many advantages for the widespread use of 3D computing, but two of the most important advantages relate to increased creativity and reductions in the costs of prototype building. For example, in one early study (by KPMG Peat Marwick) of the use of 3D computing in five U.S. and Japanese companies: “The speed and power of 3D Computing has all but eliminated the requirements to produce physical prototypes and models. This allows management and engineers to economically pursue more creative and sometimes high risk design options. NASA/Ames uses [3D] workstations to simulate a wide number of options for a Mach 25 aircraft that would have been cost prohibitive using the traditional wind tunnel practices.”

Tesla noted the speed and ease with which his mental modeling proceeded, free of the distractions of building an actual physical prototype. This is not an unusual observation. Creative designers often lament the time required to build a physical product of what could be built so quickly in their mind. Thus, it may not be surprising that, in practice, another important consequence of 3D computing is a marked decrease in frustration along with a marked increase in productivity: “Users of 3D Computing reported increases in individuals' productivity of 20 percent to 50 percent. This higher productivity was used to expand the scope of individual job functions and to reduce the actual time to complete a project. The ability to ‘handle’ the realistic electronic model led to improved interaction between the designer and the model resulting in a more intimate and accurate understanding of the model. This also resulted in more creativity, less frustration. We consistently observed that users had a positive work attitude and they preferred working in a 3D environment as compared to the manual or 2D environment in which they had previously worked.”

Something Really New

These kinds of reports make one wonder whether this is just one more step in an old progression or whether these developments, by now well established in some areas, can be seen as the beginning of something that is really quite new. Such changes may make it possible for comparatively ordinary people to do with ease and speed what before only extraordinary people like Tesla could do inside their heads. And, as we have noted before, this new direction in development might very well favor those who are much better with the manipulation of images and 3D models than the manipulation of codes, words and even mathematical symbols.

With Tesla, the power of the visual imagination takes on a whole new dimension. He was clearly an intensely creative visual thinker. He had some related difficulties, such as a curious inability to make drawings, but these did not appear to be a problem for him. Perhaps his greatest liability was the fierce independence and lack of social skill that repeatedly caused him to fall out with his coworkers and benefactors, eventually making him unable to continue his work.

Telsa, however, provides us with an example of visual thinking that illustrates, in a most concrete way, the power and potential of this ability. What Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein may have been able to do with abstract images, imaginary mechanical analogies or related mathematical formulas, Tesla seems to have been able to do in his mind with almost real mechanical devices and working machinery. (Some readers may recall an earlier blog referring to the powerful visual thinking used by the dyslexic molecular biologist William Dreyer--“Amazing Shortcomings, Amazing Gifts,” March 29, 2009.)

Tesla provides us with not only important new insights but also with a standard against which other visual thinkers may be assessed. He also provides us with an example of what, in time, more ordinary people may be able to do with the new tools that are becoming cheaper, more powerful, and easier to use as they become more and more widely available.

Note: Please go on to parts 2 and 3 of this blog entry below.

Part 2, Nikola Tesla, Thinking in Pictures and Asperger Syndrome

2010-09-09T19:34:00.001-04:00

Thinking in Pictures in Another Dimension

When I did my original research on Nikola Tesla for my earlier book In the Mind’s Eye, I decided to include him in that book because of his wonderful descriptions of his own powerful visualization abilities--in spite of the fact that he had no indication of dyslexia or the other language-related learning problems I was also interested in. He had many unusual characteristics, but he seemed in most respects entirely unlike most of the other individuals I had included in that book. I suspected there was a significant pattern to Tesla’s unusual mixture of traits but I had no idea what it was.

Then I read Temple Grandin’s book Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism. Grandin, as an autistic herself, describes the traits typically seen in a form of high functioning autism known as Asperger syndrome. In one chapter she deals with the possible relationship of giftedness or even genius in relation to the syndrome. Here she describes a number of important historical figures who would appear to have many of the appropriate traits. Although she does not explicitly name Tesla, it would appear that Grandin had clearly supplied the pattern I had been looking for. Common characteristics of Asperger syndrome are: excellent rote memory, notable lack of social skills and lack of sensitivity to various social cues, strong focus and single mindedness of thought and action along with eccentric, sometimes compulsive behavior.

In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in autism and Asperger syndrome. This increase in interest is mainly due to very large increases in the numbers of children (and their parents) being diagnosed. By now it is well known that these increases are often associated with areas of the country where many high technology industries are located. An article by Steve Silberman for Wired magazine, titled “The Geek Syndrome,” summarized the situation some years ago: “At clinics and schools in [Silicon] Valley, the observation that most parents of autistic kids are engineers and programmers who themselves display autistic behavior is not news. And it may not be news to other communities either. Last January, Microsoft became the first major US corporation to offer its employees insurance benefits to cover the cost of behavioral training for their autistic children. One Bay Area mother [reported] that when she was planning a move to Minnesota with her son, who has Asperger syndrome, she asked the school district there if they could meet her son's needs. ‘They told me that the northwest quadrant of Rochester, where the IBMers congregate, has a large number of Asperger kids,’ she recalls. ‘It was recommended I move to that part of town.’ ”

Links with a range of technical occupations have been widely observed. Some call Asperger syndrome “the engineers’ disorder.” Certain high-tech entrepreneurs and company heads are sometimes linked to the condition as well. Silberman’s article in Wired notes that “Bill Gates is regularly diagnosed in the press: His single-minded focus on technical minutiae, rocking motions, and flat tone of voice are all suggestive of an adult with some trace of the disorder.” Strong visual traits are not necessarily a major component of autism or Asperger syndrome. However, for both Nikola Tesla and Temple Grandin herself (and others), visualization and visual thinking are central components of their thought processes.

Interest in links between high intelligence and Asperger syndrome have been popping up in various scientific journals for some time. For example, a brief article in Science magazine (February 2000) referred to an article in the December 1999 issue of Neurocase: “Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues at the University of Cambridge report on a study of three men with [Asperger syndrome]: a 38-year-old mathematician and two students, a physicist and a computer scientist. The mathematician, anonymous in the paper but who acknowledged his identity to Science, is Richard Borcherds, a recipient of the Fields Medal, math’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize (Science, August 1998).” Along with a control group, the subjects took tests of how well they could read emotions in photographs. They also took tests to measure their understanding of “folk physics.”

As it turned out, “The subjects did far better than the controls on the physics test, but they were far worse at reading moods. The results ‘strongly suggest that social intelligence is independent of other kinds of intelligence, and may therefore have its own unique evolutionary history,’ the psychologists write. Other recent research has indicated that autism is more common in families of physicists, engineers, and mathematicians. . . .” The article goes on to explain that “Borcherds, now at the University of California at Berkeley, is frank about his condition, although he describes himself as being ‘at the fuzzy borderline’ of Asperger syndrome. He’s not sure the research says anything new. Mathematicians’ social ineptness has long been part of the profession’s self-deprecating folklore, he observes: ‘I seem to have a hell of a lot of colleagues who are not too much unlike me.’ ”

An article in The New York Times by Amy Harmon (April 2004) focused on the rapidly spreading awareness years ago of Asperger syndrome among adults with the condition. Most have long been puzzled by the traits in themselves, but did not know, until recently, that there was a diagnosis and a name. They thought they were alone. Now many are gathering together in support groups. “They all share a defining trait: They are what autism researchers call ‘mind blind.’ Lacking the ability to read cues like body language to intuit what other people are thinking, they have profound difficulty navigating basic social interactions. The diagnosis is reordering their lives. Some have become newly determined to learn how to compensate. They are filling up scarce classes that teach skills like how close to stand next to someone at a party, or how to tell when people are angry even when they are smiling.”

The new and rapidly spreading awareness has many effects in many directions, especially within families, observes Harmon. “This new wave of discovery . . . is also sending ripples through the lives of their families, soothing tension among some married couples, prompting others to call it quits. Parents who saw their adult children as lost causes or black sheep are fumbling for ways to help them, suddenly realizing that they are disabled, not stubborn or lazy.”

Also, Harmon observes that the support groups are having important effects on those affected: “Some are finding solace in support groups where they are meeting others like themselves for the first time. And a growing number are beginning to celebrate their own unique way of seeing the world. They question the superiority of people they call ‘neurotypicals’ . . . and challenge them to adopt a more enlightened, gentle outlook toward social eccentricities.”

Awareness of Asperger syndrome has continued to spread through the popular culture. A much acclaimed and best-selling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, very much in evidence in the spring of 2004 in bookshops in both the US and Britain, has as narrator a 15 year-old boy with Asperger syndrome. Haddon, who had some early work experience with autism and similar conditions, explains that he really chanced upon the flat “voice” of the narrator—who loves mathematics and patterns and describes exactly what he is seeing but never fully understands its social significance. Haddon said that when he chanced upon this voice and realized how useful it would to himself as writer he thought he had something very special. “When you’re writing in that voice, you never try and persuade the reader to feel this or that about something. And once I realized that, I knew that the voice was gold dust.”

More recently, John Elder Robison’s book, Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s (2007), became a New Your Times best seller. Robison tells the story of how his obsession with electronic circuits in high school led to an early career of innovation--making many very new sound effects and then exploding guitars for bands like the Pink Floyd and KISS. Most recently, it is worth mentioning that the big hit thriller for the summer of 2010, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larrson, features a young heroine who is described within the novel as having Asperger syndrome (as well as having many of the appropriate characteristics).

With Tesla, from Visualization to Asperger Syndrome

We started out with the story of Nikola Tesla helping us to understand the great power of certain forms of visual imagination and visualization. Subsequently, his story served as a bridge to help us understand the possibilities as new computer visualization systems extend some of this visualization power to individuals having conventional brains but unconventionally powerful machines.

But beyond this--never in the original plan--we are then led to see that many aspects of Tesla’s strange behavior and his remarkable talents can be better understood in the context of the newly recognized patterns in autism and Asperger syndrome—both relatively recently recognized conditions. The former was first described and named in the 1940s (remarkably by two separate individuals) while the latter did not appear in US diagnostic manuals until the 1990s. Both were thought to be extremely rare, until, just in the last few years, large increases in incidence became evident and demanded attention.

Tesla’s example has helped us understand a new way of seeing the world—one that would appear to be closely linked to the use of the newest visual technologies. Yet, remarkably, it would appear that there is a new recognition of whole groups of children and adults who would seem to be more or less like Tesla, especially in those parts of the country where the newest technologies, of all kinds, are being created and developed.

Some argue that the numbers of children with “autism spectrum” disorders has increased because new technology centers tend to draw together (and reward highly) large numbers of those having few or moderate autistic traits. As a consequence, it is said, some of the affected adults then marry each other (in larger numbers than would have happened otherwise) and they have children who may have autistic traits that are much more pronounced than either parent alone (in a process known as assortative mating).

Dan Geschwind, director of the neurogenetics lab at UCLA, sees some similarities between dyslexia and autism since both challenge conventional ideas about human intelligence: “that certain kinds of excellence might require not just various modes of thinking, but different kinds of brains. ‘Autism gets to fundamental issues of how we view talents and disabilities,’ he says. ‘The flip side of dyslexia is [having, with reading problems] enhanced abilities in math and architecture. There may be an aspect of this going on with autism and assortative mating in places like Silicon Valley. In the parents, who carry a few of the genes, they’re a good thing. In the kids, who carry too many, it’s very bad.’ ”

In a similar vein, Grandin quotes a researcher who observes that a “disorder may occur if a person receives too big a dose of genetic traits which are only beneficial in smaller amounts. For example, a slight tendency to fixate on a single subject can enable a person to focus and accomplish a great deal, whereas a stronger tendency to fixate prevents normal social interaction.”

Note: Please go on to part 3 of this blog entry below.

Part 3, Nikola Tesla, Thinking in Pictures and Asperger Syndrome

2010-09-09T19:31:00.001-04:00

Diversity--New Understanding

As a new awareness comes into public consciousness through various sources like the Grandin’s book, Silberman’s Wired article or Haddon’s novel or Robison’s life story, it is hoped that all of us will develop a better understanding about why some people behave the way that they do—as well as gain some insight into how they are able to do things the rest of us cannot do. We may become more tolerant or we may come to be more aware of the power of real diversity (and its price). Or, we may be more willing to have certain services available for affected children and adults. Or, some of us may see some of these traits in ourselves or our friends or our family members.

Whatever our reaction, it gradually becomes apparent that we may be on the edge of not one but two major changes. The new visual and other technologies may allow us to use our brains in far more powerful ways than the conventional technologies of words and numbers and books alone. But at the same time, without being fully aware of what we are doing and how we are doing it, we may be helping to create larger numbers of individuals who are unusually well suited to work within these new worlds. It may be far too early to understand what is going on here or what it signifies. However, there do seem to be some parallels with dyslexia research that might be helpful.

Paradox and Social Benefit

Dyslexia was first recognized and described more than a century ago, in the 1880s, some 60 years before autism was first described. Like autism, it was initially thought to be extremely rare. Now it is seen as affecting as much as 15 to 20 percent of the population, depending on the definitions used, and as having profound effects on education, employment, and life success. There was little scientific or government attention to dyslexia until the last decade or two when both increased greatly, with substantial funding for research. Throughout, there has always been a tendency to look at the problems associated with dyslexia and the focus has been on ways to fix the problems. But also, from the earlier days, there has been a very small group of individuals who believed that with the dyslexia came certain advantages (sometimes, or even often, but never always).

Among these was the late Harvard neurologist Norman Geschwind (a distant relative of Dan Geschwind, quoted above). He believed that the same unusual neurological formations that lead to dyslexia could also promote a range of superior abilities. Accordingly, he has provided a discussion that may also may have some relevance to autism spectrum disorders: If the problem condition also has advantages (in some cases), he wondered, then how can we learn to control the condition and not give up the (sometimes considerable) advantages? Geschwind's comments on the possible prevention of dyslexia take on an extra dimension of significance when we consider autism as well. Geschwind explains: “the dilemma . . . becomes obvious. Not only do many dyslexics carry remarkable talents that benefit their society enormously, but the same talents exist in unusually high frequency among their unaffected relatives. If we could somehow prevent these brain changes, and thus prevent the appearance of dyslexia, might we not find that we have deprived the society of an important and irreplaceable group of individuals endowed with remarkable talents?”

In spite of this, Geschwind was hopeful that the advantages and disadvantages are not necessarily connected. This hope was based on evidence that there are many nondyslexic “individuals among the relatives of dyslexics who are . . . possessed of remarkable spatial talents. . . . We know that especially frequently the sisters of dyslexics are likely to share the talents without the disadvantages of dyslexia. Once we gain intimate information as to the mechanisms of formation of the anomalies that lead to the superior talents, we should be able to retain the advantages while avoiding the disadvantages.”

Thus, Geschwind hoped to have, eventually, one without the other. We too may well hope for this (with dyslexia and with autism), but we need also to consider the possibility that it may not always be possible. We may need to consider that it may be an essential part of the nature of things that, in a significant number of cases, one cannot have one without the other.

Is it possible that our brains have such design constraints? Is it possible that unusual proficiency in one area will often mean a significant lack of proficiency in another? Or, conversely, is it possible that a deficiency in one area may indicate the likelihood of special abilities in other areas? Or, given a third case, if one has fairly balanced capabilities, is it probable that, in many instances, extraordinary abilities (in either of two incompatible modes) may be precluded? Most recent neurological evidence suggests that this may in fact be so.

Albert Galaburda, an associate of Norman Geschwind, carried out microanatomical studies of the brains of dyslexics. After detailed examination of several cases, Galaburda and his associates described the role of microscopic lesions (areas of damage or diminished growth) and the unusual symmetry of certain formations that had been observed in all the dyslexic brains that they had examined. Galaburda observed that the microscopic lesions may be capable of suppressing the development of some areas, but he suggested a role for them in actually increasing the development of other areas.

This research suggests a biological basis for the frequent paradoxical coexistence of special abilities and disabilities in the same individual: “We all know that these lesions may in fact be capable of reorganizing the brain. But they don't always reorganize the brain to produce dyslexics. I am sure that similar mechanisms are used to reorganize the brain to produce geniuses too, and sometimes both of them occur in the same person.”

Norman Geschwind pointed out that the study of dyslexia is filled with paradoxes. If the observations of Geschwind and Galaburda are borne out by further research, then perhaps one of the most striking paradoxes is that many of those with the greatest abilities can also be expected to have unusual difficulty in areas that are easy for those with average abilities. Similarly, we could find that the study of Asperger syndrome and other autism spectrum disorders may also be filled with paradoxes—the greatest of which may be: when we come to learn more about autism (as with dyslexia), is it possible that we may find that we cannot live entirely without it, at least in some moderate measure? As Dan Geschwind noted above, these studies tend to take us to deeper levels, forcing us (as did Tesla’s story) to think in fresh ways about deep diversity in human intelligence and capability.

Endnote A -- This 3-part web log entry is based on Chapter 22, Thinking Like Einstein, by Thomas G. West, where full references are provided. An earlier, shorter version appeared in Computer Graphics, a publication of ACM SIGGRAPH, the international association for professional computer graphic artists and technologists.

Endnote B -- According to the entry from MedlinePlus from the National Library of Medicine: “Asperger syndrome (AS), one of the autistic spectrum disorders, is a pervasive developmental disorder characterized by an inability to understand how to interact socially. AS is commonly recognized after the age of 3. People with high-functioning autism are generally distinguished from those with AS because autism is associated with marked early language delay. Other characteristics of AS include clumsy and uncoordinated motor movements, limited interests or unusual preoccupations, repetitive routines or rituals, speech and language peculiarities, and non-verbal communication problems. Generally, children with AS have few facial expressions. Many have excellent rote memory, and become intensely interested in one or two subjects (sometimes to the exclusion of other topics). They may talk at length about a favorite subject or repeat a word or phrase many times. Children with AS tend to be self-absorbed, have difficulty making friends, and are preoccupied with their own interests. There is no specific course of treatment or cure for AS. Treatment may include psychotherapy, parent education and training, behavioral modification, social skills training, educational interventions, and medications for specific behavioral symptoms.” (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/aspergerssyndrome.html)

Endnote C -- When Temple Grandin was on her book tour promoting the paperback edition of Thinking in Pictures, she came to Washington, D.C, for a book signing and a lecture to a autism parent group. At the book signing, I asked her to sign the copy of her book that I had just purchased (although I had already read another copy earlier). At the same time I presented her with a copy of my own book, In the Mind’s Eye, which I thought she might find interesting. She took one look at my book and said that she had always wanted to read it. I asked how she knew of it. She said she had seen a review of my book when she was correcting the proofs for Thinking in Pictures. When she saw the review, it was too late to put anything more into her text, but she could add a book to her list of readings for her first chapter — where to my surprise she pointed it out. The next day we had a long telephone conversation about the similarities and differences between her treatment of visual thinking in relation to autism and my treatment of visual thinking in relation to dyslexia. I had always hoped to look more into these connections, but whenever I brought it up to researchers in the field, I was told that the two conditions were too dissimilar. Nothing could be learned, they explained, from looking at them together. For some time I have suspected that they might be wrong. I thought that the high visual aspect in two rather different but overlapping conditions might lead to some insight both unexpected and valuable. (Possibly more valuable because unexpected.) Perhaps we will see, one way or the other, in the not too distant future whether my (our) hunch might be correct.

The Success of Failure, The Failure of Success

2010-08-01T14:16:00.002-04:00

It is widely believed that students with high grades move on to eventually make great discoveries, innovations and other major contributions to their chosen field. However, sometimes, indeed many times it seems, the reverse is true. The world of scientific research provides us with a window into the true origins of many major discoveries.

Strangely, it is sometimes harder for well-trained and highly successful scientists to make truly original discoveries. They are kept busy with many obligations -- preparing lectures, advising students, consulting with coauthors: journal deadlines, peer review, grant applications, student recommendations, conference presentations, expert advisory groups, government commissions, faculty parties and retirement dinners. Plenty to keep one busy and fully focused on the pressing schedule at hand.

It is little wonder that Einstein recommended that a scientist should remain apart as much as possible from the politics of science ("the battle of the brains") and instead take work as a lighthouse keeper or shoemaker or some other less demanding employment -- to keep his mind relatively free of interruptions and worrisome obligations. His suggestions seem romantic to us now, but his basic approach has begun to appear increasingly sensible to experienced researchers who find their lives are too full of career obligations to focus on really original work.

Strangely, in a similar way, lack of career success or even a long illness may be of benefit to the creative person. These may help to give the creative person the uninterrupted time to get the work done -- not unlike the paradoxical benefit of imprisonment, in the old days, in getting books written. (It may be recalled that it was while he was in prison that Marco Polo had time to set down the account of his extensive travels in China.) At least one book has been written on the beneficial role of long illnesses in providing uninterrupted time for single-minded creative effort. A not too successful career path may also be a help. Maxwell wrote his two-volume Treatise during a period of semi-retirement in the middle of a none too successful career.

(The cause and effect relationships are never perfectly clear, however. Would the book never have been completed if he had not the time, or would he have found the time in any case? How many would be willing to interrupt or divert a career that is in high gear to devote full attention to a fringe project with a risky and uncertain outcome? Or, indeed, how many ambitious, career-conscious professionals would allow themselves to focus on questionable topics such as cloud formations when the boss is really interested in laser fusion?)

Accordingly, if one wishes to be really creative, it seems that sometimes it is essential to have one's time less than fully committed -- to be able to follow where one's thoughts lead rather than having to succeed in a series of tasks largely defined by one's career, the limits of one’s specialist area or the ambitions of one's competitors.

One wonders what might have happened to Einstein's early work without his period of independent study (following his own fancy) as a school dropout, his lecture cutting and continued self-directed study during his university years, his two years of intermittent unemployment (with contrasting growth in intellectual excitement) after graduation and then his relatively undemanding patent office job once he did enter the world of conventional work.

We might wonder what would have happened if he had become immediately enmeshed in the teaching, administrative and social demands of a conventionally successful career. As he himself observed, in such a path there is a strong tendency to do research that is comparatively superficial and predictable -- little steps that do not risk serious failure or threaten existing beliefs, modest research programs that can be relied upon to produce publishable results and supportive, unthreatened mentors.

We might wonder how many have been diverted from greater accomplishments because of early success and recognition. Once again, a kind of natural selection may be at work, having curious and unexpected consequences. Sometimes, strangely, we can argue that truly great accomplishments may be severely hindered by even modest levels of early conventional success.

In addition, there may be other, more subtle barriers to really original creative work. There are other reasons that the expert and the professional may find it hard to change their ways of thinking, especially when it involves some of their most basic concepts and beliefs.

Many years of hard work and one's self-image as a competent professional may be closely bound up with a belief in what one has been taught -- which, in time, often one has come to be engaged in teaching oneself. Of course, little changes and corrections are needed here and there to keep up the momentum of gradual progress and to make one's reputation. But there is often little incentive to question or overturn fundamental elements of the discipline -- making obsolete some of one's own career accomplishments as well as those of many others. Even worse is to blur the boundaries of the discipline, inviting territorial battles and the threat of lost professional status and credibility.

As James Gleick observes, this conservatism continues to be a powerful force in the still emerging science of chaos: “ . . . The language of mathematics remained a serious barrier to communication. If only the academic world had room for hybrid mathematician/physicists -- but it did not. . . . Mathematicians continued to speak one language, physicists another. As the physicist Murray Gell-Mann once remarked: ‘Faculty members are familiar with a certain kind of person who looks to mathematicians like a good physicist and looks to physicists like a good mathematician. Very properly, they do not want that kind of person around.’ The standard of the two professions were different. Physicists had theorems, mathematicians had conjectures. The objects that made up their worlds were different. Their examples were different.”

If one wants to have a successful career, it is much wider and safer to clearly identify with one group or another. The risk of confusion or loss of credibility is often too great to be seriously considered by any prudent professional, especially those who have learned early and well the rewards of staying within the acceptable and desirable boundaries. Balance a doubt against a certainty and stay within the conventions of the norm.

In the end, there is even a greater problem: the important thing is that truly original discoveries sometimes require unlearning and relearning not only what one has been taught, but also fundamental and basic elements in the way one thinks about things in general -- some of the most fundamental concepts at the core of one's own thought processes.

We must not go too far down this road, of course, without pointing out that there are all kinds and levels of accomplishment and creative discovery. Each set of weekly and monthly science periodicals is a feast of enticing new developments. We are all too aware that the conventional system -- of university courses and grant programs and research laboratories -- is turning out vast quantities of wonderful and exciting and frightening things.

Clearly, the conventional system does produce. It would be wrong to suggest otherwise. (Although it seems to often produce pieces that make the whole less clear. The most general and comprehensive and integrating explanations are the most exciting, but are also the most rare.) However, there are other ways. Sometimes the biggest ideas can come from the least likely sources. And perhaps the most important ideas come rarely from those who would appear (by conventional standards) to be the best and the brightest.

All of this is, of course, an administrative problem as well. Such an unconventional process is hard to manage and control. Yet there it is. Perhaps all that can be done is to learn that such things do sometimes happen; to hope to be able to recognize them as they begin to develop; and to try to keep from destroying real creativity as it grows and begins to mature.

In the end, probably the most effective deterrent to really original work is not so much the career distractions and disincentives as the fact that the professionals often have learned their lessons too well. If you have had great success in learning to think the way your teachers and associates think, then it is all the more difficult to think in some really original and unexpected way.

In fairness, it should be noted that this problem clearly flows from the necessary double bind of any accumulated knowledge. Most of the gains are through the further application of what is already known. However -- occasionally -- this same factor can be a major cause of error and lack of progress.

This essential problem may explain why it is sometimes best to work in a field other than the one that one originally studied -- if one wants to make truly original contributions. In one's own field, one has already developed a strong internal editor that may serve to criticize and to demolish the “silly” thoughts before they can take hold internally -- or before they can get out to embarrass you. It is hard to unlearn what you have learned so well. Perhaps, also, this is the reason that it has been observed that the most original ideas often come not from those at the top of their field, but from those who are at the fringes of the field.

The double problem of knowing too much or knowing too little is nicely summarized in a passage from one of the classic studies of scientific creativity. When a field is developing normally, expert knowledge is a great advantage; but when there is an abrupt change in the course of development (or some major new factor becomes evident), expert knowledge may be a considerable disadvantage: “Thus in subjects in which knowledge is still growing, or where the particular problem is a new one, or a new version of one already solved, all the advantage is with the expert, but where knowledge is no longer growing and the field has been worked out, a revolutionary new approach is required and this is more likely to come from the outsider. The skepticism with which the experts nearly always greet these revolutionary ideas confirms that the available knowledge has been a handicap.”

It is, of course, a double-bind in another sense; one has to be close enough to conventional thought in order to obtain the needed information from the conventional sources, to check one's findings and to be able to explain one's new ideas in a way that is understandable and acceptable to others conventional modes of thought.

But this is not a new problem. Long ago, an instance of coming close to a discovery but not being able to make the conceptual changes needed to achieve the desired result was observed in a colleague by Michael Faraday. In a letter to a friend who had described to Faraday this colleague's researches on the magnetic condition of matter, Faraday wrote: “Many thanks . . . for your note. I have in consequence seen Bequerel's paper, and added a note at the first opening of my paper. It is astonishing to think how he could have been so near the discovery of the great principle and fact, and yet so entirely miss them both, and fall back into old and preconceived notions.”

Here we see that the power of “old and preconceived notions” may serve as a barrier to imminent discovery in any time or age. Then, as now, for some, one of the greatest deterrents to original thinking and discovery may be nothing more than long-established habits of thought.

As an old man, reviewing his life's work, Einstein observed that one of the most difficult things he had to do in his own work was to unlearn old patterns of thought. He observed that, in retrospect, a certain line of development could be seen as almost inevitable -- yet barriers of inflexible basic concepts could deter progress to that inevitable solution for many years: “That the special theory of relativity is only the first step of a necessary development became completely clear to me only in my efforts to represent gravitation in the framework of this theory . . .. This happened in 1908. Why were another seven years required for the construction of the general theory of relativity? The main reason lies in the fact that it is not so easy to free oneself from the idea that coordinates must have a direct metric significance.”

In other words, Einstein saw that he could not move from the special theory to the general theory without first changing -- in his own mind -- some extremely basic ideas and conceptions. This, it took seven years to do.

Einstein commented elsewhere on this problem -- remarking that, in time, some of his theories could be easily understood by young students, but that made them no easier to find in the beginning, when he was wandering alone in the dark.

The hard part, apparently, is seeing for the first time things in a way that is different from the way they have ever been seen before: “In the light of knowledge attained, the happy achievement seems almost a matter of course, and any intelligent student can grasp it without too much trouble. But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion, and the final emergence into the light -- only those who have experienced it can understand it.”

Presumably, many scientists (and others) are never able to do this deep exploration. They have neither the special ability nor the essential inclination. Basic concepts, once learned, are fixed for life.

Thus we see that, sometimes, great quantities of knowledge are not enough. Sometimes one has to be willing to change basic assumptions and thought processes in order to see clearly the unexpected truths that could be clearly evident -- if only we could see them in the right way. Sometimes knowing a lot is not nearly so important as being able to view it from a different and truly original perspective.

Adapted from chapter 8, In the Mind’s Eye, where full references are provided.

Churchill--Learning to See

2010-06-18T05:09:00.002-04:00

I just gave a talk at Oxford University last week, staying at Magadlen College, and I look forward to giving two talks on the island of Malta at the end next week. More on these later. Just now I thought I would focus a bit on Winston Churchill--once again. In doing research for In the Mind’s Eye long ago, I was surprised to find how interesting he was on many levels, and what perceptive observations he had made.

As I have been driving through the English countryside West of Oxford this trip, through villages like Blockley and Pusey, and driving past the entrance to Blenheim Place (where Churchill was born), I found myself thinking once again of the strikingly apt passages I had found in Churchill’s writings. I pass an old airfield and think of Churchill’s observations on early aircraft and flying. I see a blank wall in full sun and think of his observations regarding painting and his growing powers of observation. I see a broad expanse of hillside and think of his comparison of visual thinking in military operations and (amazingly) techniques in art. I will quote below sections from In the Mind’s Eye (without quotation marks).

Learning to See

The theme of the late-bloomer reappears again and again with Churchill. He was not an early reader, but greatly loved reading once he became proficient. He had difficulty with speech as a youth, but developed, in time, an extraordinary sensitivity and skill with language. He seemed to be poor in nearly every aspect of school, until his late teens when, at Sandhurst, he developed with great rapidity--feeling himself "growing up almost every week"--then finishing well ahead of most of his peers. Even his great love of painting was developed quite late, when he was middle-aged. And, of course, his greatest achievements during World War II were reserved for the years in which most would have already gone into retirement (and some time after he and others regarded his political career as essentially "finished").

What, then, can be said of his education as a writer and historian? His education during his years at Harrow (where, after all, he did not do very well) would not seem sufficient to explain his great skill or depth of knowledge and understanding in later years. Nor would even his oft-repeated study of elementary English composition and grammar. His years at Sandhurst were designed for the active and practical military professional, not to provide a background in the literature of the military historian.

Where and when had he read the great authors, to provide a base for his native writing skills? Once again, late-blooming seems the answer and seems the dominant pattern. Like Faraday, Churchill started late but he never stopped. And he followed his own program, in his own time, for his own purposes.

After Sandhurst, and after brief exciting exploits in Cuba, he was posted with his British Army unit to India. During this time, he entered upon a program of reading to correct the deficiencies of Harrow and Sandhurst. If we are correct in asserting that Churchill developed capabilities greater than others, but later than others (as some of those we have been considering), then it is not hard to imagine that his program of self study had the right timing and conditions for the greatest benefit (perhaps much greater than one would usually obtain as part of a conventional university program of study).

In India, Churchill had apparently taken well to the easy routine of military duties and regimental competitions. But when his need for deeper and broader knowledge came it was abrupt and strong: “It was not until this winter of 1896, when I had almost completed my twenty-second year, that the desire for learning came upon me. I began to feel myself wanting in even the vaguest knowledge about many large spheres of thought.”

By this time, he had developed a feeling for language and an appreciation for words "fitting and falling into their places like pennies in the slot." He had developed a extensive vocabulary, yet he was aware that he was not always sure of the meaning of certain words and was hesitant to use them "for fear of being absurd." He was aware that he knew something about a variety of topics, such as tactics or politics or honorable behaviour. But what of a topic such as ethics? “. . . In Bangalore there was no one to tell me about Ethics for love or money. . . . This was only typical of a dozen similar mental needs that now began to press insistently upon me. I knew of course that the youths at the universities were stuffed with all this patter at nineteen and twenty, and could pose you entrapping questions or give baffling answers. We never set much store by them or their affected superiority, remembering that they were only at their books, while we were commanding men and guarding the Empire. Nevertheless I had sometimes resented the apt and copious information which some of them seemed to possess, and I now wished I could find a competent teacher whom I could listen to and cross-examine for an hour or so every day.”

So without an instructor, he taught himself. He wrote to ask his mother to send him books. He started with Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “I was immediately dominated both by the story and the style. All through the long glistening middle hours of the Indian day, from when we quited stables till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour of polo, I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all. I scribbled all my opinions on the margins of the pages. . . It was a curious education . . . because I approached it with an empty, hungry mind, and with fairly strong jaws; and what I got I bit. . . .”

For a time during this period he read history and philosophy four or five hours each day. In addition to Gibbon, he read Plato, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Malthus, Darwin and many other books of "lesser standing." The education was "curious" but effective. As one biographer commented: “In fact, it was a very wide and remarkable one; Churchill's selection of books was eclectic and random, but the purpose was serious: what he read he remembered, and he challenged and questioned what he read. This self-education was the first real indication of his ability, his determination, and his independence. It may also be seen as the first clear sign of a personal ambition to succeed in life.”

This dedication to work and study continued through to his early years in the House of Commons and beyond. His dedication as a young M.P. was characterized by "living with Blue Books and sleeping with encyclopedias," according to one observer.[i] A friend during these years noted that when Churchill was "not busy with politics, he was reading or writing."

Considering the pace and timing and success of Churchill's program of self study, it is perhaps not at all surprising that he observed that it is best not to read too many great books too early. Presumably, his own personal experience was a powerful testament to the truth of this assertion, especially for late bloomers. In characteristically plain but powerful language, he explains: “It is a mistake to read too many good books when quite young. A man once told me that he had read all the books that mattered. Cross-questioned, he appeared to have read a great many, but they seemed to have made only a slight impression. How many had he understood? How many had entered into his mental composition? How many had been hammered on the anvils of his mind and afterwards ranged in an armoury of bright weapons ready to hand? It is a great pity to read a book too soon in life. The first impression is the one that counts; and if it is a slight one, it may be all that can be hoped for. A later and second perusal may recoil from a surface already hardened by premature contact. Young people should be careful in their reading, as old people in eating their food. They should not eat too much. They should chew it well.”

This passage suggests a reader who is not only careful in what he reads, but also one who takes plenty of time to consider what he is reading-- pondering the content, contending with the author (as he says, scribbling his opinions in the margins), integrating what is learned with what he already knows.

Integration of knowledge. Integration of a whole life. As noted previously, the wholeness and the interconnectedness of wide interests was seen as a special and remarkable quality in the life of Maxwell, for example (perhaps the more so because this quality contrasts so greatly with the highly specialized lives and interests of many modern scientists). Integration, wholeness and the ability to see connections between highly diverse things are also repeated themes in the lives and work of others such as Faraday and Edison. With Churchill, similar themes may be seen, although they are not always, perhaps, as clearly evident.

However, the integration of diverse elements in Churchill's life has been seen by some as a characteristic of prime importance. For example, one reviewer of the two recent biographical volumes by Manchester (The Last Lion: Alone) and Gilbert (Never Despair) comments: “As for the man himself, both these books offer rich testimony to his genius. Churchill was not merely great as a man of affairs; he was the complete and rounded person--as poetic as rational; as visionary as practical; as imaginative as he was sturdy: Integer vitae might be the motto of his life. He combined artistry with hardheadedness and magnanimity with sturdiness. . . . In the years covered by these volumes he wrote his two-volume life of the first Duke of Marlborough, his famous ancestor; published six volumes of war memoirs, the first volume of which sold a quarter-million copies in one day and made him a fortune. He won a Nobel Prize for literature (few were so richly deserved) and exhibited his paintings at the Royal Academy and the Tate Gallery. All the while he fondly tended his goldfish, dogs, cats, pigs, swans and racehorses and proved himself a gifted farmer and brick mason--and devoted friend.”

Churchill may have been a late bloomer with broad and integrated interests, but he also shows evidence of being a thinker with a definite propensity toward visual-spatial modes of thought. This propensity is apparent in a quite different aspect of our considerations. It is not, of course, surprising that those with high visual-spatial talents are often quite proficient in activities which require exceptional visual-spatial ability. And it is not surprising that these persons also may be especially sensitive to the special abilities of those, other than themselves, who are proficient in these areas. Thus, one might expect to find that one with these high visual-spatial talents would greatly appreciate the skill of another who is able to move with special grace and skill--by means of the newly-developed flying machine--through three-dimensional space.

In 1912, with some trepidation, Churchill started flying because he thought it part of his duties as First Lord of the Admiralty. (It is worth noting that Churchill started flying only 9 years after the Wright brothers' first flight in December of 1903 and only four years after the Wright brothers started providing aircraft and pilot training to military personnel in both America and France in 1908.[ii]) In time, however, he came to develop a very special appreciation of this new world. Churchill's description is so evocative and is so supportive of the point we are trying to make that an extended quotation seems warranted: “Once I had started flying from motives in which a sense of duty, as well as excitement and curiosity, played its part, I continued for sheer joy and pleasure. I went up in every kind of machine and at every air station under the Admiralty. . . . Then came the episode of Gustave Hamel in the spring of 1914. If ever there was a man born to fly, three parts a bird and the rest genius, it was Hamel. He belonged to the air rather than the earth, and handled the primitive machines of those days in what was then an unknown element, with a natural gift and confidence quite indescribable. . . .

“Although I have flown hundreds of times, probably with a hundred pilots, I have never experienced that sense of the poetry of motion which Hamel imparted to those who were privileged to fly with him. It was like the most perfect skater on the rink, but the skating was through three dimensions, and all the curves and changes were faultless, and faultless not by rote and rule but by native instinct. He would bank his machine so steeply that there was nothing between us and the world far below, and would continue circling downwards so gently, so quietly, so smoothly, in such true harmony with the element in which he moved, that one would have believed that one wing tip was fastened to a pivot. As for the grim force of gravity--it was his slave. In all his flying there was no sense of struggle with difficulties, or effort at a complicated feat; everything happened as if it could never have happened in any other way. It seemed as easy as pouring water out of a jug.”

Churchill shows evidence of a special sensitivity for accomplishment in a visual-spatial realm. But is there, we might ask, evidence of a more purely visual mode of thought--the operation of the mind's eye? With Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein, it seems clear that their deepest, most natural, most personal and most productive modes of thought were intensely visual (both literally and by analogy with vision), even though this might not always be apparent in their more professional and public discussions.

But what of Churchill and those like him? Can we expect to find evidence of similar hidden visual processes? Words and politics seem to lend themselves to the visual less than other things. Can we uncover evidence of an intensely visual approach laying hidden not far below the surface of verbal discourse--an underlying context of apt images and distant analogies which invisibly mold the discourse? Small and large hints, here and there, provide some indication. . . .

But [we can learn much from the] passionate love of painting described by Churchill in "Painting As A Pastime." The essay title belies its content. We are not given, as the title would suggest, the idle musings of a hobbyist dabbler in semi-retirement. On the contrary, we are given, instead, the ardent passion of one who has discovered, before it is too late, a fresh new love in his middle years. This new passion draws on such deep resources and reserves that one can only guess that these great engines of refined and skillful observation had previously had some other object in other facets of a rich and energetic life.

He explains: “One is quite astonished to find how many things there are in the landscape, and in every object in it, one never noticed before. And this is a tremendous new pleasure and interest which invests every walk or drive with an added object. So many colours on the hillside, each different in shadow and in sunlight; such brilliant reflections in the pool, each a key lower than what they repeat. . . . I found myself instinctively as I walked noting the tint and character of a leaf, . . . the exquisite lacery of winter branches, the dim pale silhouettes of far horizons. And I had lived for over forty years without ever noticing any of them except in a general way, as one might look at a crowd and say, 'What a lot of people!'

“I think this heightened sense of observation of Nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint. . . . Once you begin to study it, all Nature is equally interesting and equally charged with beauty. I was shown a picture by Cézanne of a blank wall of a house, which he had made instinct with the most delicate lights and colours. Now I often amuse myself when I am looking at a wall or a flat surface of any kind by trying to distinguish all the different colours and tints which can be discerned upon it, and considering whether these arise from reflections or from natural hue. You would be astonished the first time you tried this to see how many and what beautiful colours there are even in the most commonplace objects, and the more carefully and frequently you look the more variations do you perceive.”

Churchill's great love of painting seems to indicate a deep reservoir of native capacity which may have readily manifested itself in other analogous ways in comparatively distant disciplines. Are not the fifteen hundred toy soldiers with which he spent so much time as a youth, but a near analogy of real armies which must be managed with real tactics in real battles (and in primarily visual and spatial modes of thought and analysis)?

Similarly, it is not hard to imagine that the architect of the grand allied strategy of the world conflict of 1939-1945 conceived and habitually considered this grand over-arching plan in primarily visual terms--using intellectual capacities which focused on the whole rather than the parts, the long view rather than the particular, the simultaneous comprehension of vast and complex interrelationships.

But what justification have we for such an assertion? Are we not stretching the point. Yes, granted, in some cases there may be real justification for drawing such a conclusion. It may be true of some scientists and some mathematicians and even some poets, perhaps. But painting and politics and military strategy (among other things)--can this really be defended by a responsible observer?

In response, it may be argued that one need go no further than to read closely Churchill's own thoughts and observations as laid out in his essay on painting. In a curious passage--an almost unwanted and unplanned digression--he appears to clearly make the point that he believes the great painters and the master artists were drawing on intellectual capacities which (given the necessary particular information in a given field) may be used to understand and rightly perceive "any other high activity of the human intellect."

He refers to the great Italians, but does not name them. However, among those he was referring to we would expect to find Michaelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci--master artists who were known for their great skill in so many diverse areas of investigation, knowledge and endeavor. This passage is not elaborated, and Churchill quickly returns to his main topic--almost as if he had momentarily forgotten himself, indulging in a distant digression in thought that had presented itself to him unbidden (as he dictated his text). The passage is terse and elliptical, but his point seems to be clear enough.

Notably, the passage begins with a fresh and unexpected analogy--a comparison of the principles of painting with the principles of military command: “But it is in the use and withholding of their reserves that the great commanders have generally excelled. . . . In painting, the reserves consist in Proportion or Relation. And it is here that the art of the painter marches along the road which is traversed by all the greatest harmonies in thought. . . . It is wonderful--after one has tried and failed often--to see how easily and surely the true artist is able to produce every effect of light and shade, sunshine and shadow, of distance or nearness, simply by expressing justly the relations between the different plains and surfaces with which he is dealing. We think that this is founded upon a sense of proportion, trained no doubt by practice, but which in its essence is a frigid manifestation of mental power and size. We think that the same mind's eye that can justly survey and appraise and prescribe beforehand the values of a truly great picture in one all-embracing regard, in one flash of simultaneous and homogeneous comprehension, would also with a certain acquaintance with the special technique be able to pronounce with sureness upon any other high activity of the human intellect. This was certainly true of the great Italians.”

Indeed, in this passage Churchill's terminolgy itself is almost unsettling in its unexpected aptness. Painting and military strategy and any other "high activity" of the human mind are seen in clearly visual-spatial, right-hemisphere terms, employing words now often used by professionals in this context: focusing on "proportion" and "mental power and size" together with "one all-embracing regard, in one flash of simultaneous and homogeneous comprehension.”

Talents Wasted, Talents Discovered

2010-05-12T18:37:00.004-04:00

A friend from Sweden, Peder Johansson, just now sent me a trailer on a movie called "Proof." He did not know it but his remark (and seemingly the movie) get right to the heart of something that has been bothering me a lot lately. How can we work to change this? In my experience, the usual approaches do not even come close. Any new ideas or insights out there? What can we do? What is that we do not understand here? Or, what do we think we understand but don't.

"Have you seen this play or movie? If not, do. It's in the same class as "A Beautiful Mind." I got so happy and full of energy -- but then thought about all these talented persons I meet. So gifted but so many unemployed (more than 50%) because they "are special, different as me." What an enormous waste of human . . . " From Peder Johansson

Dyslexic Aviators

2010-04-05T22:54:00.002-04:00

I recently got an email from an old friend who asked whether I knew of any famous dyslexic aviators. She said she was re-evaluating a gifted and dyslexic young lady she had first seen at 10 years of age. This young lady is now graduating from high school and wants to be an aviator. Apparently, her math skills are exceptional.

I replied that I have seen high levels of interest from airplane pilots whenever I have given talks on my books. As a group, many have high visual spatial capabilities, of course, and I suspect some may be mildly dyslexic (or have dyslexic near relatives) and are often not detected. Generally speaking, military pilots have to be college graduates, so this may have selected out some of the most severe dyslexics in the past.

However, it is now becoming more widely recognized that there are lots of dyslexics who survive and even thrive in certain college and university programs -- especially those that focus on science and math or engineering but ask less in reading and writing such as a humanities or liberal arts program. There are said to be so many dyslexics on the MIT campus that locally they call dyslexia “the MIT disease.”

However, the best answer to this query, I realized, was in my own family. I asked them to have a look at Frank Gifford Tallman III or just Frank Tallman of Talmantz Corp (with partner stunt pilot Paul Mantz). (My own full name is Thomas Gifford West since we were both named for my great grandfather.)

Frank died in 1978. He is my mother's first cousin and probably, in the final analysis, will come to be recognized as the most famous stunt pilot of all time. (Such skills are rarely wanted these days. Filmmakers generally use computer graphics now, rather than real flying.) It happens that another cousin teaches people to fly gliders and sail planes.

Because of his apparent extreme flying skill, I had long wondered whether Frank might have been dyslexic. But then a few years ago his younger sister (Prudy Wood) gathered school letters, grade reports, etc., for a book -- papers she allowed me to copy.

Based on these documents, it became clear to me that he was in fact very dyslexic -- but, on the other hand, he was one of the few people who could fly well all the oldest planes. (See Frank's book, Flying the Old Planes, long out of print.)

His sister did finish her book manuscript shortly before her death three or four years ago. The book is about the lives of Frank, another brother, Foster, and herself. (Very skillfully written, in my opinion.) I will probably tell a short version of Frank's story in my own third book -- which I am working on now.

Prudy's book has not yet been published, but I have a copy of the manuscript. Prudy has three daughters who have been looking for a publisher, without success so far. I have offered to help.

I also suggested that my friends look up Frank's list of movies, including "The Great Waldo Pepper" and many, many more. Related to this movie, Robert Redford said he would not trust anyone with his life other than Frank Tallman. (I have a TV clip of Redford saying this that I plan to put on YouTube sometime soon, if someone has not already done it.) Frank may have been only Navy pilot without a college education many years ago.

There is much more to tell. But this is a start. I note that a new “Short Biography of Frank Tallman,” by Scott A. Thompson, has been posted on the web (dated 2007).

In summary, I suspect that some dyslexics would make the very best pilots, especially for the early planes. Perhaps similar talents are still seen among the bush pilots in Alaska, for example. Of course, modern planes need a different mix of skills, but I assume the high visual side will always be important.

It happens that I quoted in In the Mind’s Eye a passage written by Winston Churchill about extreme skill among early aviators. On re-reading this passage, I am impressed not only by the story that Churchill tells, but also the extreme skill Churchill himself shows in writing the story. The text from my book follows, introducing the quotation from Churchill (chapter 6, given here without quotation marks):

Churchill . . . shows evidence of being a thinker with a definite propensity toward visual-spatial modes of thought. . . . And it is not surprising that these persons also may be especially sensitive to the special abilities of those . . . who are proficient in these areas. Thus, one might expect to find that one with these high visual-spatial talents would greatly appreciate the skill of another who is able to move with special grace and skill -- by means of the newly invented flying machine -- through three-dimensional space.

In time, however, he came to develop a very special appreciation of this new world. Churchill's description is so evocative and is so supportive of the point we are trying to make that an extended quotation seems warranted:

“Once I had started flying from motives in which a sense of duty, as well as excitement and curiosity, played its part, I continued for sheer joy and pleasure. I went up in every kind of machine and at every air station under the Admiralty. . . .

“Then came the episode of Gustave Hamel in the spring of 1914. If ever there was a man born to fly, three parts a bird and the rest genius, it was Hamel. He belonged to the air rather than the earth, and handled the primitive machines of those days in what was then an unknown element, with a natural gift and confidence quite indescribable. . . .

“He would bank his machine so steeply that there was nothing between us and the world far below, and would continue circling downwards so gently, so quietly, so smoothly, in such true harmony with the element in which he moved, that one would have believed that one wing tip was fastened to a pivot. As for the grim force of gravity -- it was his slave. In all his flying there was no sense of struggle with difficulties, or effort at a complicated feat; everything happened as if it could never have happened in any other way. It seemed as easy as pouring water out of a jug.”

Artist's Handbook

2010-03-21T23:12:00.003-04:00

I have just started to read a nearly final manuscript copy of a forthcoming book -- Bridges in the Mind: An Artist's Handbook for Everyday Living -- by Marianne Roccaforte to be published by Benu Press, Hopkins, MN. I agreed to read it and write a blurb. Coming from a family of visual-thinking (sometimes dyslexic) artists, where there was often tension between the artistic and the practical, this book, initially, strikes me as a treasure. I wish such a book existed many years ago. I look forward to learning a lot -- and I will let you know what I find out.

The Narrows, 1942

2010-02-22T13:47:00.005-05:00

I am posting here a fragment from a forthcoming book on the lives and art of Charles Massey West, Jr., and Anne Warner West, my parents. Based on what I know now, it is clear that my father had many dyslexic traits -- including many difficulties with spelling, reading and academic work as well as high level visual-spatial talents and skills. The article is quoted below without quotation marks.

It wasn’t the top prize. But it was major recognition in a major show.

In the fall of 1942, it was a show and catalogue that mainly honored Grant Wood, who had died earlier that year. Wood had already become an icon of American painting. With images such as “American Gothic,” “Daughters of Revolution” and “Good Influence” he had linked humor and satire with pride in the simplicity of middle America, using a flat, almost plastic palate, with smooth forms, high contrast and deep shadows -- not commonly seen again until the Pixar computer animation films some 70 years later.

The top prize at the Fifty-Third Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago had gone to Edward Hopper for “Nighthawks,” a canvas that was to become itself an icon of American painting. Lonely people in a bright diner in a dark cityscape -- familiar in numerous magazine articles, satirical imitations and young persons’ wall posters -- culminating as the central focus of the major show in the East Wing of the National Gallery, Washington, DC, that closed January 21, 2008.

Art historian and commentator Robert Hughes called Hopper the most important painter of the period and it is noteworthy that “Nighthawks” is the lone image that spans the backs of his multi-tape video history of American painting.

It is also notable how pivotal “Nighthawks” was in Hopper’s professional life. One writer notes in the National Gallery show catalogue: “In May 1945, having become famous and successful after his triumph with ‘Nighthawks,’ Hopper was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters.” (Barter, 2007, p. 211.)

For West in 1942, it was not the top prize, but there he was, shoulder to shoulder with the top prizewinners.

His short biographical sketch was listed in facing pages with other short sketches of the top prizewinners. Hopper’s bio noted that his “early work aroused so little interest that he gave up painting for several years.” In West’s bio, his hometown is spelled incorrectly but his study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia (PAFA, attended 1931-1934; the oldest and most prestigious art school in America) is noted along with his current teaching position and his award in 1934 of the Cresson Memorial Traveling Scholarship for study in Europe.

It is true that the year before the “The Narrows” had already been shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, and published in Art Magazine. But this was somehow different.

In the Chicago show catalogue, there are black and white photographs of the winning paintings. Hopper’s “Nighthawks” is in the middle of the booklet, Plate VII, “Awarded the Ada S. Garrett Prize.” One page leaf away is “The Narrows” by Charles M. West, Jr., Plate IX, “Awarded the Honorable Mention for Landscape.”

Also listed in the show catalogue were paintings by well-known and not so well known artists of the period whose work was shown but did not win any prize at that exhibition. (The full catalogue listing is quoted below without quotation marks; comments from this writer are in brackets). Some of those listed were associated with the Pennsylvania Academy (many now know as Pennsylvania Impressionists) or with the Brandywine School of painters near Wilmington, Delaware.

Henriette Wyeth, born Wilmington, Delaware, 1907; lives in San Patricio, New Mexico, 233 [ref. number for paintings in this show], Portrait of N.C. Wyeth. [Daughter of N.C. Wyeth, sister of Andrew Wyeth.]

Peter Hurd, born Roswell, New Mexico, 1904; lives in San Patricio, New Mexico, 133, Prairie Shower. [Husband of Henriette Wyeth; much later famously commissioned to do portrait of LBJ.]

Walter Stuempfig, Jr., born Philadelphia, 1914; lives in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, 218, Family Reunion. [West’s classmate at the PAFA]

Francis Speight, born Windsor, North Carolina, 1896; lives in Roxborough, Pennsylvania, 217, Scene in West Manayunk. [West’s teacher at the PAFA; both were students of Daniel Garber.]

Donald M. Mattison, born Beloit, Wisconsin, 1905; lives in Indianapolis, 167, Good-by. [West’s boss at the time. As director of the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana, Mattison had recruited West, then at the University of Iowa, as raising young star teacher.]

Thomas [Hart] Benton, born Neosho, Missouri, 1889; lives in Kansas City, 59, Negro Soldier.

Georgia O’Keefe, born Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, 1887; lives in New York, 180, Red Hills and Bones.

It was not the top prize. But it was a long way to have traveled for the boy from Centreville -- a small river town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that had been in many ways unchanged for more than a century. The town of 2000 on the Corsica River in a timeless rural area of farmers and watermen on the Delmarva Peninsula, had long been a virtual island between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean (reachable from Baltimore or Annapolis on the Western Shore only by slow ferry boat and ancient steamer; the two bridges were not built until the 1950s and the 1970s).

Born in 1907, young Charlie West had spent his boyhood mostly in the town’s nearby wharf area (not far from the family home) -- very like Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn -- following the river traffic, absorbing outrageous superstitions and travelers’ tales, seeing melodramas at Ford’s Floating Theater, escaping his four older sisters and his no-nonsense, small-town businessman father.

(Ford’s Floating Theater was a tiny theater on a barge towed from river town to river town around the Chesapeake Bay, said to be the actual basis for the stories used in the musical “Showboat.” Charles did one watercolor and several paintings of this theater.)

It wasn’t the top prize. But in the fall of 1942, at the age of 35, the recognition received at the Chicago show was special indeed -- a kind of watershed, a balance point in his life as a painter and artist, one generation off the farm.

It was only 10 years before that he had won a full scholarship to attend art school in Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Academy Country School at Chester Springs, PA.

It was only 8 years before that he had been awarded the top art school prize to travel and study and paint in Europe -- almost losing his life from appendicitis as the grand ship steamed toward France.

At the hospital in Paris, after his operation, he was befriended by a Hungarian Countess and her rich American husband -- and was invited to recuperate at their grand chateau near Paris. In so doing, he saw, first hand, the last days of a style of life -- with lush gardens, expensive cars, grand estates and grander parties -- that was to end forever only five years later.

In his painting, West loved the dash and freshness and vitality of the French Impressionists of the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. He saw it as a style well suited to the rural landscapes and river scenes that he had known all of his life.

Two years before he had married a fellow art school student, Anne Dickie Warner. Their first son had been born in March of 1941. A second would follow in August of 1943.

The man who later became the head of the Pennsylvania Academy sent a note to the former student: “Dear Charlie: I can only take time for the merest word this morning, but the Chicago Art Institute catalogue has just come to my desk and I see that you have crashed through again. Heartiest congratulations and best wishes for all the Wests! Sincerely Yours, Joseph T. Fraser, November 11, 1942.”

When the Chicago show closed December 10, 1942, America had been at war for its first full year. The art school closed. West was retrained to become a draftsman in the local war industries in Indianapolis.

Thirty years later -- after teaching painting, sculpture and history of art at several schools and colleges, eventually resettling his young family in his own hometown -- at the end of December 1972, at the age of 65, West’s life was at an end. He was buried, with a small family service, along side his parents in the family plot in Centreville, as geese flew overhead in the cold of early January.

His wife Anne turned a small building, former law offices on Lawyer’s Row in the center of the town, into a gallery to honor her husband's paintings and those of others.

West’s father’s dream was that his son would become a lawyer, the top of the social scale of the small agricultural town and county, a northern most outpost of very Southern rural attitudes and traditions.

It is no small irony that West’s paintings -- his art and his career so much a puzzle to his father and virtually everyone else in this essentially provincial town and rural county -- finally ended up at the center of the law offices that face the old Queen Anne’s County Courthouse. There, deeds had been exchanged and fought over for hundreds of years -- land ownership long being in the area the main path to wealth and social position.

Anne Dickie Warner West -- descended from an old Quaker family of artists and engineers from Wilmington, Delaware, and, previously, Philadelphia (before the arrival of William Penn) -- lived on for another 34 years of painting and travel and grandchildren and family visits in Centreville and then Chestertown -- passing away in her sleep in the afternoon of November 10, 2006, at the age of 97, just a month short of her 98th birthday.

References

Art Institute of Chicago, 1942. Catalogue of the Fifty-Third Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Barter, Judith A., 2007. “Travels and Travails: Hopper’s Late Pictures” in Edward Hopper, Boston, MA: MFA Publications, pp. 211-225. The book was published in conjunction with the exhibition “Edward Hopper,” organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Other sections of this book were written by Carol Troyen, Janet L. Comey, Elliot Bostwick Davis and Ellen E. Roberts.

Note: A series of photographs of paintings by Anne and Charles West, Jr., is available on the web. Go to Google, click on images, picasa, request “Charles M. West, Jr.” (in quotation marks), then click on the portrait image to bring up the full set of 38 images, request slide show with full screen and commentary text below each image.

Contact: thomasgwest@gmail.com, thomasgwest@aol.com.

Dyslexic Talents Everywhere

2010-02-15T14:10:00.001-05:00

In a previous blog (January 25, 2010), I made reference to the recent Miami conference for which I organized a roundtable discussion on the talents of dyslexics, indicating why I feel there ought to be greater research interest in this topic.

In my thank you email to the participants, I noted several points that I thought might be of interest to readers of this blog. Excerpts of this email follow (slightly modified and expanded in some places):

I want to thank you all once again for your willingness to participate in our small (but I think very high quality) roundtable discussion in Miami. I am most grateful for your time in doing background research and for your thoughtful comments.

As you know, I am deeply committed to this particular issue and I plan to continue several lines of investigation to try to move the discussion forward and to encourage the interest of other investigators -- in my talks, my blog and my third book as well as other venues, as appropriate.

If you have further thoughts on the topic, I would be most grateful if you would let me know. My intention is to address in some way each of the issues and concerns that have been raised -- in a effort to bridge the gap between my own certain feeling that this research is greatly needed and the feelings of others that it is deeply problematic and, on the whole, not very helpful.

I will be flying to Paris tomorrow to attend the World Dyslexia Forum at UNESCO Headquarters and I understand representatives of a great many countries will attend. The organizers wanted to focus their program almost exclusively on literacy and academic remediation, but I will be doing what I can to spread the word on the importance of looking at the talent side as well -- which, indeed, is part of their program, although a very small part.

It is worth noting that I will also be participating in a conference at the University of Maryland in March, called "Diamonds in the Rough," where the main theme will be gifts and talents and positive capabilities in a range of LD areas.

I continue to be puzzled by the wide divergence between two sets of groups working more or less in the same field.

It is noteworthy, that when I spend time with my friends working in the computer graphics field (whether colleagues working at Pixar or at the annual SIGGRAPH conferences) I see almost nothing but highly creative and highly visual dyslexics who are working at very high levels of proficiency, often at very high levels of income and prestige. They have gone where they are appreciated -- and they have largely avoided areas of academic failure and humiliation. Indeed, this behavior is common sense.

I was in our local Apple store earlier today and noticed a new version of "Kid Pix" for sale there in the children's section (4 to 8 years). I happen to know quite well the original developer of "Kid Pix." (I hope he continues to have a good contract with the company currently updating and distributing the product.)

A dyslexic father designed “Kid Pix” for his dyslexic son. In the early 1990s, the MIT Media Lab professors and students believed that the creator of "Kid Pix" had designed the most innovative and most error-free user interface ever developed to that date. The father taught photography at the University of Oregon at Eugene. I saw him and his family regularly at SIGGRAPH conferences for many years. He has given me several of his books and photography CDs.

So, I hope you can understand, I see the talents of dyslexics wherever I look -- and I wonder why others do not see it.

Increasingly, I think of it as a history of science question -- or perhaps an epistemological question (since I was originally trained as an undergraduate in philosophy and especially logic, epistemology and the philosophy of science).

How do we know what we think we know? Do our empirical studies actually address the right issues with the proper testing instruments? Or, do we keep doing the same kinds of studies with marginal or inconsequential results?

If we look at things with different eyes, do we get very different (and much better) answers? Do we need very different tests and instruments to begin to understand talents and capabilities that we never thought were important -- but are now clearly very important in work and life as well as a truly modern educational system? Like Lord Kelvin, can we be too easily fooled by working with “hard” numbers?

For example, why is it that we all agreed (and taught our students) for some 100 years that the ratio of dyslexic boys to girls was roughly 4 to 1 -- only to discover the real ratio was closer to 1 to 1 -- mainly because the girls had better social skills and did not act out -- so were not tested and were not identified.

Lately, it is looming larger in my mind that what we have here may be (what is called in medicine) a "referral bias" type problem.

Most professionals in the field see every day mostly a long line of school failures and “at risk” children -- those who are too young to have found a way to some measure of success (often necessarily outside of school), great or small. (Sometimes, even the needed brain structures and capacities are not there until later in the child’s development, we are told.)

In contrast, I, and a few others, see almost exclusively those who are highly successful or very highly successful, in our attempt to see what can be learned from them that may be useful to dyslexics and non-dyslexics alike.

Can it be that so much depends on what one sees every day -- as well as what we were taught to see in our own student days?

Almost all the extremely successful people I write about were never tested and were able to find, mostly on their own, some innovative way to excel and to think well of themselves outside of school, that is, outside of continuous failure situations.

(In recent years, often the situation has changed and these highly successful dyslexics learn about dyslexia and related conditions, and the significance of their own personal histories, through the testing of their children.)

As attachments, for your interest, I am including a copy of a summary paper I wrote years ago for the journal of the Hong Kong pediatricians as well as a set of several excerpts from the Epilogue for the new second edition of In the Mind's Eye. Please have a look and tell me what you think. (As it happens, I learned at the Miami conference that the Hong Kong paper is now required reading in an Israeli graduate program, among other places.)

Again, thanks so much for your thoughtful efforts. I hope the discussion will continue.

All best wishes, Tom West

Talents Among Dyslexics, Roundtable Discussion

2010-01-25T16:23:00.004-05:00

I thought that some of you might be interested in a roundtable discussion I organized for a conference earlier this month. The topic is still remarkably controversial among professionals in the field. I plan to carry on the same discussion informally at a conference in Paris next week -- and plan to summarize the continuing debate in future blogs. Your questions and comments are welcome. -- Tom West

IARLD Conference (International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities) -- Miami, Florida, January 16, 2010.

Roundtable Discussion, 1:30 - 2:30 pm

Special Talents Among Dyslexics:

Do They Exist?

Should They Be Researched?

Abstract: This Roundtable Discussion will focus on the pros and cons of dramatically increased research on the strengths and talents that appear to be closely associated with developmental dyslexia. The session coordinator has long been a strong proponent of looking seriously at the apparent special abilities of those with dyslexia (within great variety). The topic tends to be controversial. Some researchers and practitioners feel that there are really no special talents -- or rather, there are no talents that are valuable in a conventional academic context. In contrast, many highly successful dyslexics claim their success comes from their dyslexia. Others argue the talents are distributed in the same way as in the non-dyslexic population. Still others argue that there is no cogent theoretical base for a proper research program. And finally, some are uncomfortable about discussing strengths and talents since it may yield disappointment among those individuals with little or no apparent talent -- or it would confuse funding agencies that are unwilling to provide funds for investigations of strengths and talents rather than handicaps and deficiencies. Proponents argue the great importance of identifying and developing such talents as a foundation for self esteem as well as informed future educational and occupational success -- especially at a time when trends in computer information visualization technologies favor the high visual and creative capabilities that many dyslexics possess, as many conventional academic skills become less and less important in a rapidly emerging global economy.

Contact Information:

Thomas G. West (Session Coordinator): Author, In the Mind’s Eye and Thinking Like Einstein. Institutional address: Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, Member of the Advisory Board, 4400 University Drive, MS 2A1, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia 22030-4444, USA. Tel.: 202-262-1266. Email: thomasgwest@gmail.com or thomasgwest@aol.com. Blog: http://inthemindseyedyslexicrenaissance.blogspot.com.

Summary of Presenter Viewpoint : Thomas G. West

From the time of the earliest researchers (in the 1890s) until Samuel Torrey Orton (in the 1920s) and Norman Geschwind (in the 1980s), the central puzzle of dyslexia has always been the linkage of high ability in some areas with remarkable and unexpected difficulties and disabilities in other areas. For more than a century we have recognized this pattern, but have generally focused on only one aspect. With the best of intentions, we have learned much about how to remediate the problems that dyslexics experience but we have done almost nothing to develop a deeper understanding of the varied and hard-to-measure talents that many dyslexics possess.

Highly successful dyslexics nearly always say that their accomplishments and special ways of seeing come directly from their dyslexia -- not in spite of their dyslexia. I believe we should take them at their word and give credence to what they say.

Most professionals in the field agree that talents are important, but eventually they almost always come to focus almost exclusively on reading and academic remediation alone. We need to change this, especially as major technological and computer information trends tend to favor the visual strengths that many dyslexics have as their traditional academic weaknesses become less and less important.

I believe the time has come to be serious about trying to understand the talents of dyslexics -- to do the other half of the job. Accordingly, I believe that it is time to think about building a bold and ambitious plan of research and practice that will focus primarily on talent.

The major intent of this initiative would be to build a program with its primary focus on understanding and developing the strengths and talents that dyslexics have -- rather than mainly focusing on areas of remarkable weakness. To build a bold program that would, in time, be as large as all current academic remediation programs in effort, resources and impact on the lives of dyslexic children and adults.

As a dyslexic myself, I feel a growing sense of personal responsibility to dyslexics as a group. I feel the need to substantially change the course of what we are trying to do within the field. I feel we need to seriously embrace a radical change now or there will be no change at all -- allowing additional generations of dyslexics to suffer needlessly -- while also wasting distinctive talents that are greatly needed by the society and the economy at large as we enter an age of great uncertainty on many fronts. We should recognize that we badly need the big picture thinking, creativity, innovation and original insights that appear to be the signature contributions of the most successful dyslexics.

Selected articles and books by Thomas G. West: In the Mind's Eye: Creative Visual Thinkers, Gifted Dyslexics and the Rise of Visual Technologies, second edition with Foreword by Oliver Sacks, MD, 2009, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. ‘The Gifts of Dyslexia: Talents Among Dyslexics and Their Families,” Hong Kong Journal of Paediatrics, 2005, vol. 10. pp. 153-158. Thinking Like Einstein: Returning to Our Visual Roots with the Emerging Revolution in Computer Information Visualization, 2004, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. “Secret of the Super Successful . . . They’re Dyslexic,” 2003, Thalamus, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 48-52. “Visual Thinkers and Nobel Prizes,” Computer Graphics, ACM-SIGGRAPH, 2001, February issue.

AARP Interview on Visual Thinking

2010-01-10T10:56:00.001-05:00

Just got the link to the AARP interview I did a few months ago. Nice job of editing 30-minute interview down to 5 minutes. Includes quick bits on Churchill, GCHQ and Jack Horner. Link is below.

http://www.aarp.org/aarp/broadcast/aarp_radio/prime_time_focus_pastshows/article s/visual_thinking.html

The Late Bloomer's Advantage

2010-01-10T10:18:00.008-05:00

Maturity is a key concept here. Maturity suggests responsibility, conventional education, having children, understanding the adult world and finding a place in it--making one's way or doing one's duty. A small child cares little for these things. He or she is too busy discovering the world, examining things closely, seeing how they behave, trying to figure out how things work, how people respond when you do different things--touch, sounds, smells, tastes, images--and all of this starts well before words or numbers. All of this is play--learning and discovering.

While maturity is, of course, necessary to make one's way in the adult world, we are aware that it is good to preserve something of the child, especially if we desire the freshness of view that seems to promote real creativity. This is generally known and understood. However, what is not generally known is that it may be a good thing when the maturing process takes a little longer than usual.

Parents are usually pleased when their children mature quickly, becoming more independent, more organized and more self-directed in advance of their peers. What is not generally known is that late maturation can serve a useful function, although it seems to contradict conventional belief.

The neurological evidence indicates that the onset of puberty stops further neurological development. That is, neurological development is not speeded up by early puberty. Rather, early puberty appears to arrest neurological development at an earlier and less fully developed stage. One neurologist observed: “The studies show that on the average . . . quick development means you sort of ‘gel’ earlier and you don't develop as fully. It is not just true for brain development; it is true for growth also. People who grow slowly tend to grow taller.” Accordingly, it is possible that the early developer may be good at what they can do, but they may be able to do less than the child or adult who has developed over a longer period.

With respect to creativity, the freshness of the child's view is not to be underestimated. When the world of the small child is properly understood, then perhaps it is no surprise that Einstein said he was led to his discoveries by asking questions that "only children ask." This view of himself is clearly evident in the following curious passage: “I sometimes ask myself . . . how did it come that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. Naturally, I could go deeper into the problem than a child with normal abilities.”

If delayed development is acknowledged as one major factor, then the child-like playfulness of this strong visual thinker may have been another. Einstein sometimes referred to the source of his ideas as "playing" with "images." When he describes the process in his own words, the fresh, childlike plasticity of the ideas and the interplay of the two hemispheres seems clearly evident: “The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined. There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought--before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others. The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.”

An indication of the possible effects of delayed maturation is provided by a study conducted by neurologist Martha Denckla. In some cases, delayed development in certain skills may prevent, initially, the proper performance in a range of related skills. Using a test called "map walking," Dr. Denckla shows, however, that with time surprisingly high performance may suddenly appear in the same individuals who performed so poorly a short while before. The reason for the change is that initially some component of the skill was not functioning in a full and proper manner. But once that one component begins to function, the capabilities of all the other related components can come to be applied to the task as well.

In test situation described by Denckla, a grid of dots is placed on the floor. This grid corresponds to a grid of dots on a piece of cardboard held in the subject's hand. A pattern is sketched on the cardboard grid and the subject is asked to follow this same pattern along the grid on the floor. The study results showed a surprising reversal of relative performance of different groups over time.

In a dramatic illustration of this variation on the "late blooming" pattern, those who did the worst, eventually became the best--once a certain maturational threshold had been crossed: “The younger dyslexic children, that is, children below the age of 10 years (and therefore prepubertal) had the worst performance of the three groups, as measured by walking these routes correctly. A startling "late blooming" effect, however, shone forth in the data on children over 10 years old. The teenaged dyslexic group, and in particular the familial dyslexic adolescents, demonstrated superior performance on this test. . . .”

And in another passage, Denckla puts the study into perspective: “. . . Some of the previously presented data . . . on the shift during the second decade of life from poor map-walking to good map-walking and from poor copying of design to adequate copying of design, as well as the anecdotal accounts of late blooming in dyslexics, may be related to maturation to some adequate threshold level by some critical system within the left hemisphere. Such a maturation would then allow the superior capabilities of the right side of the brain to be allied with the now-adequate motor analyzer or motor programmer within the left hemisphere. . . . Thus, what had been ‘money in the bank’ can now be usefully withdrawn and displayed.”

The pattern of delayed maturation is not only an important trait of dyslexics, it is also an important trait of all human beings--when compared with other animals. Biologists explain that it is a dominant human trait to mature much later than other animals. Human infants must be protected longer by their parents and society.

However, during this helpless early period, the human infant is still building brain structures and connections in the same way it was while in the uterus. The rate of growth for the brains of primates and other mammals diminishes greatly soon after they are born. However, for periods of up to a year after birth, human infants show the same rate of brain growth and development that they had shown in the uterus prior to birth.

It is as if nature had chanced upon this strategy as a way of extending gestation well beyond the limits of what a normal birth canal would allow--permitting extended development of the brain in size and complexity well beyond what would have been possible otherwise. Apparently, as in the common expression, the parents and society do, in fact, in a very real sense, provide an extension of the womb. And in an extraordinarily fundamental way (in contrast to common belief), this extension (and consequent delay) can be seen as a very good thing indeed.

In The Dynamics of Creation, Anthony Storr points out that "the human infant . . . is born in a particularly dependent and helpless condition, and remains in this state for a relatively longer time than the young of many other species." He notes further that "at the anatomical level, it has long been recognized that human beings continue to display, in adult life, characteristics which in other species of primates, belong to the foetus, and which generally disappear or are superseded in the mature animal." Finally, Storr observes: "Many parents, reflecting ruefully upon the emotional and financial commitments involved [in normal human delayed maturity], might be glad to see their offspring mature and become independent at a very much earlier age. But if they did so, they would bypass much of what makes them human and civilized; for the price of culture is delayed maturity."

Adapted from In the Mind’s Eye, second edition, September 2009, where full references are provided.

True Creativity

2009-12-06T22:22:00.001-05:00

Some months ago I was asked to write a chapter on dyslexia and creativity for a new book to be published in the United Kingdom next year. The chapter is done. But in doing it I was made aware once again how of central creativity is to my own investigations -- that is, real creativity -- not mindless reverence for the merely different or the shocking.

I my view, creativity is one of the highest forms of what human beings are capable of doing -- and often involves a perfect solution to a major problem or question -- whether in art or design or science or politics. Yet, the term and the idea are often misunderstood and frequently abused.

Many years ago, I attended a small conference on creativity organized by the Smithsonian Institution here in Washington, DC. The speakers were a Harvard psychologist, a local woman known for her witty books on ordinary life, a sculptor and a self-satisfied chair of the panel.

Many years later I happened to touch on the subject in a conversation with a friend of a friend. We did not know each other then but we had both attended the same small Smithsonian conference that day -- and we had both come (strikingly) to the same conclusion.

We had both felt that no one on the panel knew anything about real creativity (as we had experienced it) -- except, possibly, the sculptor. But it seemed that he had limited means of articulating his experience.

Other than the sculptor, all the panelists were mainly greatly pleased with themselves -- full of ego and arrogance -- immensely pleased with all their own cleverness and wit.

In contrast, we both felt that we had been privileged to experience real creativity -- which was rare as it was wonderful.

In both cases we had felt that we were taking dictation -- from some other place. Ego had no part of it. I can recall trying to write as fast as I could, fearing to lose some of the wonderful strings of words that fit together so beautifully and expressed exactly what needed to be said. Of course, in some sense it must have come from me. But is not how it was experienced. I was full of gratitude, as was my new friend.

We both saw that something of a true test of true creativity might very well be the unexpected perfection of the product or the solution to the problem. But there is no sense of how clever am I. Rather, there is deep gratitude at the gift one has been given.

In a brief prose essay, Robert Frost seems to have captured something of this sense of what it means to be involved in a genuine creative process --

“Scholars and artists thrown together are annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books.

“They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. . . . The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic. . . .

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

“For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from a cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing. . . .

“It must be a revelation, or series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. For it to be that there must have been the greatest freedom of the material to move about in it and to establish relations in it regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity.”

Quotation from Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes," Complete Poems, 1967.

The Dangers of Learning to Read

2009-10-27T18:27:00.002-04:00

In our modern culture, reading is seen as an unmitigated good -- the source of accumulated knowledge as well as social and economic advancement. However, there appears to be an unexpected dark side. Observing world events, I am often reminded of this other side of reading. In a historical context that may be relevant to our times, we can see that literacy, especially new literacy in a formerly backward group, may be linked to intolerance, radicalism and the worst kinds of violence. Author Leonard Shlain tells us of the original “iconoclasts,” long ago:

“In the eight century, a sect arose from within the ranks of its highly literate clergy that so despised images that its members declared an all-out war against statues and paintings. . . . At first, they sought out only religious images to smash. Church mosaics, painted icons, and stained-glass artistry fell to their savage assaults. Later their targets also included painters, sculptors and craftsmen. They even murdered those whose crime it was to love art. Monks who resisted were blinded and had their tongues torn out. The iconoclasts beheaded the Patriarch of the Eastern Church in 767 for refusing to support their cause. The iconoclast movement never spread to illiterate Western Europe; its madness consumed only the segment of Christendom that boasted the highest literacy rate. Artists fled for their lives from Byzantium, heading for the western court of Charlemagne whose largely illiterate courtiers welcomed them with open arms.”

Re-consecrated Shrines

When we are trying to understand something fundamental about human beings and the human brain, it seems wise to look, as much as possible, to other ages and other cultures to see the full range of what we need to consider. This is effectively what has been provided by Leonard Shlain in his book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess--The Conflict Between Word and Image.

Shlain, a surgeon from Mill Valley, California, spent seven years drawing together elements from many cultures and thousands of years of history to weave a narrative and an argument about the sometimes catastrophic interplay of image, alphabetic writing, religion, gender relationships and human history. For the vast sweep of the topic, Shlain's achievement is astonishing -- although it is not always entirely convincing. One does not have to accept all of Shlain's argument, however, to be persuaded that he is dealing with a topic that is well worth our attention. His view is bold and he delivers new insights and information that substantially enlarge our understanding of important historical dynamics -- as well as helping us, strangely perhaps, with developing a better understanding of some of the main issues of our own time.

While on a tour of Mediterranean archaeological sites years ago, Shlain was told that many shrines had originally been consecrated to a female deity. Then, later, “for unknown reasons, unknown persons reconsecrated” the shrines to a male deity. After some consideration, Shlain “was struck by the thought that the demise of the Goddess, the plunge in women's status, and the advent of harsh patriarchy and misogyny occurred around the time that people were learning how to read and write.”

He wondered whether “there was something in the way people acquired this new skill that changed the brain's actual structure.” Shlain points out that in the developing brain, “differing kinds of learning will strengthen some neuronal pathways and weaken others.” Applying what is known of the individual brain to that of a whole culture, Shlain “hypothesized that when a critical mass of people within a society acquire literacy, especially alphabet literacy, left hemispheric modes of thought are reinforced at the expense of right hemispheric ones. . . .” This change resulted, he proposed, in “a decline in the status of images, women's rights, and goddess worship.”

Using Both Sides

In developing this approach, Shlain points out that his own occupation as surgeon (and as an associate professor of surgery) probably has contributed in significant ways. By selection, training and daily work, it is often observed that surgeons have to move constantly back and forth between right hemisphere and left hemisphere modes of thought. Accordingly, Shlain observes that his “unique perspective led [him] to propose a neuroanatomical hypothesis to explain why goddesses and priestesses disappeared from Western religions.”

The experience of surgeons is thus unlike many scholars and historians. The latter are expected to use mainly one side only -- the left side of the brain, the world (generally) of words, grammar, logic and highly specialized analysis. Less weight is given to the pictures, images and the large-scale, global view so characteristic of the right side of the brain. It is widely recognized in some circles that there is often a trade off between verbal and visual skills. This tradeoff is recognized in the half-serious joke sometimes told by neuroscientists: “Never trust a surgeon who can spell.” If you are too good with the mechanics of writing, perhaps you may not be good enough with the mechanics of visualizing, locating and removing a dangerous tumor. Unlike many other professionals, surgeons cannot avoid being both “bookish” and “hands on.”

Two Hemispheres Through History

Years ago, when I was researching my earlier book, In the Mind's Eye, I found that always in the background, behind and under every story and every neurological observation, was my own awareness of the larger implications of the dual nature of the two hemispheres of the human brain. I was aware that this then relatively new understanding of the brain provided the larger context for most of the things I was writing. (While we have since learned that the roles of the two hemispheres is more complex than previously thought, the contrasting functions are still useful ways of thinking about the brain and cognitive processes.)

Along with this awareness, however, came a quiet but persistent series of questions. If we are now, in fact, moving from a present world largely based on words to an emerging new world increasingly based on images, has this happened before in other periods of history and how did it happen? In the past, were there whole societies and cultures largely based on right-hemisphere kinds of knowledge -- as ours seems to be based largely on left-hemisphere forms of knowledge and understanding? What would be the main consequences of following one approach over the other? What is gained and what is lost in each direction? And what happens to various factions and power groups within these societies when one group takes over from the other and there is a substantial change in one direction or another?

I wondered why certain religions and certain cultures seem to revere the written word and the book so very highly (two relatively new technologies in the long history of the human race)--and seem so ready, from time to time, to explode with a destructive force full of fear and hatred for images and everything linked to them? And what might all this mean for us today if we are, in fact, beginning to go through such a major change once again? I knew just enough of history to suspect that there was a major story to be told. But these questions were outside the scope of my own research--and I had no time to look into them further.

Years later, Shlain's wide-ranging analysis has provided a rich and thought-provoking series of possible answers to these questions. His observations show some of the wonderful possibilities, but also some of the frightening prospects. It is the kind of book that holds your attention long after you have put it down -- turning the evidence and arguments over in your mind, returning to passages, trying to see whether or not the pattern holds -- and trying to sort out what it might mean for our own times. It is a very different picture from what we are usually given. It is full of ideas that many will find very hard to accept. Sometimes he seems to push his material too hard to make it fit his thesis. However, in the end, his perspective may prove to be far more perceptive and pertinent than many more conventional interpretations by specialists and professionals.

In a series of 35 tightly-constructed chapters Shlain surveys an enormously broad territory--“Image/Word,” “Hunters/Gatherers,” “Right Brain/Left Brain,” “Hieroglyphs/Isis,” “Abraham/Moses,” “Athens/Sparta,” “Taoism/Confucianism,” “Jesus/Christ,” “Muslim Veils/Muslim Words,” “Mystic/Scholastic,” “Protestant/Catholic,” “Sorcery/Science,” “Page/Screen.” With example after example, he attempts to show that, in general, the old goddess-linked, polytheistic religions are more concerned with the cycles of life, more tolerant, less given to religious warfare and tended to exhibit the values and perspectives of the right hemisphere. The newer, literacy-linked, monotheistic religions, on the other hand, are more given to single-minded pursuit of narrow group goals, are often intolerant and self-righteous in the extreme, can be extraordinarily savage in extended religious warfare (in spite of peaceful religious teachings they pretend to follow) and tend to exhibit the values and narrow perspectives typical of the left hemisphere of the brain.

Shlain argues that these changes were brought about, remarkably, by learning to use alphabetic writing systems. “Aside from obvious benefits that derived from their ease of use, alphabets produced a subtle change in cognition that redirected human thinking. . . . Alphabets reinforced only half of the dual strategy that humans had evolved to survive. . . .” Each part of this “duality perceived and reacted to the world in a different way; a unified response emerged only when both complementary halves were used.” “All forms of writing increase the left brain's dominance over the right.” Learning to read and write “supplants all-at-once gestalt perception with a new, unnatural, highly abstract one-at-a-time cognition.”

New Thoughts About The New World

Consequently, according to Shlain, the rapid spread of literacy and inexpensive printed materials with Gutenberg's press in 1454 had mixed results. “The rapid rise of literacy rates wrought by the printing press was a boon to European science, literature, poetry, and philosophy. And yet it seemed no country could escape the terrible religious upheaval that inevitably followed the march of the metal letters.” Shlain provides detailed descriptions of the religious wars of this period.

The possibilities inherent in one predisposition versus another is probably most clear in Shlain's speculations about the discovery of the New World. If the Old World discoverers had been more tolerant and less single-minded, he argues, this sad period of history might have been very different. “Had the discovery and invasion of the New World been undertaken by a culture other than sixteenth-century Europeans driven mad by the printing press, a different scenario might have ensued. In the fourth century B.C., Alexander the Great made peace treaties with Dravidian tribes in India and Scythians in Thrace; people as exotic as any he would have encountered in America.

Unencumbered by the intolerance that comes with alphabet monotheism, Alexander did not feel compelled to eradicate the local religions and enslave the native populations.” Alternatively, “If Julius Caesar had discovered the New World, would he have destroyed the local population, stolen their lands, and rooted out their culture? Likely not. This wise pagan would have forged alliances, fostered trade, and treated the people with respect.” This should be expected, according to Shlain, because this is the policy he actually pursued with the “blue-painted Celts and Pics.”

It is noteworthy that in Shlain's view, the most dangerous historical times appear to be soon after the growth and establishment of widespread literacy. The more people learned to read, the more likely they were going to find good and authoritative reasons to begin slaughtering each other.

It is doubtful whether this will be a popular view among the growing numbers of well-intentioned literacy programs. However, perhaps we can be grateful that in the US and other advanced economies we are now mostly working on the last few percentage points -- rather than the first burst of broad-spread literacy, as in other parts of the world, especially certain developing countries. For the advanced economies, the dangerous period has largely passed; for the newly developing, the dangerous period has just begun (giving us a new and troubling perspective on the raising militancy of fundamentalist religions in a number of countries). Not being aware of this pattern, our leaders and their advisors are puzzled by world events as they unfold.

Hoping For A New Balance

Shlain gives us an unsettling picture of what can happen with the rapid spread and deep effects of a powerful technology -- reading, writing and the book. In his Epilogue, however, he apologizes for his criticism of the books he loves so dearly. “Throughout, as a writer, as an avid reader, and as a scientist, I had the uneasy feeling that I was turning on one of my best friends.” However, he felt that he had to point out the “pernicious side effect” of literacy that “has gone essentially unnoticed.”

What is most important is finding a new balance once again. He notes that “even when we become aware that literacy has a downside, no reasonable person would . . . recommend that people not become literate. Instead, we seek a renewed respect for iconic information, which in conjunction with the ability to read, can bring our two hemispheres into greater equilibrium and allow both individuals and cultures to become more balanced.”

The promise of this new balance leads Shlain to foresee a brighter future. “I am convinced,” he asserts, “we are entering a new Golden Age -- one in which the right-hemispheric values of tolerance, caring, and respect for nature will begin to ameliorate the conditions that have prevailed for the too-long periods during which left-hemispheric values were dominant. Images, of any kind, are the balm bringing about this worldwide healing.”

(It is worth noting, parenthetically, a possible alternative variation of Shlain’s theory. As we have seen, Shlain argues that the new development of literacy has a strong tendency to change people’s brains, emphasizing left-hemisphere modes of thought. Such effects may be subject to debate. However, there is an alternative dynamic that Shlain does not mention which is implicit in his argument and may be an important contributing factor. Just as individual brains might be changed, so whole populations might be changed as well. Perhaps it is not so much that the brains of individuals are changed (so quickly) but that with the spread of reading those individuals (and factions) with a certain skill and talent mix suddenly achieve, because of the new importance of reading, a status and power that they never had before -- bringing along their mainly left-hemisphere (one dimensional and single minded) view of the world. In other words, in a new reading-based culture and power structure, those with natural inclinations toward reading proficiency come to prosper, rising quickly to the top ranks. As a consequence, left hemisphere values and views of the world become an increasingly dominant part of this new culture. At the same time, right hemisphere values of balance and tolerance are overwhelmed, at least for a time. Thus, alternatively, it may not be that all brains are quickly changed, but rather that the whole population comes to be dominated by those with a certain kind of brain -- who find their new power that they did not have before because of a broad ascendancy of a new technology -- that is, reading, writing and the making of books that speak with magical and unassailable authority.)

As a group of people interested in the image in its many forms, we may hope that Shlain is correct in his future expectation of a new balance. However, we may also hope that we will not see a revival of those who are single-minded in their love only for the written word, smashing images on every side in their passionate intensity.

Passion Over “The Passion”

A relatively short time ago we might have wondered whether the actions of historically distant Christian reformers or Islamic fundamentalists would ever bear on our near interests today. However, it has become increasingly clear that these issues are becoming more relevant with each passing month. Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether we may be going through one of those portentous periods where world events and mass media will be dramatically shaped once again by the age-old battle between the image haters and the image lovers.

It is clear that images still stir deep passions--now, however, with a curious reverse twist of which many seem to be unaware. Some years ago, in an article on Mel Gibson’s then new film, “The Passion,” art critic Paul Richard points out (“Irony in Passion”) that the film depends heavily on the literal and bloody depictions of the crucifixion of Christ characteristic of the Counter-Reformation art from within the Catholic Church.

Indeed, Richard observes that the great irony here is that the avowed target audience for the film, evangelical Christians, seems to be attracted to the same literal and bloody depictions that were used as a weapon against their own theological ancestors long ago. Such images were hated by the early reformation, yet their theological descendents have come to embrace them with enthusiasm.

How did all this come to be? In Richard’s words, “Martin Luther’s Reformation was a theological rebellion. No longer would the rebels accept the pope in Rome, or the hierarchy he led, or the Latin of the Mass and of the Vulgate Bible, which most of them could neither read nor understand.” They wanted their own Bible, in their own language so they could understand and interpret the scriptures for themselves. “They didn’t need the pope, they didn’t need his saints, they didn’t need his priests, and -- as some began insisting -- they didn’t need his art.” [1] They realized that the art of the Catholic Church, and especially the art of the Counter-Reformation, was a counter attack on their own call for an end to all image making (as they believed was required by their reading of scripture) and for extreme simplicity in all things. As Richard notes, this desire for simplicity is still evident among American Protestant buildings. “That plainness is still seen in the clean, white clapboard churches scattered through New England, in the Quaker meeting houses of Pennsylvania, all the way to the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, Calif. No Catholic paintings taint these sanctuaries.”

Smashing of Images and Restoration

Reminding his readers of the historical events, Richard gives some detail about the Reformation’s role in destroying many works of art through a hatred of images of all kinds. “On Aug., 10, 1566, at Steenvoorde in Flanders, a Calvinist preacher named Sebastian Matte told his listeners to go and smash the art of the Catholic churches. Ten days afterward, the cathedral at Antwerp was methodically trashed.” Although Richards does point out that “later, under Catholic rule, Rubens was commissioned to re-do [the cathedral’s] splendor,” the fate of most churches and cathedrals in Protestant areas was grim indeed. “Such spasms of enthusiastic image-breaking erupted in the British Isles for most of the next century. ‘Lord, what work was here!’ lamented the Bishop of Norwich in 1647. ‘What clattering of glasses! What beating down of walls!’ ”

Eventually, after years of civil war, the image haters came to be in full control of England and in time found reason to chop off the head of their king, Charles I. Later, after years of puritanical and repressive rule by Oliver Cromwell and his supporters, the English people had had enough of it. They then brought back the king’s son and restored him to the throne -- releasing a rebirth of creativity and vitality rarely seen before or since. As art historian Kenneth Clark observed (Civilization) , the restoration of Charles II in 1660, “ended the isolation and austerity which had afflicted England for almost fifteen years. As so often happens, a new freedom of movement led to an outburst of pent-up energy. There are usually men of genius waiting for these moments of expansion, like ships waiting for high tide. . . .” So came a rebirth of English accomplishment in art, architecture and science. Sometimes such extreme measures led to a new restoration of balance and a new burst of creativity.

A More Ancient and Kindly Islam

The surprisingly central role of image haters in current world events is strikingly evident in a recent book about problems of democracy by Fareed Zakaria (Future of Freedom). Zakaria argues that “If there is one great cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, it is the total failure of political institutions in the Arab world. Islamic fundamentalism got a tremendous boost in 1979 when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini toppled the staunchly pro-American shah of Iran. The Iranian Revolution demonstrated that a powerful ruler could be taken on by groups within society. It also revealed how in a developing society even seemingly benign forces of progress -- for example, education -- can add to the turmoil.”

Zakaria observes that over past centuries Islam was more adaptable and flexible than what we see today. “Until the 1970s most Muslims in the Middle East were illiterate and lived in villages and towns. They practiced a kind of village Islam that had adapted itself to local cultures and to normal human desires. Pluralistic and tolerant, these villagers often worshiped saints, went to shrines, sang religious hymns, and cherished art -- all technically disallowed in Islam.”

All this was changed by more recent historical forces (of course, in some measure not unlike the Protestant Reformation in the West hundreds of years before): “By the 1970s, however, these societies were being urbanized. People had begun moving out of their villages to search for jobs in towns and cities. Their religious experience was no longer rooted in a specific place with local customs and traditions. At the same time they were learning to read and they discovered that a new Islam was being preached by a new generation of writers, preachers, and teachers. This was an abstract faith not rooted in historical experience but literal and puritanical -- Islam of the high church as opposed to Islam of the street fair.”

It is striking how well this brief aside in Zakaria’s book seems to fit Shlain’s main argument. (For emphasis, I have added the italics.) It is fair to assume that Zakaria knows little or nothing about Shlain’s book and argument. Yet, amazingly, there is a persuasive convergence. Whether Taliban or Al Qaeda, Islam’s puritanical fundamentalists are intent upon destroying images in all forms, just as they are intent upon destroying all tolerant and progressive institutions -- in a manner strikingly similar to the puritanical Protestant Christian fundamentalists of long ago. It is remarkable how this passage reveals how much these patterns still dominate our times and how modern political commentators, however well informed, seem to be unaware of a larger pattern of which their current concerns are, apparently, but the most recent manifestation.

We might hope that over the longer term, unfolding conditions might be more favorable to image lovers, as well as greater tolerance in general. However, in the short run, it would appear that the image haters and image smashers will be shaping world events in the familiar age-old pattern. And we can wonder how long it will go on before people will have had enough of it -- and will want to restore a former balance once again.

Adapted from chapter 6, Thinking Like Einstein by Thomas G. West (Prometheus Books). This book is based on a series of columns (“Images and Reversals”) written over several years for the quarterly journal Computer Graphics, a publication of ACM SIGGRAPH, the international professional association for computer graphic artists and technologists. During these years, the journal editor was Gordon Cameron who now makes software tools at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California.

Making All Things Make Themselves

2009-10-23T11:09:00.004-04:00

I have been reading the new book by Iain McCalman, Darwin's Armada -- Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution. This book has put me in mind of an article I wrote for SIGGRAPH some years back, a version of which was included in Thinking Like Einstein. I think the issues and conceptions presented are still very much alive today -- and are given a new aspect with links to the newest visual technologies.

An article on science and religion in Science magazine noted: "The reaction to the Darwinian theory was . . . diverse when it first it exploded onto the Victorian scene. . . . For Charles Kingsley, a deity who could make all things make themselves was far wiser than one who simply made all things."

Computer graphics has always been about making things, whether making 3D images of real objects, making images of imagined visions or making models of the “unseen” in visualizations of scientific data.

During the Renaissance, the goal of art was to imitate nature, to make true and accurate images of the real world. Even in the poetry of the period, the “prime aim … was to make an imitation” in order to “grasp the essential meaning and value.”

Although this goal fell away some time ago, we can now see that our newest tools make it possible to imitate nature once again - but this time at much deeper levels. The imitation can be not only of images of surfaces, but also imitation of nature’s growth, its physical motion, its processes, its inner workings, its unfolding instructions according to an simple code -- imitating the immense complexity generated by variation of a simple code within a context of meaningful selection. And it is already becoming clear that part of this imitation is developing some understanding of things that “make themselves.”

Virtual Creatures

Years ago, when I first saw the short silent movies of Karl Sims’ block creatures -- walking, swimming, seeking light and guarding their food -- I was thunderstruck. I felt immediately that something very powerful indeed was afoot. And I imagined that what I was seeing was really only the very beginning.

Of course, Sims’ work is in many ways mainly a highly sophisticated extension of Richard Dawkins’ “Blind Watchmaker” program developed for the early Macintosh. With this program (included with Dawkins’ book of the same name), two-dimensional, static, monochrome stick figures varied their form in random ways. This allowed the player to select among an array of mutations for different kinds of shapes and traits, play after play, generation after generation -- until a new and wonderful centipede, starfish or complex crystal was produced.

This piece of software showed the potential of a modest interactive game to reveal a deeper concept, a fundamental process of nature. However, for me, although the stick figures were fascinating, it took the more life-like motions and behavior of Sims’ virtual creatures to drive the point home.

What Works

Accordingly, I think our new tools and our new toys are bringing us face to face with a deeper understanding of how nature’s system really works -- how truly dazzling adaptations to a particular environment can be generated with a relatively simple mechanism, constantly interacting with a particular and changing environment.

This deeper understanding also belies the idea of fixed superiority, since so much depends upon one form of environmental context for any particular form of superiority. The system may evolve an amazingly superior swimmer, but this does not make for a superior walker. (Or, as friend has recently pointed out, a good basketball player would probably make a poor jockey.)

With such models, we can see what an effective mechanism evolution is, partly because of this intense and constant mutual interaction between genetic code and outside environment. Indeed, we might reflect that even if there were overt intention by a maker, this might not be a good thing.

We humans are constantly designing things by intention. But often we come up with the “unintended consequences” that are so often observed and lamented. It becomes clear that making things that make themselves may be a much more practical strategy in an ever-changing world.

But there is a rub here -- for many people, an enormous change of metaphor. We now have to view the maker’s role not as a craftsman or designer or engineer, but as a maker of things over which the maker has only limited control. Over time, the vast complexity generates a freedom of form and function well beyond the power of the maker. And often, I would argue, this is a good thing.

Early Discoveries

One of Sims’ creatures in particular stands out in my mind. In his design specifications, “walking” was defined as forward motion. Most creatures found ways to “walk,” more or less as expected. However, to the surprise of the programmer, one creature found that by simply building itself very tall (with an appropriately placed top-heavy weight), it could fall and tumble heel over head so that it could generate ample forward motion and thus satisfy the original selection criteria. Sims observed that this was a strategy that had never occurred to him -- the programmer, the arms-length designer.

What is no less remarkable is that Sims also found that other creatures took advantage of the bugs and programmer’s mistakes in specifying the physical world. Indeed, Sims noted that such a process was so reliable that it might be seen as a “lazy” way of finding such bugs.

Thus he argued that “it is important that the physical simulation be reasonably accurate when optimizing for creatures that can move within it. Any bugs that allow energy leaks from non-conservation, or even round-off errors, will inevitably be discovered and exploited by the evolving creatures. Although this can be a lazy and often amusing approach for debugging a physical modeling system, it is not necessarily the most practical.”

Unexpected innovation and relentless exploitation of tiny areas of possible advantage -- these are impressive indeed and show the amazing power of nature’s engine of adaptation. If these striking innovations are so easy to observe in a synthetic universe, in only a handful of generations, how much more should we expect in the real world of nature?

Of course, when viewed in this way, ample evidence can be seen in every direction. A recent article in Science News, for example, noted that a graduate student has just found a kind of bacteria living on a certain kind of ant that proved to be highly beneficial to the ants. The ants “farm” a certain kind of fungus for their own food.

However, this fungus would be easily killed by another pest fungus - if it were not for the antibiotic secretions of the ants’ bacteria ride-along buddies. Thus the graduate student “who once mused about funny-looking patches” on the ants found that the insects have “a microscopic partner species overlooked despite about a century of study.”

“What’s interesting from an evolutionary perspective is that once again the ants hit on something before we did. Ants beat humans in developing agriculture by some 50 million years. Now, says [one scientist], it looks as if the same ants came in ahead on bacterial antibiotics by millions of years.”

Learning from the Lowly

Such stories take us to a place where we should be prepared to have much higher respect for apparently ordinary and humble creatures. What we are not sufficiently aware of is that these creatures are the beneficiaries of a system capable of innovation far beyond our own small observations or imaginings.

Perhaps it is time (especially now in an era of climate change) to reconsider centuries of human self-congratulation on our own cleverness and begin to look at the cleverness -- indeed the wisdom -- of humble creatures.

These creatures have used an elegant process to not only produce clever innovations, but to produce clever innovations that are proven to work, again and again, over millions of years. Such accomplishments should teach us a great deal about the possibilities for “sustainable development.”

We have built an elaborate maze of justifications and explanations. Modern culture has sophisticated arguments to explain why human beings are at the top the pecking order and why human language is a supreme achievement. Accordingly, it is very hard for us to fully appreciate the accomplishments of the humble ant, the unsavory fungus and the insignificant microbe.

Yet, our newest technologies -- as the microscope and telescope did centuries ago -- are slowly opening up these worlds so that we may see clearly once again what we should have known all along.

However, learning from such lowly creatures is not easy. Our whole culture, for most of us, has trained us not to think such thoughts. Certainly there is very little in the Modern Western tradition to cultivate such an appreciation.

Generally, there has been virtually no respect for the intelligence of animals. Intelligence is not seen as manifest in nature. Rather, it comes in spoken words and in writing. Respecting the intelligence of animals and creatures that make themselves would seem to be more consistent with the worldview of our very distant ancestors.

It would indeed be curious if our new visualization technologies and computer simulations were to take us back in time to a place where we can admire -- once again, as our distant ancestors did -- the high intelligence of lowly creatures.

These creatures learn and innovate not from the words and logic but from relentless experimentation and selection over long periods of time, thus showing the deep wisdom of making “all things make themselves.”

Based on chapter 12 of Thinking Like Einstein. References: Brooke, John. “Science and Religion: Lessons from History?” Science, Dec. 11, 1998, pp. 1985-1986. Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker-Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, W.W. Norton, 1987. Dean, Leonard. Renaissance Poetry, Prentice-Hall, 1960, p. 1. Milus, S. “Farmer Ants Have Bacterial Farmhands,” Science News, vol. 155, April 24, 1999, p. 261. Sims, Karl. “Evolving Virtual Creatures,” Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, 1994, pp. 15-22. More information about Karl Sims work can be found at: http://www.karlsims.com/

Thinking Like Einstein on the Hokule’a

2009-10-11T15:10:00.002-04:00

The following observations are based on sections of a chapter from my book Thinking Like Einstein. Here I was trying to make the point that some of the most creative thinking in science and other fields is based on very different ways of gaining knowledge than conventional academic models. I think this has been true for most of human history and is still true today--although this is almost never recognized by modern conventional educational systems.

“We have Hawaiian names for the houses of the stars--the places where they come out of the ocean and go back into the ocean. If you can identify the stars, and if you have memorized where they come up and go down, you can find your direction. The star compass is also used to read the flight path of birds and the direction of waves. It does everything. It is a mental construct to help you memorize what you need to know to navigate. . . .

“We use the best clues that we have. We use the sun when it is low on the horizon. . . . When the sun gets too high you cannot tell where it has risen. You have to use other clues. Sunrise is the most important part of the day. At sunrise you start to look at the shape of the ocean--the character of the sea. You memorize where the wind is coming from. The wind generates the swells. You determine the direction of the swells, and when the sun gets too high, you steer by them. And then at sunset we repeat the observations. . . . At night we use the stars. . . .

“When I came back from my first voyage as a student navigator from Tahiti to Hawai’i the night before he went home, [my teacher] . . . said ‘I am very proud of my student. You have done well for yourself and your people.’ He was very happy that he was going home. He said, ‘Everything you need to see is in the ocean but it will take you twenty more years to see it.’ That was after I had just sailed 7000 miles.” (Navigator Nainoa Thompson of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, having sailed on the traditional Polynesian canoe, the Hokule’a.)

Using the Best Cues We Have

With the words of Navigator Nainoa Thompson, in this passage we see a wonderful description of using well the best of what is ready at hand to do a most important job--on which rests the survival of a whole people. Indeed, during recent years, the successful voyages of the Hokule’a and other long-distance canoes have become cultural milestones and Nainoa Thompson has become a major hero among Polynesians. These voyages and revived navigation skills have much to teach us all. We are shown a highly refined example of the observation and visual thinking skills needed to navigate across the Pacific. If we had not known better, most of us would have thought that it was not possible to do.

Perhaps we are just now mature enough in our modern culture to fully appreciate what these navigators accomplished in an earlier culture with the simplest of tools and the most sophisticated use of their brains--and to see that such feats rank with the highest accomplishments of human beings, in any field, at any time. We can now see that it is not a matter of developing complex mathematics or the most modern tools and technologies. Rather, it is a matter of using well what is available in the particular situation-- developing techniques to train the brain and the senses through close observation, long practice and sensitive teaching--making the best use of what is at hand, using “the best clues that we have.”

Feats such as these draw heavily on visual and spatial abilities and “intelligences” that have been generally under-appreciated in modern culture. But all this is changing and the newest technologies are taking us back to some of our oldest and most essential abilities--teaching us that in some fields, the further forward we proceed, the more we reconnect with our ancient roots.

Thinking Like Einstein

Visual thinking and visual knowledge is a continuing puzzle. It seems to come up more and more these days--but few seem to understand its deep roots and larger implications. The human brain is indeed wonderful--the way it permits us to use all forms of natural systems and subtle information to do rather unbelievable things--and still survive, or, rather, in the long run, in order to survive.

To navigate across thousands of miles of open ocean while feeling the long-distance swells (not sailing past tiny unseen islands just over the horizon), to adapt to amazing extremes of heat and cold--using with great sophistication only those tools and resources that are readily at hand--all without modern technologies or distant supports and hidden subsidies (always a major advantage for modern travelers). All this is accomplished without a book of written instructions. And without full scientific knowledge. But with knowledge enough to hunt food, find home, build shelter, fend off enemies, cooperate with a group and raise a family--for thousands and thousands of years.

Strangely, the further ahead we go, the more our future is seen to be like our distant past. Sometimes, the more we look into our future, the more it is like the very, very old. The more modern we become, really, the more we come to appreciate (belatedly) the long-earned wisdom of traditional cultures.

The more we understand the brain’s deep resources for creativity and pattern recognition, the more we come to respect the accomplishments of our distant ancestors--and appreciate the problems they solved--the solutions that have secured our survival and allowed us to be. The more we move into unfamiliar territory, without map or guidebook, the more we admire traditional knowledge, long discounted by bookish education.

This is not mere romanticism but level-headed respect. The more our technologies change (and also change us), the more we can see that the newest computer data visualization technologies draw on some our oldest neurological resources--more like those of the hunter-gathers than they are like those of the scribes, schoolmen and scholars of more recent times. Albert Einstein tells us, as we have seen previously, that all his really important and productive thinking was done by playing with images in his head, in his imagination. Only in a secondary stage did he translate--with great effort, he says--these images to words and mathematics that could be understood by others. We now have technologies that can deal with the images directly--so the laborious translation may often not be necessary or even desirable.

The Rise of Visual Technologies

Some believe that visualization technologies are already in evidence everywhere. They think the battle is over. Others, myself among them, think that visualization technologies have a very, very long way to go and they have hardly begun to have substantial impact in the full range of fields they will transform over time. We think, with the exception of a few specialists, the process of deep change has not yet really begun. We think that gaining insight and new understanding through the sophisticated use of visualization technologies and techniques, in time, should be as pervasive as reading and writing.

But there can be little debate that we already have tools that can help us think the way Einstein thought--and it is striking how old and traditional these ways of thinking were. In many ways, Einstein thought and worked more like a craftsman than a scholar. And, indeed, the more proficient he became at the sophisticated science and mathematics of his peers, the less visual he became--and, more important, the less creative and innovative he became.

It would seem that the traditional Polynesian navigators were drawing on some of the same neurological resources that were so very useful to Einstein when he was a young man--before, as we are told by other scientists, he became corrupted by excessive familiarity with sophisticated mathematics. As he became more expert as a scientist and mathematician, he accomplished less. He had abandoned the modes of thought that had given him his best and most original insights.

In is notable that two physicists, Richard Feynman and Abraham Pais, both observed independently that as Einstein grew older, he became less visual in his approach and became more adept at conventional mathematics. They both noted that this process seemed to make Einstein much less creative, original and productive in his work. Feynman believed Einstein became much less productive when “he stopped thinking in concrete physical images and became a manipulator of equations.”

Abraham Pais, the author of a scientific biography on Einstein, also noted that Einstein’s increasing dependence on mathematics in later life also involved a reduced reliance on the visual and intuitive approaches he used so heavily and so productively in his earlier work. Pais observes that it is “dangerous and can be fatal to rely on formal [mathematical] arguments,” a danger from which Einstein did not escape. “The emphasis on mathematics is so different from the way the young Einstein used to proceed.”

Traditional Visual Cultures

When I was giving talks to teachers and school heads in Fairbanks, Alaska, several years ago, I was told that the Athebaskan Indian students in the villages along the Yukon River were natural visual thinkers and natural scientists. This should make us think.

We may well wonder whether they would they have substantial advantages if they were to be educated in the visual world of Einstein’s imagination and modern computer graphics--rather than the old academic world of facts and dates, words and numbers. Shortly afterward, when I had given talks in Honolulu, others there told me that traditional Polynesian culture quite naturally promotes highly visual and hands-on approaches over verbal approaches to the communication of knowledge.

If we were to fully and deeply understand the roots of knowledge in our own new world, we might see that Einstein’s way of thinking is far more like those used in resurrected traditional cultures than it is like the academic conventions of the distant and recent past. We might see, again, that Einstein’s way of thinking is more like that of the artisan or craftsman or traditional navigator and less like that of the conventionally trained scholar or mathematician or scientist.

Smashing Images

There seems always to have been tension and conflict between the world of the word and the world of the image. In March of 2001, a whirlwind fanned the fires of this ageless battle between the word and the image. As the world watched in horror and disbelief (foreshadowing greater horrors the following September and thereafter), leaders of the Taliban government in Afghanistan decided that it was time to finally destroy all images in their country.

No more playing on international sympathies or bargaining for foreign funds and support. They just declared that the statues were idolatrous and gave the order and the giant ninth-century Buddha statues of Bamiyan were blasted to rubble. “It took us four days to finish the big statue. He was very strong,” said one soldier.

Thus here we have the two extremes of a global and philosophical continuum. On one side, the image haters, those who would destroy all art in all forms out of a strict obedience to an ancient and narrow prescription. And, on the other side, those who would have art harnessed to shape and serve larger interests.

For a long time (it is not often observed), many Christian denominations have embodied this split as well. Some churches have always used the image to teach church doctrine and Bible stories--especially to those who were not able learn it through written text. Other Christian groups have tried to avoid all images and decoration--indeed, some of their Protestant forbearers smashed the stained glass windows and pulled off the heads of the stone saints just as the Taliban have done in recent times.

In some parts of England, even today, they are still discovering stained glass window sections that were buried long ago to save the Christian images from the enraged, puritanical Christian destroyers of images. Indeed, it is sobering to observe that some of these same Puritan Christians sailed to America on the Mayflower--and, being less able navigators than the ancient Polynesians, ended up in New England rather than Virginia, their intended destination.

Based on sections from Thinking Like Einstein. See also: Nainoa Thompson, “Voyage Into the New Millennium,” Hana Hou! magazine, February/March 2000, pp. 41 ff. Harriet Witt-Miller, “The Soft, Warm, Wet Technology of Native Oceania,” Whole Earth Review, Fall 1991, pp. 64-69. Dennis Kawaharada, “Wayfinding, or Non-Instrument Navigation,” The Polynesian Voyaging Society, http://leahi.kcc.Hawaii.edu/org/pvs/, May 2002.

Without "Big Science"

2009-10-04T23:06:00.001-04:00

I have just crossed the country by car and have been thinking along the way of a chapter on creativity and dyslexia that I have been asked to write for a new book to be published in Britain. In so doing my thoughts have returned repeatedly to a bit of research I did on the Wright Brothers--a story that is far more interesting and timely than one might suppose. The following is based on an early version of this story:

Today, it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that virtually all science of consequence is "big science." There seems to be nearly a universal belief that nothing of importance can be done without large a research staff, expensive equipment and a massive budget. It may be true that much of modern science and technology requires such investment, but not, perhaps, in every case. There are a few counter examples to be considered.

One example that comes from the historical pantheon of American technological heroes: An illustration of what common sense and basic capabilities and determined effort may accomplish, where experts with conventional research programs or gentlemen enthusiasts with grandstand performances had failed repeatedly, is provided by the example of the Wilbur and Orville Wright.

Periodically, there seems to come a time when all the tools and techniques become available for relatively ordinary people to draw together what they need in some novel new way. Once these circumstances converge, then the major additional needed ingredient is mainly effort--determined, focused, passionate and unrelenting--along with a willingness to risk many small failures in order to inch forward into unknown territory through a good deal of trial and error.

The Wrights had only their bicycle business and such tools and skills and income that this business made available to them. Yet, with these modest resources, they took what was essentially an off-season hobby and turned it into a dramatically successful achievement, one that had previously eluded all the professional efforts.

(There is an aspect of evolutionary selection here as well. It matters most of all, perhaps, that at a particular time and place all the resources to do a job are widely available. Many will fail. A few will succeed. But with widely distributed capabilities, the whole enterprise moves ahead at a much more rapid rate. During the late nineteenth century, we are told, the total number of inventions and patents increased dramatically. The number of foolish inventions also increased greatly. But what is more important is that the number of really good inventions increased greatly as well.)

Neither Wilbur nor Orville Wright ever finished high school, although other members of the family were college educated. (There is no evidence of learning disabilities in either brother.) Their father was an educated religious leader and administrator, a traveling Bishop of the United Brethren in Christ. Their sister eventually attended Oberlin College to earn her teaching credentials.
The brothers initially went into business as job printers and publishers of several small local newspapers but they eventually stumbled into the suddenly popular and modestly profitable bicycle business that started to flourish in the early 1890s. The business involved bicycle sales (with weekly-installment payments), rental and repair in the summer with cottage industry manufacturing in the winter. The manufacturing operation was easily run by the two brothers, who were observed to "combine mechanical ability with intelligence in about equal amounts." An old school friend who had originally joined their printing operation did the final bicycle assembly. Orville operated the enameling oven while Wilbur did the brazing using a brazier that they had designed themselves.

There seemed to be a relatively aimless quality about the young adult years of the two brothers in Dayton. Their printing business was in part a continuation of Orville's summer job in high school years. Off and on Wilbur had considered going to college. But in high school a sporting injury and a "vaguely defined" heart ailment caused Wilbur to drop this plan and he stayed at home for several years, partly taking care of his semi-invalid mother until her death in 1889--while his father's work continued to require extensive travel and long absences from home.

Wilbur's slow recovery and apparent lack of drive during these years exasperated his brother Reuchlin who had married and moved to Kansas City. He could not understand how it was that Wilbur stayed at home for so long just reading and taking care of his ailing mother. Reuchlin wrote their sister Katharine: "What does Will do? . . . He ought to do something. Is he still cook and chambermaid?" This is not exactly the expected beginning for the senior member of the two originators of the dashing and daring field of early aviation.

Without formal training or special resources, the self-taught Wrights seemed to have all they needed. Each necessary task was dealt with in a straight forward way with the resources commonly available and readily at hand. When they needed a windy site for their earliest glider experiments, they simply wrote to the U.S. Weather Service. Their early experiments were essentially large-scale kite experiments, but these yielded important information on lift, more efficient wing shapes and novel devices for control in all three dimensions.

Unlike many other early experimenters in aircraft design, they knew that they needed to teach themselves how to control the aircraft first. Consequently, well before employing an engine, they took many short gliding practice flights down a large sand dune to develop their own reflexes and the essential skills--to give themselves some time to learn by trial and error the "feel" of the machine and controls.

They found that the tables on wing shape and lift published by a German engineer and professor were wrong, so they devised their own, partly from their own wind tunnel, itself made from simple parts, to their own design. Indeed, in time, they came to distrust any data they had not tested themselves.

They could find no automobile company willing to make the light and powerful engine they required, so they made their own engine to their own design, largely in their own shop, with the help of the machinist who worked in their bicycle business. At the time, it was falsely believed that air propellers were similar to water propellers. Consequently, the brothers found that they had to devise their own theory as well as develop their own design for the propellers needed to drive their machine. And throughout their flying experiments, they took photographs of everything they did so they could access their progress and make a permanent record of their achievements.

Those who are familiar with the way such a project would be staffed today--with teams of highly-paid experts in dozens of fields--can easily see how rapidly budgets and development schedules for such an undertaking would expand.

Of course, a very great deal more is known now in many fields than was known then. But at the edge of the new, the situation (now as then) may not be as different as it might appear at first. Small determined groups with fresh ideas (although less well educated and less experienced) may still move more rapidly and effectively than large ones. Today's commercial developers of powerful software for personal computers, for example, find that errors, communication problems and developmental delays increase dramatically if they employ more than a few programmers on a given project (or module of a larger project).

In this connection, it is worth recalling that the first real personal computer was developed not by a large, well-established computer company, but by two counter-culture adolescents in their now-famous garage, largely using parts available to hobbyists. Sometimes it is good not to be an expert, not to know too much. Sometimes it is far more important to have a vision and to be willing to learn by taking risks and making mistakes that experts would not make. Sometimes it is good not to know beforehand all the reasons why it will never work and why it will never sell.

In the time of the Wrights, the head of the Smithsonian Institution, Samuel Langley, a respected engineer and scientist, obtained a sizable grant of $50,000 from the War Department to develop a heavier-than-air aircraft, but his experiments sank in the Potomac, with "howls of derision from all quarters." Wilbur and Orville financed their experiments entirely out of their own modest personal resources and at a small fraction of the cost of the fully-funded professional effort.

But, we might ask, are not the efforts of the Wrights more that a hundred years ago really quite irrelevant to the realities of our times? In some ways yes. In some ways no. Sometimes the most effective barrier is, as usual, the simple belief that it cannot be done.

Perhaps, we need now to consider if we might not be at the beginning of a period in some important ways comparable to the time of the Wrights. In their own time, the Wrights had in their hands all the mechanical tools and skills needed for their novel task. Today, as more and more powerful electronic tools and skills become increasingly available in the hands of ordinary people (hobbyists and hackers in their garages, basements and bedrooms), one wonders what determined individuals and small groups might be able to accomplish where the great companies and laboratories have so far failed--or what they might discover that would never have occurred to fully-qualified workers in well-funded research laboratories (where perhaps there is a much greater tendency to take fewer risks and fail less often).

In the time of the Wrights, sophisticated mechanical capabilities had become widely available at modest cost to comparatively ordinary people-- without special education or facilities. Today, highly sophisticated electronic capabilities are becoming widely available at modest cost to these same comparatively ordinary people.

On reflection, perhaps it is only a matter of time before we should expect modern-day electronic Wrights to devise some truly new things--perhaps things as yet unimagined by the professionals, or in areas where were highly-trained teams from "big science" and "big technology" have repeatedly failed before.

They may not have the expensive equipment or the big budgets, but if they are really original, they may find a totally new way of doing the job-- and with far more modest resources. Sometimes, perhaps even now, what is needed is not so much big budgets, but big visions and a willingness to fail.

Based on Chapter 8, In the Mind’s Eye.

Recruit Autistics

2009-09-20T21:45:00.002-04:00

Just received, the October issue of Wired magazine (pp. 98-99) briefly tells of a company in Denmark called Specialisterne which hires out workers with autism and Asperger's syndrome to do detailed work in software debugging and the like. Similar companies have opened in several other European countries. The company founder, Thorkil Sonne, says: "This is not cheap labor, and it's not occupational therapy. . . . We simply do a better job." (Reported by Drake Bennett.) Using distinctive talents in this way is an idea that could apply in many areas. For example, bright dyslexics are often very good at visual thinking and creative problem solving. However, most professionals in the field never take seriously the special talents of dyslexics -- and continue to focus narrowly on fixing problems by teaching reading -- when they should be giving at least equal time and effort to the distinctive talents that are not studied nor well understood. They should take a lesson from Thorkil Sonne and his associates. It is about time.

Youtube video clips on dyslexia

2009-09-12T23:28:00.002-04:00

You are invited to have a look at the video clips put up in recent days on Youtube by Chris Smart, the maker of the UK video called "Dyslexia, An Unwrapped Gift." If you click on the Youtube address (below), you can select the first and second parts on the same page (about 9 and 10 minutes, respectively). Although I have a role, I have no reservations about saying that I think this is one of the best documentaries ever made on dyslexia.

I am delighted that Chris Smart has now made parts widely available on Youtube. It especially appeals to teens. Chris and his team selected a great setting for words ("Chained Library") and images ("Mappa Mundi") at Hereford Cathedral and great stories from the young dyslexic teenagers. Bravo Chris and the "Unwrapped Gift" team!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngl_II8TtGk

Following are parts of Chris Smart's commentary on his own film:

The first film ever made by Silva Productions back in 1999, but still popular today.

The film asks the question, is dyslexia a disability or an ability and goes onto to highlight research that suggests dyslexics will be the intellectual elite in the digital and visual picture packed world of tomorrow.

"An Unwrapped Gift" features Tom West, author of In the Minds Eye which examines the role of visual-spatial strengths in the lives of historical people who were dyslexic, including Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and William Butler Yeats

The intimate and thought provoking video diaries of young people in the film have proved to be a very positive factor in families with teenagers coming to terms with their own dyslexia. Shown extensively throughout the UK and America, the film's narrative explains how we can learn from the distinctive strengths of dyslexics, rather than just focusing on their weaknesses and failures

Testimonials:
People with dyslexia are given a voice in "An Unwrapped Gift." It is not a video about how to treat dyslexia, it is a video celebrating the dyslexic difference.
Jo Todd, Key 4 Learning

"An Unwrapped Gift" is a high quality film that makes a positive statement about a group of people who have historically been put through the mill by virtue of misunderstanding.
Stephanie Zinser, Freelance Journalist (who writes regularly on health for the Daily Mail)

Thinking Like a Child

2009-08-30T18:18:00.003-04:00

It is often observed that one of the essential characteristics of creativity is the "childlike" view of the world, full of freshness and plasticity. As they grow older, most children gradually lose this view. Most children appear to shift their thinking to a more rigid left-hemisphere dominance at a given age, as is expected. But it seems that some children cannot shift to the usual one-sided dominance so readily; they are delayed in the maturing process; they grow up using both sides of their brain or mature with a greater facility with their right hemisphere than is usual. This may lead to some degree of confusion, ambivalence, and awkwardness, but the intellectual resource may be profoundly richer thereby -- and that makes all the difference.

Maturity is a key concept here. Maturity suggests responsibility, conventional education, having children, understanding the adult world and finding a place in it -- making one's way or doing one's duty. A small child cares little for these things. He or she is too busy discovering the world, examining things closely, seeing how they behave, trying to figure out how things work, how people respond when you do different things -- touch, sounds, smells, tastes, images -- and all of this starts well before words or numbers. All of this is play -- learning and discovering. While maturity is, of course, necessary to make one's way in the adult world, we are aware that it is good to preserve something of the child, especially if we desire the freshness of view that seems to promote real creativity. This is generally known and understood. However, what is not generally known is that it may be a good thing when the maturing process takes a little longer than usual.

Parents are usually pleased when their children mature quickly, becoming more independent, more organized and more self-directed in advance of their peers. What is not generally known is that late maturation can serve a useful function, although it seems to contradict conventional belief. The neurological evidence indicates that the onset of puberty stops further neurological development. That is, neurological development is not speeded up by early puberty. Rather, early puberty appears to arrest neurological development at an earlier and less fully developed stage. One neurologist notes: "The studies show that on the average . . . quick development means you sort of 'gel' earlier and you don't develop as fully. It is not just true for brain development; it is true for growth also. People who grow slowly tend to grow taller."

Accordingly, it is possible that the early developer may be good at what they can do, but they may be able to do less than the child or adult who has developed over a longer period. Thus, later maturity may be seen as desirable in at least three ways: First, the plastic, absorbent world of the child may be experienced longer, giving the adolescent and adult a deeper store of real seeing and feeling experience of the world to draw on -- and build intuition on -- before the adult world of fixed, literate, learned knowledge takes over. Second, there is a real possibility of significantly increased neurological capacity, at least in some cases and in certain areas, which may more than compensate for earlier awkwardness and some lingering areas of relative disability. And third, the later developer may be able to retain some aspects of the child's view throughout life -- such as a sense of wonder, or, a comparative freshness and lack of preconception -- making the expression of real creativity much more probable. Although the clock of maturation follows its own beat, it is good to know that a slower pace may have, under the right circumstances, notably positive consequences.

With respect to creativity, the freshness of the child's view is not to be underestimated. When the world of the small child is properly understood, then perhaps it is no surprise that Einstein said he was led to his discoveries by asking questions that "only children ask." This view of himself is clearly evident in the following curious passage: "I sometimes ask myself . . . how did it come that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. Naturally, I could go deeper into the problem than a child with normal abilities." Is it possible for us to think of Einstein as "retarded"? But, of course, this paradox helps us to gain deeper understanding, we are told. Indeed, relative to other mammals, all human beings are "retarded" -- more helpless longer, safe inside social structures, allowed to build greater brain capability with a broader knowledge base.

Also, Einstein was willing to continue to play. If delayed development is acknowledged as one major factor, then the child-like playfulness of this strong visual thinker may have been another. Einstein referred to the source of his ideas as "playing" with "images." When he describes the process in his own words, the fresh, childlike plasticity of the ideas and the interplay of the two hemispheres and two modes of thought seems clearly evident: "The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' reproduced and combined. There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought -- before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others. The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will."

It is of no small significance that Einstein's words so clearly describe a two-mode process that corresponds so closely with the findings of those who have been investigating the roles of the two hemispheres. He first "plays" with "images" in the visual right hemisphere mode, the apparent source of new ideas or perceptions of order, possibly relatively independent of conventional thought, current scientific understanding and education. He plays until he arrives at the desired result. And then, "only in a secondary stage" does he have to seek "laboriously" for the right words and mathematical symbols to express the ideas in terms of the verbal left hemisphere mode, in terms of the world, in terms that fit within the structure of scientific thinking, in terms that "can be communicated to others."

It should be pointed out that these observations are not entirely unusual, nor should they be expected to be. Such observations as Einstein's occur frequently in the literature of creativity. Also, the concept of two modes of thinking has been cropping up in the medical literature, in one way or another, for a century or two, particularly with reference to artists and musicians and composers. What was new in the 60s, 70s and 80s was that research on the two hemispheres of the brain yielded such substantial evidence that serious investigators were forced to reverse major trends of the time and not only recognize, once again, the concept of consciousness, but also to entertain the concept that there are, not one, but two major modes of consciousness, each fundamentally different from the other -- one that we knew a little about, the other that we knew almost nothing about.

Based on excerpt from chapter one, In the Mind's Eye; second edition released September 4, 2009.

News on Second Edition

2009-08-28T16:26:00.001-04:00

Today, I received a message from my publisher, Prometheus Books, saying that they had received, this morning, the printer’s shipment of the second edition of In the Mind’s Eye.

They are shipping out now (Friday afternoon) and the books should be available at bookstores and online by the end of next week, Friday, September 4 -- this includes, according to their list, noted previously, Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Borders, BooksaMillion and others. Some booksellers are still taking advance orders at significant discounts.

I was also delighted to learn that seven publishers or agents from overseas had expressed interest in obtaining rights for translations of the revised book -- three from Europe, one from the Middle East and three from Asia, so far. At this point, one cannot be sure of what will happen, but I am really pleased with this kind of interest in the second edition of In the Mind's Eye -- and I hope that the ideas set forth in the book may still have impact in many additional languages and cultures.

Second Edition Out Soon

2009-08-21T11:06:00.003-04:00

I note that my publisher, Prometheus Books, says the second edition of In the Mind's Eye will be available in stock on Friday, September 4, 2009. They list these booksellers, among others: Amazon.com, Borders, Barnes&Noble, BookaMillion.com and BookSense.com. Just 14 days from today, August 21. Not long now!

Einstein's Cloakroom Ticket

2009-08-16T21:58:00.003-04:00

Robert Frost believed that a creative work must be in some sense be a revelation to be really valued -- it must be a surprising and unexpected discovery “as much for the poet as for the reader.” But for this revelation to come there must be the “greatest freedom of the material” to move through it and establish relations “regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity.”

The power of metaphor and analogy is widely recognized among creative people, although this power is probably more readily acknowledged among poets and writers than among scientists. Yet when we look deeply, we might find more pervasive evidence of this power than might be expected. In very different spheres of science and art, the fundamentals of the creative process may be strikingly similar, at least for certain kinds of people. Antonina Vallentin, who knew Einstein and his second wife quite well, provides an illuminating story about his use of analogies:

“At one time Einstein tried to describe the processes of scientific work and in doing so he exposed the workshop of his mind. Starting with primary concepts directly linked to sense experiences and with theorems which are interdependent, the scientist tries to discover the logical unity in the image of the universe. He goes beyond what Einstein calls the ‘secondary layer’ to arrive at a system of the greatest conceivable unity. He considered it an error to designate these superimposed layers of thought as ‘degrees of abstraction.’ ‘I do not consider it right to conceal the logical independence of a fundamental concept from the sense experiment.’ And he adds, in that picturesque language which he frequently uses: ‘The connection is not comparable to that of soup to beef, but more to that of the cloakroom ticket to the overcoat.’”

It seems that we might be getting rather more in this passage than we might have expected. The analogies are so unexpected and seemly out of context that we are startled and somewhat thrown off track. However, it seems clear that Einstein was not providing these far-fetched analogies for effect, but rather because they came readily to his own mind in just this form. It is as if there existed in his mind an array of generic relationships (represented by concrete objects) to be selected from -- the fitness of the general relationship being far more important than the apparent strangeness of the comparison.

On closer examination these analogies may not be as strange as they might appear at first. In the first instance, we might presume that what Einstein is referring to is that when soup is made from beef it retains the essence of the beef flavor even after the meat itself has been removed. In the second instance he gives a similar but different form of the relationship: a cloakroom ticket is a representation of the ownership of the overcoat and can be used to obtain the actual overcoat when needed. The first analogy (the beef) is sufficiently similar to what is wanted to be worth mentioning, but is not really quite right. However, the second analogy (the ticket) fits and is seen as more appropriate. Thus, the relationship is almost mathematical in the clarity of its form: “the logical independence of a fundamental concept” is to “sense experiment” as the “cloakroom ticket” is to the “overcoat.”

Is all of this just playing games with words? Why does he not just say what he means, we might ask. Well, we might well consider that we are seeing, not a flourish or embellishment of his thought, but a close representation of what is actually going on in his mind -- that the relationships being considered are, in fact, made up, possibly, of the combinations of two sets of very concrete images in his own mind. That is, it is possible that he is actually revealing the terms that he is thinking in, not images representing words as a kind of additional layer, but just words used to describe the images that are actually being employed -- concrete images which are used to represent certain abstract ideas -- and the ways they are categorized, sorted and stored.

When Einstein is quoted as saying he thought in images, we may well have wondered what exactly were the specific images that he used in various cases. It may be regarded as probable, in some cases, that he was thinking in terms of the trains or elevators or light beams that he frequently refers to in his writing -- the rather obvious representations of physical things that were, in turn, representations of the concepts in his thought experiments. But other times, as in the above example, we may ask whether he may have been thinking in terms of his own private notation of concrete images -- one like any private notation of images that might grow up through experience and continuous use. Even in the most technical and basic of scientific debates, the most heated and enduring controversies may well rest primarily on the hidden power of a metaphor or an analogy.

Sources: Robert Frost, “The Figure A Poem Makes” in Complete Poems, 1951 (1967), p. 20, and Antonina Vallentin, The Drama of Albert Einstein, 1954, p. 54.

Thinking in Pictures: Einstein and Faraday

2009-08-02T18:26:00.002-04:00

The predisposition to thinking in pictures appears to be a factor that spans the ages and produces a special affinity between those with this same predisposition -- not because they were physicists or mathematicians or musicians (for there are many forms of each) but because of the special correspondence in their ways of thinking.

In his study in Princeton, Einstein had pictures of three scientists on the wall: Newton, Faraday and Maxwell. It was the work of Faraday and Maxwell that most interested Einstein when he was a student -- although this work was largely ignored by Einstein's professors. Indeed, Einstein's knowledge of Faraday's and Maxwell's work was so great that it impressed Einstein's future employer and got him his first job at the Swiss Patent Office, after his long unsuccessful search for a secure position.

To a friend who had given him a book about Faraday, Einstein (employing a poignant image worthy of a poet) wrote: “You have given me great joy with the little book about Faraday. This man loved mysterious Nature as a lover loves his distant beloved. In his day, there did not yet exist the dull specialization that stares with self-conceit through horn rimmed glasses and destroys poetry. . . .”

In his Autobiographical Notes, Einstein breaks abruptly into a passage describing the development of his own scientific thought to address Isaac Newton (as if he were alive and in the room), explaining that his own work does not refute Newton's -- rather that his work extends Newton's into realms that Newton did not deal with. Other instances of this special affinity can be cited, but it is sufficient to point out that the visual mode of thought may lead to immediate recognition of an extraordinary rapport, regardless of time, place, or area of knowledge.

Based on excerpt from In the Mind’s Eye, chapter 1.

Big Picture Thinking

2009-07-29T14:53:00.003-04:00

While reviewing the "long-term," "big picture" thinking in the blog pieces on James Lovelock, Jack Horner and others, I am struck by how distant from "real life" the work of these individuals would appear to be. Yet, on reflection, I see that as our global climate crisis begins to mature, it would appear that their large scale perspectives may be all that will matter in the end.

Twenty Years Ahead

2009-07-20T14:39:00.002-04:00

The page proofs of the new edition of In the Mind’s Eye have recently been completed and the book is to be printed shortly. I thought it was the right time to excerpt here parts of a section from the new “Epilogue” that focused on several early reactions:

Some eighteen years have passed since In the Mind’s Eye was first published in the spring of 1991. Shortly afterward, two reviewers asserted that the book was some twenty years “ahead of current educational thinking.” As a first time author, I was, of course, greatly pleased to read this. But I did not take it very seriously at the time. However, over the years since, I have come to wonder more and more why so many efforts in school reform have so often ended in failure or inconsequence--and how the perspectives outlined here have been so uniformly ignored by the professionals--although not ignored by creative, visual-thinking dyslexics, their families and a handful of insightful teachers and educational institutions.

I am beginning to think that perhaps we might get some different results if we were to learn to see education through truly different eyes. Perhaps this might help us understand how we can find the islands of hidden talent in many students, creating motivation and a sense of hope that never existed before--and so finding ways do less damage during all those years of education.

It is perhaps worth our looking at one of these reviews with some care to see what might be helpful. The following remarks were made by the late Professor T. R. Miles, Ph.D., who, among many other accomplishments, was founder of the Dyslexia Unit at the University of Wales, Bangor, and was founding editor of the peer-reviewed professional journal Dyslexia. Professor Miles wrote: “. . . 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.”

Professor Miles touches on an aspect that is almost never addressed, but may be a major point in our considerations--that is, that most of the people involved in the study and remediation of dyslexia are not dyslexic themselves and were, in many cases, excellent pupils in their own school days. Accordingly, it may be very difficult for them to see the emerging great strengths and creative powers possessed by the students sitting before them --who seem such helpless fools in doing even the most elementary academic work. Over the years, I have become more and more impressed with the extreme difficulty many have in separating the concept of intelligence from academic performance and test taking. Dr. Orton did not have this problem. With his first dyslexic patient, Orton made a point of identifying high intelligence that did not correspond to conventional academic skills.

However, since his time, many seem to be like Dr. Starr--referred to in chapter 1 by Eileen Simpson. Dr. Starr was full of good intentions in helping the struggling children but, apparently, was completely unable to believe that the children in her center could be highly intelligent. She thought Simpson was bright and capable -- indeed, sufficiently able to follow her as head of the center. Simpson was smart -- consequently, Simpson could not possibly be dyslexic herself. It is simply unthinkable. (“What nonsense! . . . dyslexic? Impossible”). We all may wonder how many in this field hold, deep, deep down, the same beliefs as Dr. Starr, in spite of the best intentions and in spite of all protestations to the contrary. We may also wonder how many children pick up on these beliefs, buying into a life of low expectation and unrealized potential.

I am not arguing, of course, that all dyslexics have great talents -- nor that all non-dyslexics are blind to the talents of dyslexics. But I believe we do need to consider that the kinds of talents they do have, great or small, may be just the kinds of talents that are invisible to conventional teachers and conventional tests and conventional measures of academic ability. This is why I feel that developing a whole new family of tests and measurement instruments is so critical.

In the ways of the world, it is a simple truth that one cannot be considered to be really bright unless there exists some test on which you can get a top score. And, as we have been trying to show throughout this book, there are many talents and abilities that are important in life and work that are never measured by conventional psychological and academic tests. This needs to change.

To do this properly, we will probably have to get highly successful dyslexics involved in the process because many conventional educators and test designers may be quite unable to see what needs to be measured, how it can be measured and why it is important to measure it. Old habits of thought are hard to break-- especially when you have always gotten top grades on your papers and examinations. But perhaps, once again, we will need to rely on dyslexics to “see what others do not see or cannot see.”

Clearly, it is time to develop new ways of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of students as early as possible. Sometimes great abilities can be hidden beneath striking difficulties. Sometimes, we are beginning to see, the kid who is having a lot of trouble with reading or spelling or arithmetic may turn out to do very well indeed with astrophysics or advanced mathematics or molecular biology or computer information visualization -- areas where visual thinking and image manipulation are more highly valued than rapid recall of memorized names or math facts or large quantities of data. Sometimes, when the conceptual context and the technologies change in dramatic ways, the high talents that were once marginalized or considered of low value in the old era may suddenly move to center stage, providing the exact set of skills required in the new era.

Somehow, we need to be able to observe these changes with an open mind -- alert to seeing potential and opportunity rather than only failure and restriction. Sometimes, we might discover, the kids who are having the most trouble should not be held back. Rather, perhaps, sometimes, they should be pushed a long way forward -- if the right area can be identified by some new and innovative screening device or testing method. As we have seen, those who are most gifted in higher mathematics can have persistent problems with arithmetic; some great writers can never learn to spell. Sometimes, our conventional ideas about tests of grade-level basic skills make no sense at all.

However, identifying the right area of strength for each specific student can be quite important. It would help to hold their attention. But more important, perhaps it will allow them to use talents never recognized before. Perhaps it will allow them to learn in ways that are quite different from conventional schooling (and out of conventional educational sequence). Perhaps it will allow them to gain respect from others (and for themselves) for being able to do things that are challenging for other students--or even challenging for their teachers. Of course, not all will be able to move ahead quickly -- but even the most limited student may have islands of strength that no one knew existed. We must make it our business to help them find these islands. Sometimes, almost anything will do to start. But in the end, it is really important for them to be able to say “I have a lot of trouble with this but I am the best in my class (or my school) at doing that.” Sometimes, a whole life hangs in the balance.

In many cases, of course, such an approach could be an administrative nightmare. How can the system cope with such extremes of diversity, with so many different measurement scales? Life is so much easier when there is one scale -- conveniently showing those who are the top in everything and those who are at the bottom of everything. With some new system, with so many scoring high on at least one or two subtests, how do you know which ones are really bright and which ones are really not so bright? However, it is clearly not beyond our capacity to make it work if we are convinced that it must be made to work -- if we are convinced of the real value of diversity in brains and abilities.

We now have many new and sophisticated tools at hand. And the need is great. It is high time to give up the illusion of uniformity and begin to take advantage -- for the sake of these individuals as well as the needs of society at large -- of vast differences in abilities in many diverse fields. When we all are having to compete with many millions of others globally (in an increasingly uncertain and changing economy; with fast transportation and cheap light-speed communication), it is suddenly essential that all of us quickly find whatever special talents we have, and develop these to a very high level -- whether or not it is part of the conventional academic curriculum.

Based on excerpt from the new “Epilogue” from the second edition of In the Mind’s Eye, August 2009.

Autism as Academic Paradigm by Tyler Cowen

2009-07-14T08:47:00.004-04:00

I was delighted when this article was forwarded to me yesterday. I am posting it on my blog since, in my view, it is full of truth telling--about what I have learned in recent years from Temple Grandin and others as well as my quick look at Nikola Tesla and my talks with folks at GCHQ. But also there is much in the article that exactly parallels the points that I and others have been trying to make with respect to the talents of dyslexics. In fact, several years ago I happened to meet Vernon Smith (mentioned in the article) at a George Mason University reception and I asked him whether he had encountered highly talented dyslexics among his associates. To my surprise, he started telling me about his own autistic-like behaviors, when he would "zone-out" while thinking of some long-term problem. The article does mention dyslexia, but, of course, there is much, much more. Several times Temple Grandin and I have discussed the highly visual ways of thinking that some (many?) of those with autism or dyslexia seem to share--in spite of being very different conditions. Perhaps the time is right to look into these matters in a conference of some kind. As the literature continues to develop, it would appear that autism and dyslexia may be opposites in many ways. However, they would appear to be similar with respect to being misunderstood--having professionals looking only at cognitive weaknesses while pretty much ignoring cognitive strengths. (Or, allowing major strengths to entirely overshadow the weaknesses so that the weak areas are hardly noticed.) I hope the link below will work for the next few days. (Just now I am going through proof pages of the new edition of In the Mind's Eye.)

-----Original Message-----

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This article, "Autism as Academic Paradigm" is available
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Dyslexic Discoveries: James Lovelock

2009-07-04T10:12:00.001-04:00

I was really surprised and amazed, indeed, shocked. I had been reading things by and about James Lovelock since the 1970s. But I had no idea that there would be an explicit connection between him and creativity among dyslexics. Indeed, on the Summer Solstice, Father’s Day, the 21st of June, not long ago, it happened that Lovelock gave a talk and signed books at our local bookstore, Politics and Prose, here in northwest Washington, D.C.

Shortly afterward, I was browsing the new website “Dyslexic Advantage” recently put together by Fernette and Brock Eide, physicians with a clinic near Seattle, Washington state. This new site skillfully blends video clips with a few lines of text, often with little commentary. The videos relate to an individual’s accomplishments and may or may not include references to dyslexia. The text is usually quoted from biographies or autobiographies, providing evidence of dyslexia or similar learning problems.

I quickly noted that this is a wonderful combination, especially accessible for dyslexic children and adults who need to have real evidence of what dyslexics have done and perhaps a bit about how they have done it. I browsed several stories on the website and then noted a reference to James Lovelock. An excellent interview with Lovelock had been selected summarizing his main ideas and the controversies that these ideas have yielded over the years (among many unwanted but often accurate predictions). But then I was shocked to read the following text just below the video clip on the website:

“ ‘I’m dyslexic and hopeless at arithmetic, but nowadays I love maths as computers do all the hard arithmetic chores.’ -- James Lovelock

“Dyslexic inventor of the electron capture detector, James Lovelock is now known best for his work as an environmentalist and creator of the Gaia Hypothesis. This video is an interview with Lovelock about his environmental work.

“Interview with Lovelock where he talks about his school history: http://www.independent.co.uk/student/passedfailed-an-education-in-the-life-of-james-lovelock-originator-of-the-gaia-hypothesis-443339.html”

In the story in the Independent (a London newspaper), we see brief examples of Lovelock being able to learn much from hands-on lab work--combined with long hours of boring war work (fire watching while at the National Institute of Medical Research in London during World War II) where a future Nobel Prize winner, doing the same duty, gave him a “brain dump” of all that he knew (in reality, we see here a treasure of interactive, individualized instruction, so well suited to a bright and intensely curious dyslexic mind).

But there is more: Very recently, I was putting together ideas for a chapter in an upcoming book on dyslexia and creativity. While searching for a quotation from Michael Faraday in my own chapter on creativity in In the Mind’s Eye, I chanced upon a long endnote that somehow I had totally forgotten about:

“A major recurring theme in the history of science is that some new ideas are unacceptable to conventional modes of thought. Sometimes the problem is that the ideas are not really perceived as being new. It is assumed that what is important is already known and well understood.

“A current example of this sort of problem is the theory of atmospheric chemistry known as the ‘Gaia Hypothesis.’ The theory has been advanced since the late 1960s by the British scientist and instrument designer James Lovelock, with others. The basic idea is that the kinds and amounts of gases in the earth's atmosphere are regulated mainly by microbial life. If certain gases, like oxygen and methane, were not being constantly produced [by living things], they would be expected to combine with each other, making the proportions of these gases in the uncombined state much less prevalent. Consequently, Lovelock argued that life can be detected on a planet [at great distance] through the makeup of its atmosphere alone--that is, [the presence of] life can detected through atmospheric measurements.

“ . . . Lynn Margulis, [who worked with Lovelock for a time, years ago,] indicated that it was some time before even she was able to understand the full significance of Lovelock's still controversial ideas. . . . Margulis noted that some time ago Lovelock ‘couldn't get anyone to understand what he was saying. I know,’ she said, ‘because I worked with him for two years before I could understood it. . . . It's not his fault. It's not my fault. It was just that he was coming up with something very new. What we tended to hear was what we had heard before. Oh, we would say, we know all about that already--which is just the response you are getting today from today's academics. [But] it's a genuinely original idea.’

“There are further possible reasons for the continuing resistance to Lovelock's approach--ones that touch on the familiar problems of [over] specialization and definition of professional domain. According to Margulis: ‘If this kind of analysis is correct, then atmospheric chemists will have to know something about microbiology. And even worse, microbiologists will have to know something about atmospheric chemistry. . . .’ Many specialists are not enthusiastic, in part perhaps, because ‘they are going to have to re-educate’ themselves, which many do not wish to do--making for ‘a real problem.’ ”

At the book signing at Politics and Prose, I had given Lovelock a hastily prepared note (along with a copy of Thinking Like Einstein and sections from my new epilogue for the second edition of In the Mind’s Eye), thanking him for his research, books and talks--also noting how much his career as an independent scientist would appear to have followed Einstein’s advice that to do deep science one needs to remain apart as much as possible from the “battle of the brains” in conventional scientific careers.

Clearly, there is much more to be investigated about how it came to be that an independent dyslexic scientist has been able to both design instruments that have been able to make minute measurements that sparked global awareness of one global problem (CFCs) and now is willing to make unpopular and controversial predictions about another global problem (one much more difficult to understand and control). Even those who disagree with Lovelock’s observations and assessments would acknowledge that he has brought us to think deeply about important issues. He now thinks that global warming is proceeding more rapidly that the experts expected and he wonders whether it is already too late to reverse the accelerating trends. He hopes that he may be wrong. But if he is right, we will know in a decade or two.

The endnote quoted is from In the Mind’s Eye, chapter 8, “Patterns in Creativity,” note 20, p. 328 in the 1997 edition; original source quoted: Lynn Margulis, “Rethinking Evolution,” Smithsonian Institution talk, April 23, 1990. The new Lovelock book is The Vanishing Face of Gaia (Basic Books, 2009). The publisher gave the subtitle: “Final Warning.” During his recent talk, Lovelock noted that his own preferred subtitle had been: “Enjoy It While You Can.” The front cover of the book carries the quotation: “ ‘James Lovelock will go down in history as the scientist who changed our view of the Earth’-- John Gray, Independent (UK).” For material on James Lovelock from website “Dyslexic Advantage,” see: http://dyslexicadvantage.ning.com/video/dyslexic-climatologist-and

Baby Dinosaurs and Ancient Red Blood Cells

2009-06-25T13:52:00.003-04:00

John R. (Jack) Horner is an example of a highly successful dyslexic with minimal traditional academic skills but maximum productivity in his field of research. Horner flunked out of the University of Montana seven times. (I used to say six times, but he corrected me.) However, after he had established himself, “his brilliant synthesis of evidence . . . forced paleontologists to revise their ideas about dinosaur behavior, physiology, and evolution.” Horner never earned an undergraduate degree or graduate degree. But now he is a professor with many graduate students, an honorary degree and many, many honors. He failed “just about all his science courses, and never [completed] his undergraduate work.” Although he had great difficulty with his course work, it is clear that at a deeper level he was continuously learning--absorbing the knowledge needed to understand and then revolutionize a field of knowledge.

As Horner tells the story, his difficult beginnings helped him to be a risk taker. “ ‘Back in the days when I was growing up, nobody knew what dyslexia was. . . . So everybody thought you were lazy or stupid or both. And I didn't think I was, but I wasn't sure. I had a lot of drive, and if somebody told me I was stupid, that usually helped--it really helped me take a lot more risks. For someone that everybody thinks is going to grow up to pump gas, you can take all the risks you want. Because if you fail, it doesn't matter.’ ”

But the risks paid off. According to the curator of the museum of vertebrate paleontology at the University of California at Berkeley: “A lot of people have tended to underestimate Jack because he hasn't come through the traditional academic route. But he is, without question, one of the two or three most important people in the world today studying dinosaurs.” Horner is able to see things differently and he observes things others do not see. For example, he believes that it is really of little interest to find the fossil bones of a large adult dinosaur. What he is interested in finding are fossils of many dinosaurs of many sizes, in their environment, in order to understand the life of the animals and the way they interacted with other animals and plants in that environment. Horner is known not only for his markedly different way of looking at things, but also his unusual ability to see, in the field, the tiny fossil bones of baby dinosaurs that other experts cannot find. According to another researcher: “He has a gift. . . . He can see things the rest of us don't see.”

Horner is especially worth noting because, in spite of his persistent academic failures, he came eventually to be acknowledged as one who has transformed some of the fundamental thinking in his field. His story forces us to reconsider in a deep fashion what is really important in one’s work and what is not. Horner proved to have extraordinary difficulties with things that are largely peripheral to his discipline (reading, composition, test taking), but also proved to be unusually gifted in those things that lie at the heart of his discipline (being unusually observant while searching for fossil bones in the field, being able to interpret the surprising patterns that emerge, being able to visualize easily changes to terrain and ecology over very long periods of time, thinking his way beyond and around his associates, seeing ways of using new technologies, developing innovative and persuasive arguments based on looking at the fossil evidence in a very different way).

Horner says he tries to teach his students “to think like a dyslexic” because that is where the “good stuff” comes from--learning to read the book of nature with careful personal observations and fresh insight without being distracted by the theories of others. He says the rest is “just memorization.” One of Horner’s students, dyslexic herself, recently made discoveries thought “impossible”--finding red blood cells and flexible blood vessels inside a 65 million-year-old fossil bone. Horner points out that this discovery was never made before because “all the books in the world” would say that it could not be done. He notes that it is easy for dyslexics “to think outside the box” because “they have never been in the box.” We need to see the truth of Horner’s observation that dyslexia is “certainly not something that needs to be fixed, or cured, or suppressed!” Indeed, we need to see that, as Jack says (in a recent article), “maybe it’s time for a revolution”--or at least (from a separate interview) “it may be time to start something.”

Based on section from the new Epilogue for the second edition of In the Mind’s Eye to come out in July-August 2009. See new Jack Horner book just out earlier this year, How to Build a Dinosaur.

The Success of Failure, The Failure of Success

2009-06-01T17:24:00.002-04:00

As I look at the history of science and current investigations of all kinds, I continue to be more and more impressed with the way conventional ideas of discovery appear to be far off the mark. One can be quite successful in one’s training and career but never produce new knowledge of any consequence. It is striking that in many cases, the opposite seems to be true. The observations below are based on an excerpt from In the Mind’s Eye. Although it was written long ago, the pattern outlined here comes often to my mind. (Full references are, of course, available in the original text.)

It may be that it is sometimes harder for well-trained and successful scientists to make truly original discoveries. They are kept busy with many obligations--preparing lectures, advising students, consulting with coauthors: journal deadlines, peer review, grant applications, student recommendations, conference presentations, expert advisory groups, government commissions, faculty parties and retirement dinners. Plenty to keep one busy and fully focused on the pressing schedule at hand.

It is little wonder that Albert Einstein recommended that a scientist should remain apart as much as possible from the politics of science (“the battle of the brains”) and instead take work as a lighthouse keeper or shoemaker or some other less demanding employment--to keep his mind relatively free of interruptions and worrisome obligations. His suggestions seem romantic to us now, but his basic approach has begun to appear increasingly sensible to experienced researchers who find their lives are too full of career obligations to focus on really original work.

Strangely, in a similar way, lack of career success or even a long illness may be of benefit to the creative person. These may help to give the creative person the uninterrupted time to get the work done--not unlike the paradoxical benefit of imprisonment--in the old days--in getting books written. (It may be recalled that it was while he was in prison that Marco Polo had time to set down the account of his extensive travels in China.)

A not too successful career path may also be a help. James Clerk Maxwell wrote his two-volume Treatise during a period of semi-retirement in the middle of a none too successful career. (The cause and effect relationships are never perfectly clear, however. Would the book never have been completed if he had not the time, or would he have found the time in any case? How many would be willing to interrupt or divert a career that is in high gear to devote full attention to a fringe project with a risky and uncertain outcome? Or, indeed, how many ambitious, career-conscious professionals would allow themselves to focus on deep but questionable topics.)

If one wishes to be really creative, however, it seems that sometimes it is essential to have one's time less than fully committed, to be able to follow where one's thoughts lead rather than having to succeed in a series of tasks largely defined by one's career, one's competitors or by other outside forces.

One wonders what might have happened to Einstein's early work without his period of independent study (following his own fancy) as a school dropout, his lecture cutting and continued self-directed study during his university years, his two years of intermittent unemployment (with contrasting growth in intellectual excitement) after graduation and then his relatively undemanding patent office job once he did enter the world of conventional work.

In contrast, we might wonder what would have happened if he had become immediately enmeshed in the teaching, administrative and social demands of a conventionally successful career. As he himself observed, in such a path there is a strong tendency to do research that is comparatively superficial and predictable--little steps that do not risk serious failure or threaten existing beliefs, modest research programs that can be relied upon to produce publishable results and supportive, unthreatened mentors.

We might wonder how many have been diverted from greater accomplishments because of early success and recognition. Once again, a kind of natural selection may be at work, having curious consequences. Sometimes, truly great accomplishments may be severely hindered by even modest amounts of early conventional success.

But there may be other, more subtle barriers to really original creative work. There are other reasons that the expert and the professional may find it hard to change their ways of thinking, especially when it involves some of their most basic concepts.

Many years of hard work and one's self-image as a competent professional may be closely bound up with a belief in what one has been taught--which, in time, often one has come to be engaged in teaching oneself. Of course, little changes and corrections are needed here and there to keep up the momentum of gradual progress and to make one's reputation. But there is little incentive to question or overturn fundamental elements of the discipline--making obsolete some of one's own career accomplishments as well as those of many others. Even worse is to blur the boundaries of the discipline, inviting territorial battles and the threat of lost professional status and credibility. As James Gleick observed in his book Chaos, this conservatism continues to be a powerful force in the emerging science of chaos:

“. . . The language of mathematics remained a serious barrier to communication. If only the academic world had room for hybrid mathematician/physicists--but it did not. . . . Mathematicians continued to speak one language, physicists another. As the physicist Murray Gell-Mann once remarked: ‘Faculty members are familiar with a certain kind of person who looks to mathematicians like a good physicist and looks to physicists like a good mathematician. Very properly, they do not want that kind of person around.’ The standard of the two professions were different. Physicists had theorems, mathematicians had conjectures. The objects that made up their worlds were different. Their examples were different.”

So we are told that it is much safer to clearly identify with one group or another. The risk of confusion or loss of credibility is often too great to be seriously considered by any prudent professional, especially those who have learned early and well the rewards of staying within the acceptable and desirable categories. Balance a doubt against a certainty and stay within the conventions of normal science.

But in the end, there is a greater problem: the important thing is that truly original discoveries sometimes require unlearning and relearning not only what one has been taught, but also fundamental and basic elements in the way one thinks about things in general--some of the most fundamental concepts at the core of one's thought processes.

We must not go too far down this road, of course, without pointing out that there are all kinds and levels of accomplishment and creative discovery. Each set of weekly and monthly science periodicals is a feast of enticing new developments. We are all too aware that the conventional system--of university courses and grant programs and research laboratories--is turning out vast quantities of wonderful and exciting and frightening things.

Clearly, the conventional system does produce. It would be wrong to suggest otherwise. (Although it seems to often produce pieces that make the whole less clear. The most general and comprehensive and integrating explanations are the most exciting, but are the most rare.) However, there are other ways. And sometimes the biggest ideas come from the least likely sources. And perhaps the most important ideas come rarely from those who would appear, by conventional standards, to be the best and the brightest.

This essential problem may explain why it is sometimes best to work in a field other than the one that one originally studied--if one wants to make truly original contributions. In one's own field, one has already developed a strong internal editor that may serve to criticize and to demolish the “silly” thoughts before they can take hold internally or before they can get out to embarrass you. It is hard to unlearn what you have learned so well. Perhaps, also, this is the reason that it has been observed that the most original ideas often come not from those at the top of their field, but from those who are at the fringes of the field.

The double problem of knowing too much or knowing too little is nicely summarized in a passage from one of the classic studies of scientific creativity. When a field is developing normally, expert knowledge is a great advantage; but when there is an abrupt change in the course of development (or some major new factor becomes evident), expert knowledge may be a considerable disadvantage:

“Thus in subjects in which knowledge is still growing, or where the particular problem is a new one, or a new version of one already solved, all the advantage is with the expert, but where knowledge is no longer growing and the field has been worked out, a revolutionary new approach is required and this is more likely to come from the outsider. The skepticism with which the experts nearly always greet these revolutionary ideas confirms that the available knowledge has been a handicap.”

It is, of course, a double-bind in another sense; one has to be close enough to the conventional in order to obtain the needed information from the conventional sources, to check one's findings and to be able to explain one's new ideas in a way that is understandable and acceptable to conventional modes of thought.

But this is not a new problem. Long ago, an instance of coming close to a discovery but not being able to make the conceptual changes needed to achieve the desired result was observed in a colleague by Michael Faraday. In a letter to a friend who had described to Faraday this colleague's researches on the magnetic condition of matter, Faraday wrote:

“Many thanks, my dear Wheatstone, for your note. I have in consequence seen Bequerel's paper, and added a note at the first opening of my paper. It is astonishing to think how he could have been so near the discovery of the great principle and fact, and yet so entirely miss them both, and fall back into old and preconceived notions.”

Here we see that the power of “old and preconceived notions” may serve as a barrier to imminent discovery in any time or age. Then, as now, for some, one of the greatest deterrents to original discovery may be nothing more than long-established habits of thought.

As an old man, reviewing his life's work, Einstein observed that one of the most difficult things he had to do in his own work was to unlearn old patterns of thought. He observed that, in retrospect, a certain line of development could be seen as almost inevitable--yet barriers of inflexible basic concepts could deter progress to that inevitable solution for many years:

“That the special theory of relativity is only the first step of a necessary development became completely clear to me only in my efforts to represent gravitation in the framework of this theory. . . . This happened in 1908. Why were another seven years required for the construction of the general theory of relativity? The main reason lies in the fact that it is not so easy to free oneself from the idea that coordinates must have a direct metric significance.”

In other words, Einstein saw that he could not move from the special theory to the general theory of relativity without first changing, in his own mind, some extremely basic ideas and conceptions. This, it took seven years to do.

Einstein commented elsewhere on this problem--remarking that, in time, some of his theories could be easily understood by young students, but that made them no easier to find in the beginning, when he was wandering alone “in the dark.” The hard part, apparently, is seeing for the first time things in a way that is different from the way they have ever been seen before:

“In the light of knowledge attained, the happy achievement seems almost a matter of course, and any intelligent student can grasp it without too much trouble. But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion, and the final emergence into the light--only those who have experienced it can understand it.”

Apparently, many scientists are never able to do this deep exploration. They have neither the special ability nor the essential inclination. Basic concepts, once learned, are fixed for life.

Thus we see that, sometimes, great quantities of knowledge are not enough. Sometimes one has to be willing to change basic assumptions and thought processes in order to see clearly the unexpected truths that could be clearly evident--if only we could see them in the right way. Sometimes knowing all the data is not nearly so important as being able to view it from a different and truly original perspective.

Sometimes the illusion of difficulty alone is enough to deter progress--sometimes to a shocking extent. Some physicists and astronomers have recognized that the presumed difficulty of some of Einstein's ideas has long been greatly over stated and that this same attitude has significantly retarded advances in a number of related scientific areas--in this case, according to some, for a period of over forty years. Thus one prominent astronomer, who was closely acquainted with the scientists involved in the experimental proof of Einstein's general relativity theory, observed in a talk given in 1982:

“I may parenthetically remark that this supposed difficulty in understanding the general theory of relativity was greatly exaggerated: it contributed to the stagnation of the subject for several decades. Many of the developments of the sixties and the seventies could easily have taken place during the twenties and the thirties.”

Another curious aspect of creative activity that we can learn from this same source is the way some people can immediately recognize the validity of another's work. They can see without hesitation or reservation that the work of another is correct and revolutionary. No testing is required for their certainty--although objective verification is, of course, required for presentation to others.

In 1918, the British astronomer, Sir Arthur Eddington, mounted expeditions to Brazil and West Africa in order to make astronomical observations to verify Einstein's theories. One colleague, S. Chandrasekhar, had complimented Eddington on his courage in planning the expedition when the outcome seemed so uncertain. In Chandrasekhar's words:

“To my surprise, Eddington disclaimed any credit on that account and told me that, had he been left to himself, he would not have planned the expeditions [at all] since he was fully convinced of the truth of the general theory of relativity!”

Eddington never really had any doubt about the correctness of Einstein's theories. As soon as he had heard of Einstein's work, he knew Einstein had to be right. We are told that this was known to be so because the great influence of Einstein's work on Eddington. When Einstein formulated his fundamental field equations, he concluded his paper with the observation “scarcely anyone who has fully understood this theory can escape from its magic.” Chandrasekhar comments:

“Eddington must surely have been caught in its magic; for, within two years, he had written his Report on the Relativity of Gravitation for the Physical Society of London, a report that must have been written in white heat.”

Among like minds, sometimes there can be an immediate recognition of the truth of a new discovery--however different it is from everything that is taught by one's teachers and believed by one's peers.

Based on an excerpt from In the Mind's Eye, chapter 8, “Patterns in Creativity.”

Design, Visual Thinking and Jobs

2009-05-15T16:43:00.002-04:00

I just now sent a comment to Marketplace and thought you might be interested in seeing their story/commentary and my brief reply. The full URL is below. I am always delighted when confirming observations come from very different points of view.

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/05/14/nad_pm_hymowitz_commentary/

Computer Work and the Talents of Dyslexics

2009-05-04T23:44:00.003-04:00

The mix of talents and skills needed in various parts of the computer industry seems to provide natural opportunities for some dyslexics. The following long passage is part of an electronic mail message I received some years ago from a programmer and system integrator in Britain. It provides an artfully worded and elegant profile of a common pattern of dyslexic problems along with special strengths that could be much more common than we might otherwise expect. With this passage, I am struck, once again, by the way these special capabilities, although little understood, seem to be so well suited to the changing requirements of this particular industry--and the way someone who has trouble with words can write so well.

“About 2 months ago the BBC showed a program in the Q.E.D. [popular science] series about dyslexia and learning difficulties . . . in which you were featured. I had before heard of various famous people being linked to dyslexia, especially Einstein and Churchill. But until seeing your piece in the show, I think I generally assumed, like most people, that they were great men who had [just] overcome their difficulties to lead distinguished lives. I had not heard before the theory that their abilities could be a result or side effect of their dyslexia. I must say I find [this theory] most interesting. I do not work in any field of research associated with dyslexia but have suffered with the problem all my life.

“As you can probably see, my spelling leaves a little to be desired and if you could see it you would know my handwriting is closer to spiders dying than text. However, I have never had any problem expressing myself verbally and have always been told I am very creative. I read very slowly and find new words difficult to read. . . . I avoid reading aloud as I tend to read very slowly and with little expression which generally gives the impression I am unintelligent. I can never be sure to get left and right correct first time.

“Unfortunately, my mother used to be an English teacher and so finds all that kind of thing second nature. For a long time, she did not really believe that dyslexia existed but put my problems down to the usual sort of things--laziness, doesn't concentrate, late developer, etc. My father has the same sort of problems as myself and it is a family joke that my mother used to send his (love) letters back to him with the spellings corrected! My education was mainly at boarding schools and my letters home got much the same treatment. The English teacher at school had the same attitude as my mother and the Headmaster was convinced that beating me enough would knock the laziness out of me. . . .

“Anyway, that is just some background. Now back to the subject of your theory (and book). I have bought your book and am reading it (slowly !). I studied, and work in, computers and have done since I was 16. I have always found the subject extremely easy and can produce quite complex systems in very short time scales to a great degree of accuracy and reliability. This is based around an ‘intuition’ I have for the way computers work. Once I know the different aspects of a system I can understand all the implications of a single change on the whole, in a way I find that my colleges cannot. They have to analyse each part of the system trying to work out the effect a change will have on that part before going on to the next part and analysing that, etc. This ‘higher’ ability over my peers is something I have only realised more recently and your theory came at just the right time to help me explain the situations I was being faced with.”

It is especially significant that this individual finds that once he has internalized a mental model of the whole system, he can quickly see the effects of any change. This method of working is entirely different from the step by step analysis one sees generally in conventional usage and education. Yet this is the same method of working that one finds often in discussions of the ways that highly sophisticated and complex problems are approached by highly creative people. It may be possible that a methodical study of young dyslexics such as these working in different parts of this still relatively new industry may yield better understandings of problem solving strategies that may have broad applicability.

When we survey a few recent examples of highly successful dyslexics and visual thinkers, we can see that they have many strengths that are often not properly recognized in school or university--but come to recognized in work and in life. What can be learned from this puzzling pattern? It seems clear that we need to work on finding better ways of identifying and developing the gifts and talents that are often hidden under the difficulties. Also, when we look at highly successful individuals such as described here, we see they succeeded by following their substantial gifts, not by focusing mainly on their difficulties. We need to find ways of bringing traditional education more in line with the requirements of work and life. The more we are able to do this, the more likely we will, in the long run, really help dyslexics and visual thinkers--as well as the larger society. We are also likely to learn more about the true nature of talent and intelligence.

Based on excerpt, “Dying Spiders and Mental Models,” from the “Epilogue,” Updated edition, In the Mind’s Eye. (Quotation used with permission. Misspellings silently corrected. British spellings preserved.)

In the Mind's Eye, Dyslexic Renaissance

Narrows 1942, New Version

Baruj Benacerraf, M.D., 1920-2011

Wild Side of Math Models

Finding Interconnections

A Dyslexic Poet -- William Butler Yeats

The Puzzle of My Own Early Education

Kids Designing Tests for Dyslexic Talents

Part 1, Nikola Tesla, Thinking in Pictures and Asperger Syndrome

Part 2, Nikola Tesla, Thinking in Pictures and Asperger Syndrome

Part 3, Nikola Tesla, Thinking in Pictures and Asperger Syndrome

The Success of Failure, The Failure of Success

Churchill--Learning to See

Talents Wasted, Talents Discovered

Dyslexic Aviators

Artist's Handbook

The Narrows, 1942

Dyslexic Talents Everywhere

Talents Among Dyslexics, Roundtable Discussion

AARP Interview on Visual Thinking

Just got the link to the AARP interview I did a few months ago. Nice job of editing 30-minute interview down to 5 minutes. Includes quick bits on Churchill, GCHQ and Jack Horner. Link is below.

http://www.aarp.org/aarp/broadcast/aarp_radio/prime_time_focus_pastshows/articles/visual_thinking.html

The Late Bloomer's Advantage

True Creativity

The Dangers of Learning to Read

Making All Things Make Themselves

Thinking Like Einstein on the Hokule’a

Without "Big Science"

Recruit Autistics

Youtube video clips on dyslexia

Thinking Like a Child

News on Second Edition

Second Edition Out Soon

Einstein's Cloakroom Ticket

Thinking in Pictures: Einstein and Faraday

Big Picture Thinking

Twenty Years Ahead

Autism as Academic Paradigm by Tyler Cowen

Dyslexic Discoveries: James Lovelock

Baby Dinosaurs and Ancient Red Blood Cells

The Success of Failure, The Failure of Success

Design, Visual Thinking and Jobs

Computer Work and the Talents of Dyslexics

http://www.aarp.org/aarp/broadcast/aarp_radio/prime_time_focus_pastshows/article s/visual_thinking.html