John R. (Jack) Horner 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.
Friday, July 19, 2019
“Businesses Say Dyslexic Strengths Needed in the Age of AI”
“Businesses Say Dyslexic Strengths Needed in the Age of AI”
The International Dyslexia Association (IDA)
Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon, November 7-10, 2019
Presenter: Thomas G. West
Short Description for Conference Program
In recent years, major accounting and business consulting firms have studied the kinds of skills and capabilities that employers say they will need in the near future, especially in relation to the rapid growth in intelligent computing systems. A report issued in October 2018 by one of these firms has indicated that many of the strengths commonly exhibited by dyslexics align well with the kinds of capabilities that surveys of employers have specified -- especially with current major trends in ubiquitous computer networks and scientific data visualization as well as “deep learning” and artificial intelligence (AI).
Detailed Overview of Presentation
Recent studies by major business consultancies have indicated the kinds of skills and capabilities that employers say they will need in the near future. A report issued in October 2018 by EY (formerly Ernst and Young) has indicated that many of the strengths commonly exhibited by dyslexics align well with the kinds of capabilities that surveys of employers have specified.
The EY report is titled, “The value of dyslexia: Dyslexic strengths and the changing world of work.” The EY preface explains: “In this report, we analyze how dyslexic strengths match closely to the pressing skill requirements of the changing world and have provided recommendations to nurture and grow these abilities. Our findings show the huge benefits to be had from taking action to maximize dyslexic strengths. With this in mind, we trust our work will help in seeing the value of proactively educating, recruiting, developing and retaining those with dyslexia.”
In a recent interview conducted by this presenter (February 2019), a senior officer of Deloite indicated that all four of the major business consultancies are now very busy with contracts working for corporations, governments and military organizations around the world as they try to understand how to deal with human jobs as they are hit by wave upon wave of highly intelligent machines. (The “big four” firms are Deloitte, EY-Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers.)
With these contracts and studies, a long-predicted pattern is increasingly clear as it unfolds. The reading, academic and clerical skills where dyslexics have the greatest difficulties have diminishing economic value -- while their creative, innovative and big-picture thinking capabilities are rapidly increasing in economic value. The new machines can now read hundreds or thousands of books in seconds and answer sophisticated questions, according to Ray Kurzweil, currently working with Google.
In addition, with “deep learning” by these machines, high-level skills are being rapidly replaced in medicine, law and other professional fields. According to Roger Paroff’s article on “The Deep Learning Revolution,” in the business magazine Fortune: “Many of the most exciting new attempts to apply deep learning are in the medical realm. . . . While a radiologist might see thousands of images in his life, a computer can be shown millions. . . . The most remarkable thing about neural nets is that no human being has programmed the computer to perform any of these stunts. . . . In fact, no human could. Programmers have, rather, fed the computer a learning algorithm, exposed it to terabytes of data -- hundreds of thousands of images . . . to train it, and have allowed the computer to figure out for itself how to recognize the desired objects. . . . In short, such computers can now teach themselves.”
The presenter’s objective will be to discuss the implications of these new realities for IDA and IDA members: whether to continue to focus mainly on reading and conventional academic remediation -- or whether to initiate a new additional program of research to begin to help dyslexic children and adults to take advantage of their distinctive talents and capabilities to thrive in a dramatically transformed workplace. These new studies and perspectives are expected to provide important new research opportunities for neuroscientists, dyslexia specialists and schools of education as well as provide considerable benefit to dyslexics themselves -- and, in time, to non-dyslexics as well.
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Additional Requested Information for IDA Presentation
Brief Biographical Sketch
West’sfirst book is In the Mind's Eye: Creative Visual Thinkers, Gifted Dyslexics and the Rise of Visual Technologies. This book was awarded a gold seal and selected as one of the “best of the best” for the year by the American Library Association. The book has been translated into Japanese, Chinese and Korean -- and West has provided presentations for scientific, medical, art, design, computer and business groups in the U.S. and 19 foreign countries.
West’s second book isThinking like Einstein: Returning to Our Visual Roots with the Emerging Revolution in Computer Information Visualization. This book is based on seven years of invited articles and columns written for the in-house magazine of the international computer graphics organization ACM-SIGGRAPH (with annual conferences of up to 60,000 scientists, technologists, artists and makers of feature films).
His third book -- Seeing What Others Cannot See: The Hidden Advantages of Visual Thinkers and Differently Wired Brains-- focuses on stories of scientific discoveries made by dyslexics and other different thinkers.
West continues to lecture worldwide having given presentations to the Confederation of British Industry in London, the Netherlands Design Institute in Amsterdam, a meeting of 50 Max Planck Institutes in Göttingen, Germany, the Italian Dyslexia Association in Rome, the first “Diversity Day” conference for the staff of GCHQ, the code-making and code-breaking descendants of Bletchley Park (World War II code breakers), in Cheltenham, England, scientists and artists at Green College and at Magdalen College within Oxford University, England, the Royal College of Art in London, the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, a dyslexia policy conference at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, the University of California at Berkeley, an education conference sponsored by Harvard and MIT, the Arts Dyslexia Trust in London, an education conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and a meeting of visualization scientists and artists sponsored by MIT and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Other presentations have included the Learning Disability Association of Taiwan, the international conference of computer graphic artists and technologists (ACM-SIGGRAPH) in Vancouver, BC, Canada, the International Symposium on Dyslexia in the Chinese Language organized by the Society of Child Neurology and Developmental Pediatrics in Hong Kong, the U.S. National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, the Aspen Institute in Colorado,Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California – anda Director's Colloquium for scientists and staff of NASA Ames Research Center (at Moffett Field in California’s Silicon Valley).
In November 2014, West was invited to give five talks for the Dyslexia Association of Singapore as part of a nation-wide effort to take advantage of the distinctive talents exhibited by dyslexic children and adults. Long a leader in technological and commercial innovation, Singapore plans to lead the world with this effort as well.
The second edition of In the Mind’s Eyeincludes a Foreword by the famous medical writer Oliver Sacks, MD, who said “In the Mind's Eyebrings 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 Mindas a testament to the range of human talent and possibility.”According to one reviewer: “Every once in a while a book comes along that turns one’s thinking upside down. In the Mind's Eyeis just such a book.”
Selected Readings
West, Thomas G., 1992. “A Future of Reversals: Dyslexic Talents in a World of Computer Visualization,” Annals of Dyslexia, vol. 42, pp. 124-139.
West, Thomas G., 1994. “A Return to Visual Thinking.” In Proceedings, Science and Scientific Computing: Visions of a Creative Symbiosis. Symposium of Computer Users in the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, edited and translated by P. Wittenberg and T. Plesser. Gottingen, Germany, November 1993. (Published in 1994.) (Paper published in German: Ruckkehr zum visuellen Denken, Forschung und Wissenschftliches Rechnen: Beitrage anlasslich des 10. EGV-Benutzertreffens der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Gottingen, November 1993.)
West, Thomas G., 1999. “The Abilities of Those with Reading Disabilities: Focusing on the Talents of People with Dyslexia.” Chapter 11, Reading and Attention Disorders: Neurobiological Correlates. Editedby Drake D. Duane, MD, Baltimore, MD: York Press, Inc.
West, Thomas G., 2004. Thinking Like Einstein: Returning to Our Visual Roots with the Emerging Revolution in Computer Information Visualization. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
West, Thomas G., 2005. “The Gifts of Dyslexia: Talents Among Dyslexics and Their Families,” Hong Kong Journal of Paediatrics(New Series), 10, 153-158.
West, Thomas G., 2009.In the Mind’s Eye: Creative Visual Thinkers, Gifted Dyslexics and the Rise of Visual Technologies. Second edition. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, distributed by Penguin Random House. (The second edition of In the Mind’s Eyeincludes a Foreword by the late Oliver Sacks, MD, who said “In the Mind’s Eyebrings 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 Mindas a testament to the range of human talent and possibility.”)
West, Thomas G., 2014. “Amazing Shortcomings, Amazing Strengths: Beginning to Understand the Hidden Talents of Dyslexics,” Asia Pacific Journal of Developmental Differences, vol. 1, no. 1, January 2014, pp. 78-89. (A publication of the Dyslexia Association of Singapore (DAS). DAS has initiated a multi-year program “Embrace Dyslexia,” intended to take advantage of the distinctive talents of dyslexic children and adults, as a form of economic competitive advantage. Long a leader in technology and commerce, Singapore intends to lead the world in this effort as well. In November 2014, Thomas G. West was invited to visit Singapore for a week to give five talks as part of the kick-off for the “Embrace Dyslexia” program.)
West, Thomas G., 2017. Seeing What Others Cannot See: The Hidden Advantages of Visual Thinkers and Differently Wired Brains. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, distributed by Penguin Random House.
From Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, distributed by Penguin Random House --
Seeing What Others Cannot See
The Hidden Advantages of Visual Thinkers
and Differently Wired Brains
by Thomas G. West
For over 25 years, Thomas G. West has been a leading advocate for the importance of visual thinking, visual technologies and the creative potential of individuals with dyslexia and other learning differences. In this new book, he investigates how different kinds of brains and different ways of thinking can help to make discoveries and solve problems in innovative and unexpected ways. West focuses on what he has learned over the years from a group of extraordinarily creative, intelligent and interesting people -- strong visual thinkers and those with dyslexia, Asperger’s syndrome, and other different ways of thinking, learning and working.
West shows that such people can provide important insights often missed by experts and professionals -- as they also can prevent institutional “group think.” Based on first-person accounts, West tells stories that include a dyslexic paleontologist in Montana, a special effects tech who worked for Pink Floyd and Kiss and who is now an advocate for those with Asperger’s syndrome, a group of dyslexic master code breakers in a British electronic intelligence organization, a Colorado livestock handling expert who has become a forceful advocate for those with autism and a family of visual thinkers and dyslexics in Britain that includes four winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
This is an inspiring book that not only documents the achievements of people with various learning differences, but also reveals their great potential. This potential is especially great in our new digital age where traditional clerical and academic skills are less and less important -- while an ability to see the big picture and to understand complex patterns revealed in high-level computer information visualizations is rapidly increasing in value in the global economic marketplace.
Thomas G. Westis the author of the award-winning book In the Mind's Eye: Creative Visual Thinkers, Gifted Dyslexics and the Rise of Visual Technologies and the highly acclaimed Thinking like Einstein: Returning to Our Visual Roots with the Emerging Revolution in Computer Information Visualization. In the Mind’s Eyewas awarded a gold seal and selected as one of the “best of the best” for the year by the Association of College and Research Libraries of the American Library Association. The book has been translated into Japanese, Chinese and Korean -- and West has provided presentations for scientific, medical, art, design, computer and business groups in the U.S. and 20 foreign countries.
West continues to lecture worldwide having given presentations to the Confederation of British Industry in London, the Netherlands Design Institute in Amsterdam, a meeting of 50 Max Planck Institutes in Göttingen, Germany, the Italian Dyslexia Association in Rome, the first “Diversity Day” conference for the staff of GCHQ, the code-making and code-breaking descendants of Bletchley Park (World War II code breakers), in Cheltenham, England, scientists and artists at Green College and at Magdalen College within Oxford University, England, the Royal College of Art in London, the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, a conference at the University of Uppsala before the Queen of Sweden, the University of California at Berkeley, an education conference sponsored by Harvard and MIT, the Arts Dyslexia Trust in London, an education conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and a meeting of visualization scientists and artists sponsored by MIT and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Other presentations have included the Southwest Branch of the International Dyslexia Association in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, the Learning Disability Association of Taiwan, the international conference of computer graphic artists and technologists (ACM-SIGGRAPH) in Vancouver, BC, Canada, the International Symposium on Dyslexia in the Chinese Language organized by the Society of Child Neurology and Developmental Pediatrics in Hong Kong, the U.S. National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, the Aspen Institute in Colorado,Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California – anda Director's Colloquium for scientists and staff of NASA Ames Research Center (at Moffett Field in California’s Silicon Valley).
In November 2014, West was invited to give five talks for the Dyslexia Association of Singapore as part of a nation-wide effort to take advantage of the distinctive talents exhibited by dyslexic children and adults. Long a leader in technological and commercial innovation, Singapore plans to lead the world with this effort as well.
The second edition of In the Mind’s Eyeincludes a Foreword by the late Oliver Sacks, MD, who said “In the Mind's Eyebrings 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 Mindas a testament to the range of human talent and possibility.”According to one reviewer: “Every once in a while a book comes along that turns one's thinking upside down. In the Mind's Eyeis just such a book.”
Contact: thomasgwest@gmail.com. Distribution for Prometheus Books is provided by Penguin Random House (www.penguinrandomhouse.com).
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Note: Provided below is the Introduction for the book by Thomas G. West: Seeing What Others Cannot See -- The Hidden Advantages of Visual Thinkers and Differently Wired Brains, Prometheus Books, 2017.
Introduction
Since my first book, In the Mind’s Eye, was published in 1991, I have had the privilege of providing presentations for many different kinds of organizations in the U.S. and in nineteen foreign countries. In the process, I have met and learned from, I like to say, some of the smartest, most creative and most interesting people on the planet. Many of them are dyslexic or they are, as described these days, “on the spectrum,” with Asperger syndrome or other learning differences. Still others are merely very strong visual thinkers -- people who habitually think in pictures (who may have trouble with words or numbers).
With this book, I will draw together some of the observations and stories that I have accumulated since In the Mind’s Eyewas first published. In the first book, I took a scholarly approach with a great many references and notes to support my perspectives and arguments. With this book, I am taking a very different approach. I will be focusing on brevity and simplicity -- using a collection of short stories and excerpts, layering a worldview with minimal explanation and discussion.
I hope that these stories and observations will help others to begin to see how important these visually-oriented capabilities are for high-level work in many fields -- and how little they are understood and appreciated in traditional education and in conventional measures of intelligence and ability. I make no claim to special knowledge or expert status. I just want to share with visual thinkers and different thinkers what I have learned in the hope that it will help them along the way -- and in the hope that it might influence the direction of future research and practice.
Some forward-looking organizations have come to appreciate and value these visual capabilities, but most educators and employers seem to be stuck in old ways of thinking. (The psychologists say, “we have got it covered -- with our well-established ‘performance’ tests.” The artists, designers and visually-oriented scientists say, “no, you have not even begun to see what we see.”)
Over centuries, we have built an academic system that relies mainly on words and numbers. However, we are now living at a time when powerful visualization technologies, together with emerging large-scale problems, are driving us toward a new realization of how much we need to develop a new kind of thinking -- and how much we need the kinds of people and the kinds of brains that have been marginalized in the past by the dominant specialist culture, mostly based on proficiency with words rather than images.
In the last few decades, the world has changed in important ways. And it is changing once again. We need to understand current trends and not be blinded by traditional beliefs and practices. When we take the long view, the trend lines appear to be quite obvious. But many professionals and experts are well trained to see and believe what they were taught to believe decades ago. In a time of major change it is really important to listen to people who can “see what others cannot see.”
When traveling with my first book, I would talk with scientists, physicians, designers, artists, inventors and others. They often made the remark that their dyslexic colleagues had a different way of looking at things and “they could see things that others could not see”-- whether in reference to an indefinite ultrasound or x-ray image or regarding a novel surgical procedure or the solution to an enduring scientific puzzle. At first, I came to believe that this capability was most often characteristic of those dyslexics who were also strong visual thinkers.
Later, I was surprised to hear the very same words used by an advocate talking to a group of high school students with Asperger syndrome. In the same vein, another advocate had written and discussed with me her own propensity to think in pictures -- seeing things in her work that others did not notice or think were important. Indeed, she had asked one researcher and writer, how do you think at all if you don’t see pictures in your mind?
Over the years, I heard similar observations hundreds of times in hundreds of different places. Gradually, I came to see that I was dealing with a pattern of consequence, one that many had observed in a variety of different fields. The cumulative effect was that I was handed an intriguing topic -- and a book title -- that I could no longer ignore.
It is apparent that visual thinkers seem to experience the world differently from non-visual individuals and other “neuro-typicals.” And this I believe, is a good thing -- although not usually recognized as such, especially in the early years of education. I have learned that for some people the easy things in primary school can be quite hard -- while the hard things in graduate school and in advanced work situations can be quite easy.
Over time, I have come to realize that I have had the considerable advantage of gaining a special perspective into remarkable parts of our world -- providing me with distinctive insights into diverse and alternative ways of thinking, learning and working -- all related, apparently, to observing things in a deeply original and perceptive manner.
It is often noted that some dyslexic scientists or entrepreneurs need only a brief mention of an idea or concept. They don’t need to read the rest of the report. They just think about it and all the implications and future problems and potentials become immediately apparent. They do not need a painful elaboration of the obvious.
As always, I have continued to rely mainly on stories and first-person accounts. I have come to trust them more than many conventional academic theories and studies based on large-scale surveys. I listen to what the affected individuals tell me. I believe they know what they are talking about. They live it every day. And I believe it is important to look at a whole individual life story to see how mixed strengths and weaknesses manifest themselves through time in changing economic and social circumstances. You can assemble the data and count the frequencies later; but you first must look at the individual life story, like a good medical history, to see the most important overall patterns. If you are mainly looking at many people using the established conventional tests, you may be measuring and counting the wrong things.
When one looks, as an outsider, at a century or two of evolving conventional thinking, you can see how often the winds have changed or have blown the wrong way. Looking back, it is often easy to see who was on the right track from the beginning -- and how long it has taken for the conventionally-trained experts to abandon outdated beliefs.
These observations are especially true in regard to the different thinkers we focus on here. In a way, it is self-evident. If you see what others do not see or cannot see -- most will say that you are wrong or, in some way, a heretic. It is not pleasant for the conventional experts to see threatened the material that they have been teaching for many years -- or to have their books and articles suddenly become outdated or irrelevant. It is always so.
These stories and first person accounts have provided me with a set of primary sources that permit me to gain insights perhaps rarely otherwise available – and I hope these will be of interest to a wider audience. This approach is not unlike the style of the late Oliver Sacks, M.D. -- who kindly provided a Foreword and blurb for the second edition of In the Mind’s Eye.
Over these years, I have also been fortunate to meet a number of individuals who were eager to tell me their own life stories. Indeed, several individuals who have been at the very top of their fields -- including, for example, one of the leading individuals in the early development of modern molecular biology -- as well as a major figure in the emerging specialist field of pediatric surgery. Both of these individuals contacted me after reading my first book -- saying, in one way or another: “I read your book. You understand how I think. Others do not. I want to tell you my story.”
I have been surprised at the remarkable range of fields and occupations of those who have shown interest in these topics -- including scientific, medical, art, design, computer and entrepreneurial business groups. In many cases, attendees and contacts have shared with me observations that were, apparently, not generally known -- and sometimes well hidden.
In time, I found that these observations seemed to fit into a larger pattern, acknowledging the value of diverse minds and diverse brains – especially when this diversity is beginning to be highly valued in a time of rapid technological change and global economic competition. We are becoming more aware that we need something other than the conventional clerks or strong test takers or traditional narrow specialists -- although our educational system continues to train and select them.
Instead, I believe our very survival may depend on strong visual thinkers and practically-minded visionaries, those who think in different ways, those who see the larger patterns, those who seem to be able to see over the horizon and predict what is coming, those who naturally think in moving pictures by mental manipulation of three-dimensional shapes and forms -- increasingly aided by the newest integrative graphical computer technologies.
Remarkably, I have continued to be surprised at the serious interest in these perspectives among the most highly successful individuals. These individuals seem to immediately understand that high creativity and capabilities are often linked to visual thinking or to dyslexia, to Asperger syndrome or other learning differences. In general, strangely, it seems that Nobel Prize winners are highly interested in these perspectives -- whereas there appears to be very little interest among conventionally trained teachers, school psychologists and educational administrators. They might find much more talent among their students if they knew how and where to look for it.
In many respects, Asperger syndrome (which I still regard as a useful term, often used by affected individuals, although some professional groups have recently discontinued its use) appears to be the complete opposite of developmental dyslexia. However, many individuals in both groups appear to share a strongly visual manner of thinking, a link that is not always obvious but could be extraordinarily important -- especially in an era when high-level work in many fields increasingly involves “scientific visualization” and visual analysis of complex information.
In addition to these powerful trends, it appears that, historically, many of the most creative and productive in regards to technological innovation and scientific discovery have been strong visual thinkers. In contrast, it appears that many non-visual thinkers may be very good at learning and applying old knowledge (and doing well on exams, often getting the top grades and the top jobs) but may be very poor at creating new knowledge or developing the broad and deep understanding so badly needed for modern, real-world challenges. What spelled success in the old specialist culture may very well generate major failures in the new.
In this book, I want to focus mainly on visual thinking -- and its considerable power in many different fields to understand relationships and novel solutions not often available in other ways. Among computer graphics folks, words and numbers are seen as the “thin pipe to the brain.” In contrast, they see computer graphics and information visualization as “the fat pipe to the brain.” I hope that this book will begin to illuminate what the “fat pipe” can do -- and how is changing the fundamentals of our world.
Mostly, I will be looking backward at some of what I have learned -- but I hope to look a little way forward as well. As we know, for years computers have been taking over low-level jobs. In more recent years, the newest and most powerful computers have played into the hands of visually-oriented different thinkers -- providing powerful tools well suited to their mix of talents and special abilities.
However, the context is changing once again. Now in the early days of “deep learning,” we can expect shortly to see major effects on very high-level jobs as well. The machines are now learning to see patterns that only high-level, experienced professionals could see before. In some cases they have already surpassed human capabilities. This has long been expected. But after several false starts, it appears that the time has arrived. The effects are not yet entirely clear, but it is likely that these trends may require the distinctive talents of “different thinkers” once again. Then we will badly need to listen to those who “can see what others cannot see.”
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From the quotations page of Seeing What Others Cannot See--
People with dyslexia are often regarded as defective, as missing something—a facility in reading or linguistic thinking—which the rest of us have. But those of us who are predominantly verbal or “lexical” thinkers could just as well be thought of as “avisuals.”
—Oliver Sacks, MD
I believe those of us with Asperger’s are here for a reason, and we have much to offer.
—John Elder Robison
Dyslexia is Britain’s secret weapon in the spy war: Top code breakers can crack complex problems. . . . Most people only get to see the jigsaw picture when it’s nearly finished while the dyslexic cryptographists can see what the jigsaw looks like with just two pieces.
—Statement from GCHQ official, July 2013
During residency, I recognized that I had dyslexia. And then I realized I had this gift for imaging. Radiology is where I belonged. I live in a world of patterns and images and I see things that no one else sees. Anomalies jump out at me like a neon sign. . . . I do have a gift that other people don’t have, and I will always stay ahead of the crowd and see more in an image than other people.
—Beryl Benacerraf, MD
Many of the most exciting new attempts to apply deep learning are in the medical realm. . . . While a radiologist might see thousands of images in his life, a computer can be shown millions. . . . “This image problem could be solved better by computers . . . just because they can plow through so much more data than a human could ever do.” The most remarkable thing about neural nets is that no human being has programmed a computer to perform any of [these] stunts. . . . In fact, no human being could. Programmers have, rather, fed the computer a learning algorithm, exposed it to terabytes of data—hundreds of thousands of images or years’ worth of speech samples—to train it, and have allowed the computer to figure out for itself how to recognize the desired objects. . . . In short, such computers can now teach themselves.
—Roger Parloff, Fortunemagazine, October 2016
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Back Cover for Seeing What Others Cannot See--
“For twenty-five years Thomas G. West has been a leader in the movement to highlight the value and beauty of minds that see the world in non-typical ways. In Seeing What Others Cannot See, he presents his strongest case yet for the importance of recognizing, educating, and utilizing nonverbal strengths, and their special value in our contemporary world. Recommended for anyone interested in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, innovation and creativity, technology and education.”
—Brock Eide, MD, coauthor of The Dyslexic Advantageand The Mislabeled Child
“In this fascinating book, Thomas G. West revisits and interprets his earlier theories in the light of ongoing changes in society, highlighting the importance and awareness of positive aspects of dyslexia by contrast with the traditional deficit approach. Here he extends his thinking to include a novel evaluation of Asperger’s, drawing links between distinctive visual thinkers in both groups in a series of compelling case studies. West argues most persuasively for greater emphasis on the power of visual literacy and the need for new tools to evaluate these strengths throughout life, to meet the challenging demands of our modern environment.”
—Angela Fawcett, PhD, editor, Asia Pacific Journal of Developmental Differences and former editorDyslexia. Emeritus Professor, Swansea University.
“People who think in pictures have contributed greatly to both scientific discovery and artistic expression. Thomas G. West carefully documents their abilities. Our education system needs to change from an emphasis on deficits to the development of a student’s strengths.”
—Temple Grandin, PhD, author, Thinking in Pictures andThe Autistic Brain
“Thomas G. West argues convincingly that dyslexics and related intellectuals seem to fail in elementary school learning while excelling at the broader level of graduate school. Many whose stories he recites were smashing successes in business. West urges that this is because of extra gifts in visual learning and thinking. He goes beyond praising dyslexics’ hidden strengths in visual thinking and learning, their ability to see what others cannot see—he demands that we stop hiding the imaginative strengths of all children under their weaknesses in reading.”
—Donald Lindberg, MD, Director Emeritus, National Library of Medicine, NIH
“In Singapore, we have certainly met many individuals with dyslexia who have talents that many do not see. Like Tom West, we would like everyone to emphasize and develop the strengths of those with learning differences rather than focus on their weaknesses. This is so that society can benefit from the incredible gifts of those with dyslexia.”
-- Lee Siang, CEO, Dyslexia Association of Singapore
* * * * *
Foreword to the Second Edition of In the Mind’s Eyeby Oliver Sacks, M.D.
“Although, as a neurologist, I sometimes see cases of alexia--the loss of a previously existing ability to read, usually caused by a stroke in the visual areas of the brain-- congenital difficulties in reading, dyslexias, are not something I often encounter, especially with a mostly geriatric practice such as my own. Thus I have been particularly fascinated--sometimes astonished--by the wide range of considerations thtat Thomas G. West has brought together in this seminal investigation of dyslexia, In the Mind's Eye.
“People with dyslexia are often regarded as defective, as missing something--a facility in reading or linguistic thinking--which the rest of us have. But those of us who are predominantly verbal or ‘lexical’ thinkers could just as well be thought of as ‘avisuals.’ There may indeed be a sort of reciprocity between lexical and visual powers, and West makes a convincing argument that a substantial section of the population, often highly intelligent, may combine reading problems with heightened visual powers, and are often adept at compensating for their problems in one way or another--even though they may suffer greatly at school, where so much is based on reading. Some of our greatest scientists and artists would probably be diagnosed today as dyslexic, as West shows in his profiles of Einstein, Edison, da Vinci, Yeats, and others. West himself is dyslexic--this, no doubt, has strongly influenced his life and research interests, but it also gives him a uniquely sympathetic understanding of dyslexia from the inside as well as the outside.
“My own experience seems to be in the opposite camp--I learned to read very early, and my own thinking is largely in terms of concepts and words. I am rather deficient in visual imagery, and have a great deal of difficulty recognizing places and even people. When I met Temple Grandin, the autistic animal psychologist who is clearly a visual thinker (one of her books is titled Thinking in Pictures), she was taken aback when I said I could hardly visualize anything: ‘How doyou think?’ she asked. Grandin herself has very heightened spatial and visual imagination, and thinks in very concrete images.
“The idea of compensation for various neurological ‘deficits’ is well supported by neuro-scientific studies, which have shown, for instance, that people blind from birth have heightened tactile, auditory, and musical powers, or that congenitally deaf people who use sign language have heightened visual and spatial capacities, and perhaps a special attunement to facial expression. People with dyslexia, similarly, may develop various strategies to compensate for difficulties in reading. They are often very highly skilled at auditory comprehension or memorization, at pattern recognition, complex spatial reasoning or visual imagination. Such visual thinkers, indeed, may be especially gifted and vital to many fields; among them may well be the next generation of creative geniuses in computer modeling and graphics.
“In the Mind's Eyebrings out the special problems of people with dyslexia, but also their strengths, which are so often overlooked. Its accent is not so much on pathology as on how much human minds vary. It stands alongside Howard Gardner'sFrames of Mindas a testament to the range of human talent and possibility.”
Oliver Sacks, M.D., January 2, 2009. The late Dr. Sacks, a British neurologist residing in the US, is most widely known for his book Awakenings(1973) that was made into a film of the same name starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. Also well known are his books An Anthropologist from Mars(1995), Seeing Voices: A Journey into the Land of the Deaf(1989) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat(1985). A recent book is titled The Mind’s Eye(2010). Dr. Sacks was professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and maintained a private practice in New York City. Sacks considered that his literary style followed the tradition of 19th-century “clinical anecdotes,” a style that focuses on informal case histories, following the writings of Alexander Luria. One commentator noted that Sack’s work has been featured in a “broader range of media than those of any other contemporary medical author.” The New York Timessaid that Sacks “has become a kind of poet laureate of contemporary medicine.”
* * * * *
Selected Reviews and Comments, In the Mind’s Eye andThinking Like Einstein --
“I would like to thank you for the copy of your book . . . which I read with considerable interest. I wasn’t aware, and I am enormously proud that I share my learning problems with such distinguished characters as Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Sir Winston Churchill, Gen. George Patton and William Butler Yeats. I found your detailed analysis of the various deficiencies very informative and I think your book is a real contribution to the field.”
-- Baruj Benacerraf, M.D., letter of August 5, 1994. The late Dr. Benacerraf was Fabyan Professor of Comparative Pathology, Emeritus, Harvard Medical School and was past President of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston. A Nobel laureate for discoveries in immunology (1980 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine), Dr. Benacerraf was recognized as a distinguished dyslexic in 1988, receiving the Margaret Byrd Rawson Award from the National Institute of Dyslexia. Together with his life-long difficulties with reading, writing and spelling (along with his daughter, above, and grandson). He observed that he had a special facility with visualizing space and time--an ability that he believed contributed greatly to his scientific research and discoveries.
“The computer is the most malleable tool we’ve ever invented. The Turing revolution, which brought it to us, has proceeded over its 60-year history to absorb field after field of human endeavor. First was simple number crunching. Then text processing, table making, pie charting, data basing, and a host of other, more sophisticated, fields have gone digital with the new tool as human brain amplifier. Visualization is the latest domain to become “ordinary” this way. Tom West argues that the legitimacy of visualization as a first-order attack on problem solving is therefore being established after generations of quiet use by only some creators--and some of the best at that. He claims that visualization is not only a legitimate way to solve problems, it is a superior way: the best minds have used it. West urges us to join the dyslexics of the world and use pictures instead of words. In the process we get fascinating glimpses of how other minds have worked--minds that have changed the world.”
-- Alvy Ray Smith, PhD, electronic mail message of November 20, 1996. Dr. Smith was co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios (before purchased by Steve Jobs), former Director of Computer Graphics at Lucasfilm, Ltd., and Graphics Fellow, Advanced Technology, Microsoft Corporation. At Pixar, he formed the team that proceeded to create Tin Toy, the first 3-dimensional computer animation ever to win an Academy Award. This team later produced the first completely computer-generated motion picture, Toy Story. At Microsoft, he designed the multimedia authoring infrastructure for Microsoft third party developers and content producers. While he was a Regent for the U.S. National Library of Medicine, he was instrumental in inaugurating the Visible Human Project.
“Unfortunately, I did not discover this wonderful book [In the Mind’s Eyeby Thomas G. West] before I wrote Thinking in Picturesseveral years ago. I recommend it to teachers, parents and education policymakers. West profiles people with dyslexia who are visual thinkers, and his conclusions on the link between visual thinking and creativity are similar to mine.”
-- Temple Grandin, “The List,” The Weekmagazine, March 3, 2006, describing why she has included In the Mind’s Eyeon her list of six favorite books.
“Dear Tom: Thanks for sending me your epilogue [to the second edition of In the Mind’s Eye]. It was wonderful. I think that visual thinking in both autism/Asperger and dyslexia are very similar. Your descriptions match the descriptions I get from people on the autism spectrum. I share your concern that educators do not understand the creative visual thinking mind. I give talks to parents and teachers all the time and I emphasize that they need to develop a child's strengths. I am really pleased that you are going to use my quote. I love the Oliver Sacks foreword. Sincerely, Temple Grandin”
-- Email of August 17, 2009. Dr. Grandin is a professor of animal science and is author of the memoir Thinking in Pictures(dealing with her life with autism) and the best-selling book Animals in Translation. An HBO cable TV film based on Grandin’s life debuted in February 2010, starring Claire Danes. The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews--being nominated for 15 Emmy Awards and winning seven.
“Thanks so much for sending the material. . . . There is a lot of overlap in points we have both been making for years. I have often argued in my public talks that the graduate education process that produces physicists is totally skewed to selecting those with analytic skills and rejecting those with visual or holistic skills. I have claimed that with the rise of scientific visualization as a new mode of scientific discovery, a new class of minds will arise as scientists. In my own life, my ‘guru’ in computational science was a dyslexic and he certainly saw the world in a different and much more effective manner than his colleagues. . . .”
-- Larry L. Smarr, Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Illinois, electronic mail message of August 6, 1994. With W.J. Kaufmann, Dr. Smarr is author of Supercomputing and the Transformation of Science, Scientific American Library, W.H. Freeman and Company, 1993.
“There is a great deal in this book which is pertinent to the study of the highly able. The author points out that this century’s focus on what is normal, and pushing children towards those norms, may have obscured an understanding of the high degree of individual differences, masking many forms of giftedness which then may go undetected. He urges us to cultivate these awkward individuals for their unusual gifts to improve creativity in the sciences as well as the arts. West’s weave of case studies and ideas to promote his arguments is intriguing and convincing. If what he says is true, then the waste of high ability is very much worse than we might have thought. But using his reasoning, if we were to change our educational outlook to a more positive and humane one, then millions more children would be enabled to develop into creative, productive, and fulfilled adults.”
-- Review by Joan Freeman, European Journal for High Ability, vol. 4, no. 2, 1993.
“Since he first published In the Mind's Eye18 years ago, Thomas G. West has been at the forefront of a growing number of experts who recognize that the ‘dys’ in dyslexia is often far less important to those who have it than the often remarkable abilities in reasoning, visualization, and pattern recognition that frequently accompany this condition. The impact of this now classic work upon the dyslexic families and individuals that we have the privilege to work with--the encouragement and insight it has provided--is incalculable . . . . Everyone who is dyslexic, has a child with dyslexia, or works with such individuals will be encouraged and enlightened by this marvelous book. For those tired of an educational system that too often treats dyslexic children like ugly ducklings, it is a field guide to the glories of the swan. We cannot possibly recommend it highly enough."
-- Brock Eide, MD, MA, and Fernette Eide, MD. The Eides are authors of The Mislabeled Child (Hyperion, 2006) and The Dyslexic Advantage(Hudson Street Press, 2011).
“Thomas West brings to life the fascinating capacities and syndromes that arise from our visual-spatial imagination. His book proves beyond doubt that we are not all points on a single bell curve of intelligence.”
-- Howard Gardner, PhD, letter of October 15, 1996. Dr. Gardner is author of many books, including Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences(BasicBooks, 1983) and Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century(Basic Books, 1999). A MacArthur Prize Fellow, he is affiliated with Harvard University Graduate School of Education, Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Veterans Administration Medical Center.
“. . . I entirely agree with [Dr. Doris Kelly] when she says that [In the Mind’s Eye] is ‘about 20 years ahead of current educational thinking.’ Many of us have spent long hours considering all the things that dyslexics are supposed to be weak at. What Tom West reminds us of is that we need also to consider dyslexics’ strengths. . . . At present, so he implies, education is in the hands of those who possess all the traditional skills; and since, not surprisingly, they assume that others are like themselves, the needs of some very gifted thinkers whose brain organization is different are not being adequately met. I very much hope that both teachers and educational planners will read this book and take its message seriously.”
-- T.R. Miles, Ph.D., in Dyslexia Contact, June 1993, pp. 14-15. The late Dr. Miles was Professor Emeritus, University College of North Wales, and Vice President of the British Dyslexia Association.
“Dyslexia and other learning differences are commonly seen as disabilities, but they must also be seen as distinctive abilities, different (and often superior) modes of perceiving and understanding the world. As Thomas West shows, some of our greatest minds, from Einstein and Edison to Churchill and da Vinci, have been visual thinkers who today might be labeled ‘learning disabled.’ In the Mind’s Eyemakes a powerful case that the dyslexic-visual mind may be full of creative human potential, and is as crucial a part of our cognitive heritage as any other.”
-- Oliver Sacks, MD. This back cover blurb was sent to Thomas G. West by Dr. Oliver Sacks for use with the second edition of In the Mind’s Eye, October 23, 2008. The Foreword was provided later.
“Interestingly, dyslexia is found to be often associated with talent. . . . It’s not unusual for children with perceived general learning disabilities to display an exceptional ability that results in their placement in programs for the specially gifted. . . . Perhaps no one has championed the association between dyslexia and talent more than Thomas G. West, author of In the Mind’s Eye. . . . West’s research focuses on the correlation of very high success with the prevalence of dyslexia, a relationship that will likely be the focus of more research in the years ahead.”
-- Jim Romeo, New York Academy of Sciences, Update Magazine, April/May 2004, “Getting Scientific about Why Johnny Can’t Read--Understanding Dyslexia.”
“I want you to know that reading your book and the conversations we had at the SIGGRAPH [computer graphics] conference were pivotal in the history of our project. We rewrote much of our material based on insights gained from your book. Previously, we had not realized fully how central the role of visualization was to what we were trying to do. We were already on the right path without really knowing it. . . . In our project CALCULUS&Mathematica, we have learned the effectiveness of teaching the concepts visually using graphic software prior to verbal explanations. Our students have gained a deeper understanding of the subject and they can recall and apply the material long afterward, which is rare for students taught with conventional methods.”
-- J. Jerry Uhl, PhD., Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, telephone conversation of September 29, 1993. The late Dr. Uhl was a major figure in the National Science Foundation-sponsored reform of calculus teaching at the university level. With W. Davis and H. Porta, he was author of the interactive courseware, CALCULUS&Mathematica(Addison-Wesley, 1994), using high-level, general-purpose mathematics software along with the first generation of graphic computers (before graphics were available on other platforms). Initially viewed as radical, the innovative approaches used in this courseware have been widely adopted and are now in use by many modern calculus courses and textbooks. (Dr. Uhl told me he had high status in the mathematics world because he had been editor of several mathematics journals. Consequently, he said he could afford to focus on his interest in innovations in mathematics education -- which would otherwise mean “death” to a serious career in mathematics. -- TGW) (Mathematicais a product of Wolfram Research, a major mathematical software company. In a listing of Dr. Uhl’s favorite quotations, Stephen Wolfram is cited as saying, “When I started off doing mathematics, I wasn't very good at it. I never learned my multiplication tables and it was certainly the conclusion of my teachers at that time that there was no way I would ever go on and do anything . . . mathematically oriented. As it turned out, I found out about computers and found out that you could make computers do these kinds of things.”)
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