TRANSCRIPT FROM "OCKHAMS RAZOR",Broadcast Sunday 17 December 2000 
with Robyn Williams. Thanks to Gordon Shaw of W. Australia  for posting this originally on the Dyslexia forum.

Summary:

Some very gifted children are often condemned as failures in the school system because they learn in a different way to the majority of kids.

Transcript:


Robyn Williams: ‘You will never amount to anything.’ My school teachers implied that to me on many an occasion. One schoolmaster also said those words to another rather distracted lad called Albert when he attended classes in Munich. Fortunately Albert Einstein was encouraged by his family, and they still had money, before hard times fell, to let him have another go at another school.

Now I’m not comparing myself for a minute to the great physicist who transformed the 20th century, but you may like to compare yourself to him, or maybe a child you know. Could it be that we don’t understand those little lateral thinkers, and condemn them to be failures, when they should in fact, be showing exceptional promise.

Jennifer Riggs thinks so, and she should know.

Jennifer Riggs: I met a little boy the other day whose mind ponders problems like: how come if you drop a piece of paper end on, it falls so much faster than if you drop it flat? He’s six. An Einstein in the making, you might think.

Well, yes and no.

His teachers are quite concerned about this child. He is immature, they say, and should be kept down in Year 1. He is restless and should be on Ritalin.

This is The Einstein Factor at work.

The very things that made Einstein a scientific genius made him a less than perfect pupil when it came to learning by rote or even doing simple arithmetic. He barely survived his education. He was told he was an insult to the school, to remove himself, which he did, and went for an educational walkabout in his teens, a drop-out. He was only saved by family friends; he was fortunate in his mentors, who introduced him to popular sciences and to the philosophers, who hauled him back to school and who spoon-fed him before exams. He was also fortunate in the new school, which was ‘progressive’, with a lot of hands-on learning.

What would happen to him today, I wonder.

He might be labelled ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder, and put on medication. He might be labelled ‘at risk’ quite early on and filtered out by various means, with the very best intentions, of course. These children can look like slow learners so they are sidestreamed; their whole education dumbed down, chances of excellence gone for good. What a waste!

We need to look at these children much more carefully in the light of recent learning research.

Working with bright underachievers, it dawned on me that they are often unmistakably gifted, not in spite of their dyslexia-type difficulties, but because of them. In fact, neurologist Norman Geschwind described what he called a ‘pathology of superiority’, that is, brains that are wired for lateral thinking, for the big picture, for visual imagination and for abstract thought, but not for the 3Rs. Recent analysis of Einstein’s brain bears this out.

When we honour Einstein, we do acknowledge that spelling and number competence are not more important than insight and vision but when we look at seedling Einsteins in school today, what do we see?

Do we see lateral thinking or do we see distractibility? Strong visual/spatial intelligence, or an inability to focus on words? High mathematical potential, or inability to do sums? Do we totally misread these children?

Instead of weeding them out as slow learners, it might make a lot more sense to promote them into special programs designed to optimise their strengths while at the same time giving them a chance to catch up on some of their weaknesses through their strengths and not through endless repetition of what doesn’t work for them.

Let me tell you about another small boy, not particular popular with the teachers, for just the same reasons that Einstein was not popular with his. He is fascinated by the drama of meteorology and can read and spell all those difficult weather words, and precious little else. He can hardly remember where he left his hat, but he can remember that on Wednesday lunch hour he can come and talk meteorology, and he can get himself up from the sand-pit to do it.

Fortunately his family supports his enthusiasm and provides resources to grow on. But, what if the school could use these children’s passions as a springboard to further learning?

Einstein speaks of ‘loving interest’ and ‘desire for truth’ and ‘that divine curiosity which every healthy child possesses but which is so often weakened early’. ‘For a school … to work with fear, force and artificial authority’, he says, ‘destroys … the sincerity and the self-confidence of the pupil.’

For Einstein and children like him, confidence is an early casualty. Our education systems are (still, in spite of all the research) set up for learning by listening. Fine for some, but Einstein and many others are programmed differently. Their ‘pathology of superiority’ is like a dyslexia, that learns with pictures and ideas and actions, rather than with words and symbols. Because they are not sequential thinkers, they crave the overview before the detail. Because their auditory processing is weak, they are not good at listening or rote learning. There is nothing wrong with their ears, it’s just that for neurological reasons, being talked at sends them into a daze.

When Einstein warned against ‘dead knowledge’ and ‘empty words’ he knew well that ideas get buried in terminology and that much of what is said in the classroom never even reaches the mind.

To help him concentrate, Einstein used to pace up and down twiddling a lock of his hair; a tycoon might doodle or fiddle with executive toys. These children too seem to know instinctively that they need to move to keep their brains alive, to concentrate, and they can easily be helped to find teacher-friendly ways to fidget.

Young Albert was so late in learning to speak that his parents sought medical advice about it. When he did start to talk, he softly echoed all his own words right up to the age of seven. Even at nine he was by no means fluent. Enough to make anyone worry. No-one realised it was a problem of auditory focus.

By his teens his learning was so poor that his teacher burst out with the prediction that he would never amount to anything. It may be laughable now, but it must have been devastating at the time. There was no-one to comfort him by saying ‘You’re very far from dumb, Albert, your brain’s just wired differently. You have it in you to be a great lateral thinker and dream up all sorts of wonderful new ideas. You learn best by seeing and doing.’

His life proved it. When he was not much more than a toddler, his mother was so determined that he should be self-reliant that she set him to find his way home through city streets; he managed it very well.

He played with blocks almost obsessively and constructed card houses up to 14 stories, which must have led him naturally into geometric understanding. He was so fascinated when his uncle told him about Pythagoras that he painstakingly developed his own proof. He fell in love with a book of Euclid when he was twelve: visual/spatial intelligence at work. But he still couldn’t do his sums.

At the very end of his life Einstein recalled the awakening of wonder when his father gave him a magnetic compass to play with at the age of 4 or 5. Here was a needle, isolated and unreachable, totally enclosed, yet caught in the grip of an invisible urge that made it strive towards the north. ‘This experience made a deep and abiding impression on me,’ he said.

His teachers never saw this wonderment and persistence. They never saw this visual/spatial brilliance. They saw only his ineptitude.

But is it reasonable to extrapolate from the great Einstein to children in school today? I believe it is not only valid but necessary, particularly when we consider how close Einstein came to academic extinction.

I’ve lost count of the great creative thinkers who had difficulties of this kind in school. Can it be chance that the mathematical/physical line right back to Newton shows it? Poincare, the acknowledged genius, averaged out as an imbecile on the Binet IQ test, brilliant in some areas but dragged down by abysmal scores in others. Very typical of these children. Lucky for him, he was an honoured scientist at that time, not a schoolchild! Both Maxwell and Faraday are on record as having had such problems and even Newton was said to be ‘inattentive’ and ‘not bookish’, which probably amounts to the same thing. Can this be chance? Is it not more likely that the brilliance of their abstract visual imagination, their capacity to scent out the beauty and order in seeming chaos, and their sheer inventiveness all came at a price?

Do the stereotypes of the absent-minded professor or the ‘mad’ scientist come out of thin air? Much more likely they are derogatory labels for something frequently observed but not understood. The word ‘scatterbrain’ exactly describes these many children; it’s a word charged with meaning: Scatterbrain.

Einstein had plenty to say about education. From bitter experience, from the heart as always, and from his strong sense of altruism. It behoves us to take note, given that the highest outcome aspiration of any teacher or any school might be to nurture a future Nobel Prize winner.

He called for active learning: ‘pleasure in … artist-like workmanship …’

for enquiry: ‘the beauty of the mysterious’

for ‘the childlike inclination for play’

for ‘independent thinking and judgment’ and

for ‘a vivid sense of the beautiful and the morally good’

Even though we might not have quite his turn of phrase, we’d go along with most of that, but how?

The hands-on learning environment, a lab-cum-studio-cum-library-cum-museum-cum-workshop is there in educational theory but mostly honoured in the breach. Einstein’s concept of the facilitator who is ‘given extensive liberty in selection of material and method’ and who has ‘grown up in such schools’ is a bit of a rosy dream.

That workshop style of learning which can give scope to the whole range of learning styles fulfils the recommendations, but can teachers be expected to transform themselves and school systems overnight? Many of them are hanging onto the life-raft with bleeding fingers as it is. Every few weeks schools are called upon to address this or that social problem. They are not able to do more until they are helped to learn by experience that Einstein-friendly programs can be add in, rather than add on. This they can, most triumphantly.

So much for the optimism, but supposing, just supposing that our wondrously successful screening procedures weed out all our original thinkers of the future, what then? How many are we losing already? Can we come up with new ways to nurture seedling Einsteins?

There’s a postscript to all this: just last night I heard of a school, desperate to lift its ratings, that is starting an extension science course in Year 10. Einstein would not meet the enrolment criteria nor would the course meet his criteria; it was described to me as ‘higher and drier’. Is this the way to inspire science visionaries?

Robyn Williams: Well I think you can guess the answer to that question.

Jennifer Riggs in Brisbane where she works with unusually talented children.

FOR MORE ON THE "EINSTEIN FACTOR" READ THE "DOUBLE EDGED GIFT" BY MARY COYLE, available from the online store,
price £3.50 + postage. (£0.50 UK and EU; £1.00 elsewhere.)

---

  Public release date: 18-May-2003
Contact: las46@georgetown.edu
las46@georgetown.edu
202-687-7707
Georgetown University Medical Center

Was Orton right?

New study examines how the brain works in reading; Offers key to better understanding dyslexia

Washington, DC – Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study brain activity in children, researchers today confirmed part of an eighty-year-old theory on the neurobiological basis of reading disability, and shed new light on brain regions that change as children become accomplished readers. Their findings were reported in the May 18 online publication of the journal Nature Neuroscience.

In 1925 Dr. Samuel Orton, a clinician and prominent dyslexia researcher, hypothesized that normally developing readers suppress the visual images reported by the right hemisphere of the brain because these images could potentially interfere with input from the left. Advanced technology allowed researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center to discover that children do in fact "turn off" the right side of the visual parts of the brain as they become accomplished readers. This confirms an aspect of Orton's theory--born out of observations of individuals with reading disability--is correct.

For the first time, they also were able to demonstrate that different phonological skills relate to activity in different parts of the brain when children read. Phonological skills allow readers to sound out words by correctly associating sounds with written symbols. They are critical for children learning to read and are often found to be impaired in children with developmental dyslexia.

This observation lends support to the theory that there may be several neurobiological profiles that correspond to different subtypes of dyslexia, each associated with varying deficits in one or more of these different phonological skills.

"Reading is the single most important skill our children learn – it impacts virtually every aspect of a child's life," said Dr. Guinevere Eden, associate professor of pediatrics and director of Georgetown University's Center for the Study of Learning. "Despite the extraordinary effort that goes into teaching children to read, very little is known about the neurobiology of reading acquisition in children. This study is important because we need to understand the brain basis of learning in kids who read well in order to understand why some children, like those with dyslexia, don't."

Eden and her colleagues Peter Turkeltaub, Lynn Gareau, and Dr. Tom Zeffiro of Georgetown, and Dr. Lynn Flowers of Wake Forest University, studied 41 people between the ages of six and 22 using fMRI to examine which parts of the brain they use when they see words. Using a method where subjects were asked to locate tall letters within a word – forcing them to read the words implicitly - the researchers correlated brain activity with scores on reading tests to see if more advanced readers had more activity in certain brain areas than less experienced readers, and vice versa. Then they studied brain activity during reading related to scores on tests of phonological skills.

Supporting Orton's theory, the fMRI scans showed that young children who were just learning to read used the left temporal regions of their brains; increases in age and the associated gains in reading, was characterized by a suppression of the visual areas of the right hemisphere.

The study also showed that the same locus in the left temporal lobe engaged during reading in younger children is also more active if children are good at phonemic awareness, such as understanding that "pop" without "p" is "op." These measures are frequently employed for behavioral evaluation of children at risk for developing reading problems and these new findings provide an anatomical correlate of this ability.

"Work like this can provide important background information to develop new research-based teaching programs that can ultimately help all children to become proficient readers and identify those who are need of specific interventions," said Peter Turkeltaub, primary author of this study. "This is an exciting area of research in which scientists converge with educators and parents to achieve the common goal of helping children achieve the reading skills they need to succeed in life."

Dr. Eden and her team continue to study the neurobiological basis for reading. In related research, supported by the NIH and the International Dyslexia Association – founded in the memory of Samuel Orton, Eden and her colleagues will soon begin the largest national longitudinal study ever undertaken to study brains in children as they develop into readers. A "brain bank" will enable researchers to undertake more comprehensive dyslexia and neurobiological research.

 

This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Georgetown University Medical Center is an internationally recognized academic medical center with a three-part mission of research, teaching and patient care (through our partnership with MedStar Health). Our mission is carried out with a strong emphasis on public service and a dedication to the Catholic, Jesuit principle of cura personalis--or "care of the whole person." The Medical Center includes the School of Medicine and the School of Nursing and Health Studies, both nationally ranked, and the world renowned Lombardi Cancer Center.

The Georgetown Center for the Study of Learning, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health, seeks to better understand the neural mechanisms that enable the acquisition of reading skills, and to identify new approaches to assess and treat reading disabilities.

---

DYSLEXIA GENE FOUND?
A possible "dyslexia gene" has been found by researchers in Fnland.
Click the link to read the article, which we can't reproduce here for copyright reasons.
READ ARTICLE

---

WORDS GET IN THE WAY?
A fascinating article on the interaction between visual and verbal memory, which may have  significant bearing on dyslexia-related memory problems

CLICK THE LINK TO READ THE ARTICLE, which we can't reproduce for copyright reasons.
READ ARTICLE

---

TEACHING PHONICS TO 5 YR OLDS (From the "World of Dyslexia" newsletter, http://www.worldofdyslexia.com ) full report in "The Dyslexia Review" http://www.dyslexia-inst.org.uk/di_guild/guild.htm
BENEFITS OF EARLY PHONICS TO FIVE-YEAR OLDS

Researchers at the UK's prestigious London University Institute of Education have published the findings of their latest research into the use of phonics with 5-year olds. Traditionally, children of this age have been taught using 'whole word' or 'Look and say' methods, and phonics have not been introduced until around age six or later.

The teachers and researchers worked with 122 five-year old children, with the majority speaking English as a second language. A parallel group worked in the traditional way, using 'Big Books'. The experimental group used 'Jolly Phonics' (one of many phonics programs available). The two groups were matched using various factors. During the 12-week period of the experiment, teachers taught the children phonics (or the 'Big Book' method for the control group) for one hour each day.

Children were tested before and after the 12-week period. With the the group learning phonics there were 'strong and significant effects ... on the development of reading and writing'. The results showed that 'phonemic awareness, segmentation and blending skills, and phonic knowledge influence the development of of reading and writing skills.'

Following this research, 22 other London schools took part in an extension of the experiment, with 'highly significant improvements ... The teachers were in no doubt that that their change of method had produced dramatically different results from those they normally obtained in Year R (kindergarten), with well over half the teachers ... expressing surprise at the effectiveness of phonics teaching, even with EAL children (whose first language is not English), and delight at their children's rate of progress'.

Full report in 'Dyslexia Review': http://www.dyslexia-inst.org.uk/di_guild/guild.htm

BACK TO TOP