Dyslexia

When we look at the kids who are having a tough time learning to read and we went through the statistics, thirty-eight percent nationally, disaggregate that, seventy percent of kids from poverty and so forth hit the wall. Ninety-five of those kids are instructional casualties. About five to six percent of those kids have what we call dyslexia or learning disabilities in reading.

Information processing really is an issue that cuts across so many different disabilities. The term “learning disabilities” is itself an umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of disorders and problems, the biggest one being dyslexia or reading disability.

Reading is the gateway skill. It leads to all sorts of success, both academically and in life. It is the skill that undergirds most of the curriculum, and if children aren’t learning that skill by the end of third grade, they are in desperate trouble. For kids with learning disabilities it’s a double whammy. You know, seventy to eighty percent of students with learning disabilities have their main problem in the area of reading, with reading based learning disabilities.

Over the past ten years we’ve learned that learning disabilities are real. For those who ever doubted, it’s absolutely apparent now in the science that learning disabilities are real. The brain research and the fMRI research showing images of the brain at work reveal conclusively that dyslexia and reading disabilities are real. We understand where in the brain the problem is and the functioning that is not happening in those who are experiencing that disorder.

We’re saying that it’s a miracle that it ever happens. It’s an incredible human capacity. It’s hard won by incredible depth of practice. It’s very unsurprising that many people struggle with it. I mean, you wouldn’t have to have much of a fault in this machine operating with high speed in this incredible processing efficiency that’s required to begin to see somebody be a little slower at it or a lot slower at it. 

And so therefore, dyslexia, in a self-organizing machine of this nature, is an expected problem. It’s an expected weakness. It should apply very widely.

John Stein at Oxford has also really developed this magno cellular deficit hypothesis which is one of the focuses right now in dyslexia research at the more physiological level. And it fits very, very well with the temporal spectral processing deficit. In fact, many of the current theories have in common that there seems to be some underlying difference in the processing rates of the individuals with difficulty in processing rapid transient information.

Joe Talcott and Carolyn Whitten and various other people who are in John Stein’s lab at Oxford have published some wonderful papers in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences recently, I think in 2000, that really fit well with the study I talked about with infants. Basically, it showed that the ability to process transient visual and/or auditory information is very highly correlated across the spectrum of individual differences and different levels of reading ability. 

I think the low self-esteem, the sense of shame, is life-long. At the National Center for Learning Disabilities, we have a wonderful Board of Directors. We have at least two individuals on that board, both of whom have dyslexia and both of whom are former governors. They are extraordinarily accomplished individuals, both of them dyslexic. And both have talked at length about the continuing sense, not just of frustration or memories of failure, but precisely a sense of shame that is still remembered… classroom based, other children around, a teacher, not being able to do what other children seem to be able to do so easily. It stays for a lifetime. (More Shame Stories)

I once asked a very prominent American, very successful individual, one of the hundred most wealthiest Americans, why, given his great individual success, he felt investing in dyslexia related research was so important? Why did he cared so much? It was clear immediately when the question was asked, why he cared so much. He still felt the pain of self-identifying as a kid as a failure and of perhaps that self-identification more than his good parents was still carried as a burden by him later in life. (More Shame Stories)

It’s important to us to use the “disability” word non-metaphorically. That’s why I see myself pushing back on a couple of your questions regarding “acquired” disabilities. The neurobiological nature of learning disabilities is rooted in science, and also provides the foundation for federal protections and opportunities (flawed though they may be). Saying that millions more children are “disabled” due to instructional malfeasance is not something we would say or encourage. That said, there is considerable evidence that a percentage of children (hard to specify) are being labeled “learning disabled” simply because they have not been taught effectively. 

I encourage you to establish and maintain a distinction between reading difficulty/problem and reading disability/disorder. As we discussed in the interview, many millions of kids struggle to read and learn, but a smaller number will truly qualify as having dyslexia/a reading disability. 

This really goes back to the basic arguments that were made at the early era of the study of dyslexia, by Isabelle Lieberman and others, who argued that the fundamental problem is the degraded way in which a person’s speech represents this crucial phonemic information. It is representing it in a fundamentally degraded way but it is subject to refinement. You could say the engrams, or the story representations of information that are the basis of usage, are in a fuzzier, degraded form. It’s an old idea but it is exactly what we believe is happening because the speech model in such a brain is just not up to par in the early life of a child. It’s noisy and degraded. A brain that represents speech based upon a muffled model generates a processor idealized for processing muffled speech.