Music, Mathematics, Dyslexia:

The Other Ways of Organizing Information

by Renée Fuller

It's a disease, it's pathological. We must treat it before it's too late!

 

The concerned parents heard the dictum with dread. They knew that on their planet, the third one from their star, the new testing and neuroscience discoveries had demonstrated that children with high test scores in music, mathematics, and what was called superior content organization, frequently were school failures. The latest form of neuroimaging techniques showed that such children had a unique type of brain organization which frequently meant they had difficulty making phonological discriminations. As a consequence they defaulted in learning to read, and had "defects in language-processing." That was the frightening destiny that faced their beloved son.

If they acted immediately, treatment could be started before it was too late. The drug "R" was favored by many experts. According to its proponents, this drug allowed children to concentrate on the minutiae that had to be learned in order to become literate. Other experts favored the drilling of phonological discriminations in an effort to reorganize brain functions. Perhaps then their son's neuroimaging would look more like that of successful reading students. The government had already spent billions of credits in an effort to help children with such learning pathologies. Everyone knew that each year there had to be an increase in spending because the numbers of needy children with learning disabilities was increasing at a geometric rate

Which treatment should the parents choose for their beloved son? They had to move fast before the damage was irreversible. But even with treatment, their son would carry the label "learning disabled" for the rest of his life. He would have problems in college, requiring special dispensations which students could now demand under the Disabilities Act. Even future employers were now required to take into account his disability. As parents they had to face the fact that their son was different, and could not be expected to perform like the more fortunate without the disability label. Furthermore, there was the likelihood that their son's children would in turn manifest this same disorder. The news they were facing was serious indeed.

Did you think you were reading science fiction? Not according to the Reader's Digest, or Scientific American, nor even the New England Journal of Medicine, and not according to many of our senators and congress people who have been pouring billions, yes billions of dollars, into this problem. And yet there was a time, not long ago, when neither millions of man-hours nor billions of the national treasury were spent on our "school disabled children."

I remember that time well. Because I was one of those children, who would now be labeled acutely learning disabled, yet on whom no one spent a dime. Instead what happened is what neuropsychologists Herbert Birch and Marion Blank discovered in the early 1970's. Dyslexic children from homes where there are books, and whose parents read to them, teach themselves to read in early adolescence. Drs. Birch and Blank explained their data with the hypothesis that during adolescence new abilities come into play that make it possible for "dyslexic" children to teach themselves to read. Which would fit with what I did -- using the very abilities that "dyslexic" children are said to be superior in, the capacity to contextualize, the capacity to organize content information. It happened during my twelfth year. The excellent school I was attending discovered during routine testing that I was barely reading at the second grade level The homeroom teacher took me aside, showed me the results and whispered, so that the other children wouldn't hear, "You must do something about this.. And I did. That summer I took out one by one all of the OZ books, and knowing the content of the first, slowly deciphered the hieroglyphs. The first book took me three weeks, eight hours a day. By the end of the summer it took me only two days to read a whole book. I had figured out something terribly important. How to make my brain do something I wanted done. It has been a knowledge and skill that has been my resource and rescue throughout all my schooling -- all the way through graduate school.

It also formed the basis for the learning systems I would eventually develop for people like myself who, as Dr. Shaywitz of Yale with her MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) studies pointed out, are superior at content organization but fail to learn to read. Knowing what I knew about myself, why couldn't superior content organization be used to take the place of routine rote learning? That is what I had done for myself at age twelve. And after becoming a psychologist, and researching cognitive development for more than a decade, it seemed logical that the additional scientific and clinical knowledge I had acquired might improve on the techniques I had used on myself at age twelve.

The effect of the improvements turned out much more dramatic than I had ever thought possible. For it was not only the learning disabled, but the retarded and even four-year olds who were successful with a content loaded system. Now, more than two decades later this phonics oriented approach which simplifies letter recognition and word building to the level of the 2 to 3-year old, and embeds the rote learning in goofy science fiction adventures, hasn't found a single learning disabled student. Not only does everyone learn to read, but they get great delight out of playing the written language game, writing stories of their own, even writing letters expressing their grievances. These students, from four to forty plus, are aware they are participating in mankind's greatest invention -- written communication. At the same time they demonstrated dramatic language and thought developments. The details and the reasoning for these remarkable accomplishments is an additional and unexpected story for later telling.

Where and when did the idea get started that children who are poor at rote learning, yet good at organizing information, frequently good in math and even music, have something wrong with them -- have a "learning disability" Actually, the concepts of Learning disability, dyslexia etc. are new to this century. And only in the last twenty years have the learning disabilities and pathologies. been popularized. There is an odd contradiction here. In our scientific age, the concept learning disability runs contrary to what we know about biology. The fact that biologic organisms vary one from another is basic not only to humans, but even to bacteria. Biologic variability is a powerful adaptation tool of all living things. Variability even amongst bacteria means survival against ever new antibodies. Amongst social mammals, having different talents (which is one of the results of variability) means that there can be division of labor. As the numbers in a social group increase, variability expands the potential talent pool. We have all benefited from the multitude of different abilities that have bloomed in our modern industrial society with its thousands of different talent niches. This represents success, not something having gone wrong!

But can some of this variability be counterproductive or just wastes? Certainly Mozart's talents would be wasted in the Kalahari desert, as would Einstein's. And Hitler's talent for mesmerizing crowds was counterproductive since it plunged us into World War II. However, that does not mean that the differences in brain organization that produce the variations of ability are themselves either a disability or pathological. People who lack the ability to compose music, and that means most of us, are not musically disabled -- although we may sometimes feel like it -- especially if we cannot even carry a tune. With all probability the part of the brain which is utilized by musicians is activated by the rest of us for alternative abilities.

Confusing "disability" with what is merely a variation in cognitive organization is analogous to claiming that blue eyed people are disabled because the majority of us have brown eyes. Biologic variability accounts for blue eyes which is very different from, for example, the disability caused by glaucoma -- a disability, and therefore pathological. Both blue eyes and glaucoma have a biological basis, just as various cognitive abilities have a biological basis. But that does not negate the difference between variability and disability or pathology. Blue eyes merely reflect variability whereas glaucoma means that something has gone wrong and represents a disease process. Those of us who are mislabeled "learning disabled" do not have anything wrong with us. Our abilities are merely organized in a different way just as the pigment of the blue eyed people is organized in a different way from that of the brown eyed people.

The distinction between variability and disability has wide-ranging implications both on a practical and theoretical level. On a practical level it means that poor rote learning which, as Dr. Shaywitz and others have pointed out, characterizes the "learning disabled" student, need not reduce or close down their ability to learn reading or other language sports. Instead, these can be opened up by alternative routes. As previously described, the superior content organization of those of us labeled learning disabled can be used to teach essential rote tasks. Some of us can even become academic stars! Nor should that be surprising. Many of the great cognitive innovations have been and are being made by the very people we are labeling "learning disabled."

You ask what harm has the labeling done, aside from humiliating parents and children? Perhaps we should ask how many potential Einsteins, Churchills, or Michelangelos have been crippled by this label How many of our best minds have been turned off from scholastic achievement, which is necessary for their later work, simply because the "experts" have convinced them of their disability? How much of the cream have we soured by these labels? Is that why top performance in our best colleges is reputed to be declining?

On a theoretical level the concept "learning disability" implies that something has gone wrong that needs fixing. The implication is that maybe the wiring was faulty. The alternative view is that what we have labeled "learning disability" merely reflects a variation in cognitive organization; that historically these variations have manifested themselves in the diversity of talents that created human culture and laid the groundwork for our industrial society. This view suggests that the new neuroimaging technologies, such as the MRI, could give us an insight into how different neural organizations produce different abilities. For biologists, the latter view means the recognition that as the number of abilities in a group of social animals increases, so will their ability to survive and prosper. On a human level the latter view allows us to realize that it is out cognitive differences which have given us the arts; from music to dance, from painting to tapestry, from poetry to novels and cinema. And they have given us the sciences; from mathematics to physics, from chemistry to biology. They have even given us the social sciences. And that is just the beginning. Rather than being cursed by variations in abilities on which we are presently spending millions of man-hours, billions of the national treasury, and trillions of hours of misery, we need to regard these differences as our great blessing to be utilized to their fullest potential. These cognitive variations, which were given to us to cherish, are wonderful gifts -- for they have made us who and what we are.

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About the Author:

Dr. Renée Fuller, Ph.D., received her MA in experimental psychology from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in physiological psychology from New York University. One of her experimental programs dealt with the cognitive changes following Ball-Stick-Bird intervention. For this work she received Fairleight Dickinson University's Distinguished Achievement Award. At present she is continuing her work in developing learning programs and is consultant to numerous school systems, universities, departments of education, and other organizations.

To learn more about Renée Fuller and Ball-Stick-Bird, go to The Ball-Stick-Bird Publications website at: http://www.ballstickbird.com or write to her at:

Ball-Stick-Bird Publications
PO Box 429, Williamstown, MA 01267

telephone: (413) 664-0002
e-mail: info@ballstickbird.com

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