“That’s the way it is with art. It’s not that you want to do it, it’s that you have to do it. You have no choice.” – Martin Scorsese Martin Scorsese is an Academy award winning American director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and film historian with over 50 years in the movie industry, and he is dyslexic. He grew up in a New York tenement, an asthmatic child of a presser and seamstress in the Lower East Side. He recalls spending lots of time in front of a TV set watching good and bad films and going to a local movie theatre with his father and brother. As he watched, he often drew his own scenes, frame by frame in a notebook, flicking pages back and forth […]
Dyslexia, Thomas Watson Jr, and IBM
"While my father was achieving phenomenal success at IBM, I barely made it through high school. It took me three schools and six years before I finally graduated at 19.… He knew I was drifting, but never gave up.” - Thomas Watson Jr, President of IBM, President Medal...
Dyslexia = Grit
A Penn Professor's book is currently winging its way around the Internet: Grit - the Power of Passion and Perseverance - with its talented author Angela Duckworth making the rounds around popular media outlets. With interest, I looked clicked on a link to a popular...
Discoverer of the Titanic – Dyslexic Ocean Explorer Robert Ballard [Premium]
“When I was a child, I wrote a letter to an oceanographic institution in California called Scripps (Scripps Institution of Oceanography UC San Diego). It was a Dear Santa Claus letter. “Dear Scripps, I want to be an oceanographer.” I’m sure I misspelled it, because I’m dyslexic. They gave me a scholarship.” – Robert Ballard When I was seventeen, 56 years ago, I went on my first expedition. We got caught in a storm, hit by a rogue wave, and I thought that was so cool. I was too young to be afraid. I just fell in love with adventure with a purpose, where you go out there and overcome the obstacles that you’re always faced with, and then you find this secret, whether it’s a shipwreck […]
This is Your Brain on Words [Premium]
In breaking research from UC Berkeley, researchers have found a complicated filing system when it comes to how we process words that we hear. While listening to stories, individual words triggered tiny activation explosions all over the brain associated with word associations – “Words were grouped under various headings: visual, tactile, numeric, locational, abstract, temporal, professional, violent, communal, mental, emotional and social.” So a well-working human brain responding to stories functions more like a wall filled with stickie notes rather than a linear filing cabinet? Which sounds more like the dyslexic way of wiring? Check out the video explanation below. The finding certainly points out the fallacy of viewing language in simple right-brain-left brain terms, but it does support the complexity of language and the right-left […]
Shakespeare and Dyslexia – Making Words Physical [Premium]
Today is National Shakespeare Day, and dyslexia and Shakespeare have been on our minds. We recently mentioned that Lloyd Everitt (yes, he’s dyslexic) is the youngest actor to play Othello at Shakespeare’s own Globe Theater. But we’ve also been thinking about Shakespeare recently because, on our trip down to California, we had the pleasure of stopping by the Oregon Shakespeare Company’s Rebecca Carey, the head of Voice and Text. Rebecca has an accomplished career that includes acting herself as well as teaching and consultant roles with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Oxford School of Drama, Broadway, and American Repertory Theatre. Rebecca is also co-author (with her husband, David Carey) of The Shakespeare Workbook and Video, a brilliant practical course for actors that includes such topics […]
Latest Research: Advances in our Understanding of Dyslexia, ADHD, and Giftedness [Premium]
It’s long been known that Dyslexia and ADD / ADHD have high rates of overlaps or “co-morbidities”. Dyslexia and ADHD co-occur 30-50% of the time (Germano, 2010) and only 40% of children with dyslexia and 20% of children with ADD/ADHD have it in isolation (Wilcutt and Pennington, 2000). Science has progressed on many fronts over the past 5 years, and both attention and dyslexia are now known to be much more complex than originally suspected. It has long been known that dyslexia is associated with attention and working memory differences, and that reading, writing, and spelling difficulties are higher among children identified as having ADHD. Both Dyslexia and ADD / ADHD are associated with slower processing speeds and both seem to be connected with the […]
Dyslexia and Superhero Film Director Zack Snyder
With news that Batman vs. Superman just passed the $700 million globally, powerhouse film director Zack Snyder shares his story about dyslexia in Bloomberg. Zack is known for a series of blockbuster movies, beginning with Dawn of the Dead, 300, Watchmen, Legends of...
Higher Creativity of Dyslexic Children and Adolescents – New Research [Premium]
“…dyslexic children around the age of 10 years old were found to be particularly creative in our study…” – Kapoula et al. University Paris PLOS One 2016: 11(3). From creativity researchers in Europe, some striking new information about how well dyslexic students and adolescents performed on the Torrance Test of Creativity Thinking compared to non-dyslexic peers. Particularly large differences were noted in the areas of originality and elaboration. Figure 1 shows A, the test prompt, B, the drawing from an art student, C, a drawing from a non-dyslexic student, and D, a drawing from a dyslexic student. “When comparing the most creative group of students (i.e., from ENSAD) and the most creative group of dyslexic children and teenagers (i.e., from BRUXELLES) (Fig 2F, Table 9), the only […]
High School Students View Their Dyslexia as an Advantage
Things are changing. From ABC: "Fortunately for Christa Hills, her dyslexia diagnosis came when she was in primary school. She was able to access appropriate help from a young age. Now studying for her Year 12 exams, she regards dyslexia as a gift. 'It's really great....
Dyslexia Cybersecurity CEO Lior Div – Hacking the Hackers
"Dyslexic people process visual information differently than most people, so instead of starting with letters or sounds, I looked at sentences or even paragraphs as a whole, and then broke them down into parts. That process – starting with the big picture and breaking...
