October 2002

Thomas West, director of the Center for Dyslexia and Talent at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study.

Krasnow Center Focuses on Distinctive Talents of Dyslexics

By Robin Herron

When Thomas West, director of the Center for Dyslexia and Talent at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, arrived in California last March as keynote speaker for a Silicon Valley conference on dyslexia, he spoke to an audience filled with dyslexic computer geeks. He wasn't surprised to find so many dyslexics in Silicon Valley because anecdotal evidence suggests that those who are talented with computers often are dyslexic.

In fact, West himself could lay claim to the title of computer geek - he used to design computer systems - but it wasn't until he was 41 that he discovered that he, too, is dyslexic. "I knew from an early age that I learned differently, but it wasn't until our two sons started having similar problems that I realized the pattern was repeating itself," he says.

West turned that realization and his subsequent research into an award-winning book, In the Mind's Eye, in 1991. The book, which West updated in 1997, is now in its 12th printing and has been translated into Japanese with the title Geniuses Who Hated School. A Chinese-language translation is due out next year.

In the Mind's Eye summarizes relevant brain research and examines the talents and mixed dyslexic traits of 10 famous persons, including Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gen. George Patton, and William Butler Yeats.

West has long been interested in the connections between dyslexia and the strong visual-spatial and other nonverbal abilities that can lead to a high degree of success in entrepreneurial business, creative science, film, art, design, media, and computer graphic technologies.

"It's time to learn from the distinctive strengths of people with dyslexia, rather than just focusing on their weaknesses or failures. The talents are there, but we rarely see them," says West.

"I believe that these strengths will be more and more valued as we move into the future. We are already moving away from an era that valued mainly the skills of a medieval clerk - reading, writing, counting, and memorizing texts - toward a new era in which computer information visualization technologies will require us to develop the very different skills of a Renaissance visual thinker like Leonardo da Vinci," he says.

In the Center for Dyslexia and Talent, West and science director Gordon Sherman are following in the footsteps of the late Harvard neurologist Norman Geschwind, who believed that the same early brain development changes that produce the difficulties associated with dyslexia can also produce a wide variety of talents and special abilities.

West and Sherman, who is also executive director of the Newgrange School and Educational Outreach Center in Princeton, New Jersey, plan to investigate patterns of talents seen over generations in families and to examine life experiences of highly successful dyslexics in order to help others better use their distinctive strengths.

"One of the most remarkable stories I know of involves the family of David and Patience Bragg Thomson in Britain," he says. "Over five generations there have been a great many individuals with dyslexia, yet members of this family have been successful in visual-spatial occupations in the arts and sciences, and no less than four of them have been Nobel Prize winners (Sir Lawrence Bragg, Sir William Bragg, Sir Joseph Thomson, and Sir George Thomson)," says West.

"All the prize-winning discoveries were based on the exceptional visual-spatial capabilities of these extraordinary scientists," he continues. "But these visual-thinking scientists could also be of special help to their dyslexic grandchildren because they understood how they could best learn through visual approaches and hands-on experience."

West believes that in the unfolding computer visualization age, visual thinkers are already coming into their own. "Basic skills are being taken over by machines anyway," he says. "Because of the power of the newest computer technologies, individuals with special visual talents are becoming increasingly valuable to organizations, and organizations are learning that combining strengths of different kinds of thinkers - brain diversity, if you like - makes a much more powerful institution," he claims.

"Tom West brings a unique vision to our understanding of dyslexia," says James Olds, director of the Krasnow Institute. The notion that so-called learning disabilities may in fact simply be different learning styles "may prove to be a cornerstone for future bridges between neuroscience and education," he says.