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Can you find the illusion in this example? (Hint: look for the repeated words.)
     This is what it feels like to have a learning disability; to look at something and see what is not really there, or to look at something and not see what is actually there. Davis has even used an optical illusion to create dyslexic-like symptoms in non-dyslexics. Thus we can see that orientation and disorientation have their seat in perception, and that using the Davis Orientation Counseling or the Davis Alignment Procedure to turn off disorientation is the first step in controlling dyslexic and ADD symptoms. The second step is to use multisensory techniques when teaching the visual thinker.

What Is ADD/ADHD?

     The most important thing to understand about a visual-spatial person with Attention Deficit Disorder or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is that he does NOT have a deficit of attention. Just the opposite, he has too much attention. Visual-spatial people are often hyper-aware of their surroundings, so if a noise happens across the room from a person with ADD/ADHD his attention is immediately drawn there and away from the task he is supposed to be attending to.
     Davis elaborates, "The child is more environmentally aware and more curious than other people. A child who is often bored may be easily distracted. But even when he isn't bored, something new entering the environment will immediately draw his attention. Even after ADD is corrected, the person will still remain more aware and curious than others, so to a degree this behavior will continue. Once the child learns to multitask, he will be able to divide his attention between the two points of interest at the same time instead of shifting it back and forth from one to the other. This will relieve the teacher's burden somewhat, but the real solution would be to make the classroom the most interesting thing in the environment for the student" (The Gift of Learning, p. 45 - 46). If a visual thinker with ADD/ADHD gets over stimulated, though, the opposite can happen, where the person's attention span gets tired so that he can no longer attended to anything well without first having recuperation time.
     In addition to the Davis Orientation Counseling and the Davis Alignment Procedure, Ronald Davis has two other visualization exercises that can help a visual-spatial person with ADD/ADHD tendencies. The first can be found in The Gift of Learning, Chapter 13: Energy Dial Setting. As the chapter title suggests, the student is shown how to control his energy level and his sense of time.
     Alluded to in the quote above, the second mental exercise, multitasking, shows the student how to be able to pay attention to two things in his environment. The section on multitasking can be found on p. 236 - 238 in The Gift of Learning. (Parents of students with ADD/ADHD will also want to read Chapter 14: Establishing Order.) I have found these mental exercises invaluable in helping students calm down and attend to tasks.

What Is Dyslexia/LD?

     Dyslexia/LD is not brain damage, nor is it mental retardation. It comes from the visual learner being a symmetrical brain type; it is a matter of hemisphere dominance. "From the 1980s onwards the area of the brain chosen for special investigation by dyslexia researchers was the planum temporale - a region on the upper surface of the temporal lobe on either side of the brain. Earlier autopsy studies had shown that in about 65% to 75% of unselected brains the two plana were asymmetrical and of different sizes, the planum on the left side usually being the larger. In a study of the brains of eight individuals known to have been dyslexic in their lifetime it was found that in all eight cases the two plana were symmetrical...
     "...it has been suggested that there is significance in the fact that in the dyslexic brains examined to date the two plana were symmetrical... There is firm evidence that in most individuals it is the left half of the brain that controls speech, and it is likely, although not certain, that it is the right half that makes possible the recognition of pattern and the ability to view things as 'wholes'. It therefore makes sense to suppose that in the case of dyslexics it is the left hemisphere that is relatively weak and the right hemisphere that is relatively strong. If this is correct it would also make sense of the familiar observation that it is the balance of skills in dyslexics that is unusual: they are relatively weak at what are apparently 'left hemisphere' tasks - reading, spelling, and the memorization of symbolic material - and relatively strong at apparently 'right hemisphere' tasks, for instance those required for success in art, architecture, and engineering" (Miles, p. 3-5).
     What dyslexia/LD is can be hard to define. This is because the terms dyslexia and learning disabilities often function as umbrella terms to describe a host of other issues: dyslexia (reading), dyscalculia (math), dyspraxia (coordination), dysgraphia (handwriting), hyperactivity/ADD (attention and sitting still), executive functioning (decision making), obsessive-compulsive (task persistence and anxiety), and more. As I have said before, visual-spatial learners can be as different from each other as they are from verbal-sequential learners. One student may be good at math but weak at reading, another student may be the other way around, a third student may have a constellation of weaknesses and strengths. To the neurologist dyslexia means a person with a symmetrical brain type. To the attorney dyslexia is defined by the law in terms of getting services from the state for the student. To the teacher it envelopes a plethora of learning issues that need to be addressed.
     It is possible that learning disabilities only became an issue for teachers and psychiatrists as education became more universal. Before the nineteenth century education was optional and was often only affordable for the wealthy. If a student struggled with a subject, his options were either to buckle down and try to make things work or to quit (which was still an option back then). "Not long ago, working class (and even middle class) dyslexics could work around [academic failure] by avoiding formal schooling and going directly into a trade without academic qualifications... Unfortunately, today, especially in industrialized nations, there are few alternatives for anyone in any class who would choose to avoid the academic route. Today, even vocational schools are heavily oriented toward classroom work, written tests, and other staples of the academic approach, alternatives have become very restricted and the adverse consequences of academic failure even more pervasive" (West, p. 153). In the early 1800's the Prussian Kingdom instituted a system of public schools in an effort to unify their country politically. They were so successful that other countries soon followed suit. In the United States the advent of public education was instituted gradually state by state. "In 1852, the Massachusetts legislature passed the first compulsory school-attendance law in the U.S. By the end of the 1800's, 31 of the 45 states had school-attendance laws. By 1918, every state had such a law" (Borrowman, p. 72b).
     One of the early pioneers working with learning disabilities was Samuel Torrey Orton. He was a psychiatrist who, in 1924, worked in a mobile psychiatric unit in Iowa, providing services for schools, doctors, and the welfare authorities. From the hundred or so troubled students who were referred to the unit, there was a sixteen year old, designated M.P., who couldn't read at all even though he seemed intelligent otherwise. M.P. was the first learning disabled student that Orton had dealt with. It is probably no accident that Orton was called in to work with students with "word blindness" only six years after full universal education was installed. Before compulsory school attendance came into being, schoolmasters had developed a method of instruction that was effective for many pupils. When attendance became mandatory, enforced by truant officers, it is possible that students with academic struggles began to appear in larger numbers. Because the students could no longer easily quit school, the onus now fell on the teachers and psychiatrists to deal with the problem. The past one hundred years have been spent learning how to teach the visual-spatial learner.

Conclusion

     In my experience, the trick to teaching students with learning disabilities is not to think of them as students with learning disabilities, but rather as people who have a different learning style, teaching to both the strengths and weaknesses of the visual mind. (Thus why I prefer the terms visual-spatial learner, picture thinker, etc. as neutral, non-pejorative terms.) It is also important to realize that there are people who are visual thinkers, but who do not display dyslexic and/or ADD tendencies; they can benefit from Davis Orientation Counseling and multisensory techniques as well.

Page 3

The optical illusion creates a pulsation that is the same as the shimmer I have described above, creating a sense of movement from a phenomenon called optical distortion. Here is what Classic Optical Illusions has to say about the figure. "Take a look at the way the design pulsates. When you look at anything too close to you, the muscles around your eyes pull into a spherical shape to get the words and pictures into focus. Because the lens of your eye isn't perfectly round, however, some parts of what you are looking at will be in focus, and others will look blurry. Normally, the differences in the clarity of your vision are on the outer edge of the object you are seeing, so you can still read the words and recognize the pictures. But in an illusion, such as this one - where all the lines come from different angles and meet at the center - it is impossible for you to focus clearly on all of it at once. Your eyes are always making tiny movements, no matter how hard you try. So the clear parts of the design and the blurry parts are constantly changing. This is called 'optical distortion', and it is what makes the picture seem to move, shimmer, swirl, or pulsate" (Brandreth et al, p. 60).

Perception

Why does the student with learning disabilities see the shimmer (present in text when he reads) as being similar to the pulsation in the optical illusion? My theory is that it is because disorientation and optical illusions are both perception issues. Any mind will seek out shapes and patterns; the visually oriented mind even more so. Dennis Coon defines perception as, "... the process of assembling sensations ('data' from the senses) into usable mental representations of the world... Perceptual organization may be thought of as a hypothesis held until evidence contradicts it. Perceptual organization shifts for ambiguous stimuli. Impossible figures resist stable organization altogether" (p. 129). The pattern recognition abilities of the picture thinker can make him prone to make errors in perception, i.e. disorientation, but can also allow him to see subtle patterns in data, in his surroundings, or in art (whether visual or aural) that an auditory-sequential thinker might miss.
Harry Turner, an artist who creates optical illusions, has this to say on the subject of perception, "We are not always aware of the extent to which lines in two dimensions deceive the eye (and mind). Think how you grasp a whole comic situation from the simple lines of a cartoon. The image that falls on the retina of the eye resembles a cartoon from which we try to interpret outside reality. Not surprisingly, we make mistakes. Richard Gregory [author of Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing] has described perception as continuous problem solving, because there is never enough information from the eye alone to specify external objects - the brain has to call on memorized sensory data to read a host of non-optical qualities into the images that are triggered by light falling on the retina. Our perception is so dominated by visual stereotypes that, for much of the time, we tend to see what we expect to see. All these optical illusions exploit this capacity to complete images in the mind's eye on the basis of past experience, by stimulating the imagination to override the simple logic of two-dimensional graphics" (p. 7).