Dyslexia - A review
by John Jennings
LOOKING AT ALTERNATIVE VIEWS
What if all our current concepts about Dyslexia are as misinformed as early medical theory in the last century was mistaken in its judgement of common diseases? Dr. Ojemann, neurosurgeon in Washington University, in probing brains with electrodes, has identified different responses of the brain neurons to a silent naming word from the response of neurons to reading. Scientific research in New York using a magnetoencephalograph measures the most sensitive electrical mutations in the brain cell structure and may produce scientific evidence of the exact nature of the learning process. This is presumably an advance on the EEG technology. My background knowledge of brain structure would be limited to undergraduate textbook level which barely makes it possible for me to understand such concepts as those now being formulated by scientists.
(Sources Channel 4 documentary 1995, TIME cover story 1995, Sunday Times feature 1995, NBC News) If dyslexia is a neurological condition arising from misplaced brain cells, what are the implications of this for remediation theories based on an analysis of the symptoms rather than the causes?
Some of these issues deserve to be put, lest we are to discover that dyslexia proceeds along the lines of nineteenth century medicine with the emphasis on the treatment of symptoms rather than causes. If the diagnosis is based on false premises, then the prescription may have serious consequences and it might be argued that no prescription is preferable to the wrong prescription.
Even in the less confused area of reading assessment, the diagnosis of problems can be very inaccurate. If this level of inaccuracy is displayed in the general diagnosis of reading, how much more inaccurate might be the diagnosis of the specific problems of a dyslexic, given the uncertaintainty of the causes.
It is logical to assume from this that a single test given to a child, can be two to three years wrong in its reading age score.Will remediation be targeted at the assumption that the child is one year behind or three years behind? The prescription will be very different.
Such discrepancy does not surprise me, given that in twenty years of special interest in the subject, I have become more and more convinced of the changing complexities of the brain processes in older teenage children and the inadequacies of prescriptive remedies based on models devised for younger children.
I raise these issues since this assignment was described as an ESSAY and it therefore poses an opportunity to explore and tease out ideas in a less scientific forum than a PAPER on the topic. It may take another generation to bring together the various sciences of neurology, psychology, psychotherapy and language experts whose combined knowledge might lead us to very different conclusions.
The National Foundation for Educational Research in the U.K was asked by the D.E.S to compile a review of the research on the subject of Specific Learning Difficulties with a view to informing government policy on the subject. It has a 62 page appendix listing references to research documents discussed in the 300+ page book.
One of the more noticeable features of the research reported on is the over reliance on computer technology jargon. This led me to ask the question as to whether the computer model of information processing and retrieval was being over used as a model for the functioning of the brain in the absence of neuroscientific models of learning activity. Having been previously constantly exposed to computer jargon, it came as a surprise to find so much of it in research into dyslexia. These are samples of the slang I was previously only familiar with in connection with computers.
EXAMPLE :
The theory of Farnham-Diggory in Learning Disabilities 1978
"It is retained in the feature buffers - short memories of sensory information, of which there are probably several, certainly one each for each of visual, auditory and factual information. It is then integrated with other information in the feature synthesisers but this must take place quickly as information fades out of its buffered state very fast."
Is this jargon masquerading as scientific information or is it scientifically true. Note the uses of the adverbs "probably" and "certainly"
A further statement for analysis: This is total waffle jargon invented by me to deliberately demonstrate the thin line between fictional garbage and scientific information. This fictional garbage may have meaning within the context of computer information processing since it uses the key jargon terms of the industry. Were I to reconstruct this information to seem more sensible and plausible, it might pass for knowledge about the processing of information in the brain but not have any basis in proven scientific fact.
These were the main subject topics discussed in the various books in the bibliography, which cover the entire spectrum of Specific Learning Difficulty.
It would be unrealistic in an essay of this type to attempt to summarise the research in all of the above areas. One essay alone dealing with environmental factors had 47 references to research papers in 4 pages of text.
At a less scientific level the dyslexic needs help with poor co-ordination and be given activities which will improve participation in sport. The issue of the building up of the self esteem of dyslexics also needs more attention than it seems to get in the literature on the subject. They may be branded as failures by parents, peers and worst of all by teachers, the professionals in the area of learning, who, though teachers, may have treated them as lazy, stupid, unintelligent persons whom they eventually drove into disruptive behaviour by not identifying the problems. This raises questions about teacher education which is a wider issue.
Two interesting points are worth mentioning before ending.
What if the neuro-scientific research in the Boston brain bank throws into confusion the sometimes dogmatic assertions of educational theoreticians?
"The neurons that are active when you hear a word, are not active when you express it", says the neurosurgeon.
Two neurosurgeons in The University of Iowa have identified "convergence zones" or a type of control switch which provides access to information and relates it to other relevant data.Through the use of an MRI scanner they have identified different sections of the brain for information on nouns or naming words such as house or door and another area of the frontal cortex for handling verbs or doing words such as "I run" "I walk" etc. A third area controls the interrelationship of nouns and verbs for construction into sentences.
Thousands of these zones in the cortex, handling language may yet be scientifically shown to co-ordinate perception, memory and emotion.
For example for one student, I have the following set of reading ages based on the results of FIVE commonly used reading tests.
The read only memory is short term, focused on the milliseconds it takes to acquire information before being transferred to a permanent storage area. Data in the storage area can be retrieved or merged with other data. The storage capacity is dictated by different factors, most notably the memory capacity. Auditory, visual and speech/sound features are processed through the synthesised integration of the three features and the capacity to reproduce without malfunction. If cells or storage areas are corrupted the data will be damaged.
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