Charlton Heston taught me to swear– no really, I think the first time I ever got caught saying ‘damn’ was repeating that line from the very end of Planet of the Apes promptly of course followed by ‘hell’. But that’s not where I really knew Charlton Heston from, no that was the Ten Commandments. Here was a movie that had more fantastic special effects than anything I’d ever seen at the age of seven or eight and went on for hours. Not only that, because it was out of the bible, I didn’t have to convince my parents to turn it on like Star Trek- and Charlton did it all, larger than life. Follow that with Planet of the Apes and then Beneath the Planet of the Apes, action, apes and the end of the world– could it get any better? Omega Man and Soylent Green were ones I didn’t see until later, but still enjoyed. Heston always had a commanding presence in film. Ben Hur won 11 Academy Awards. And now at 84, the vigorous actor, who championed conservative causes, who stood up to the ‘damned dirty apes’, who parted the Red Sea and who told us that ‘soylent green is people’ has passed away. He died in his home with his wife at his side on April 5th, at last at rest. But to me, he will always be on the back of the horse, with the half-naked hottie, riding away under the long shadow of the Statue of Liberty and on to freedom. Long live Charlton Heston.

JY

August 2007

Dyslexia – Ahead of the Curve or Outside It?

            It has been suggested in the book The Gift of Dyslexia by Ronald Davis that some of the root causes of the change in perception that effects learning called dyslexia are due to the primarily visual focus of the dyslexic child.  That learning is impaired due to the element of confusion caused by the lack of visual interpretation of words that have no intrinsic visual value such as connectors and conjunctions such as “a, and, the” etc.  Dyslexic children are believed to visually view each word that makes up a sentence and that these disruptive non-visual elements derail the thought process and that the more of such words that there are per sentence the less likely the child is to a) complete the entire sentence in a single attempt or b) comprehend the meaning of the sentence.  So the child rereads the sentence several times which may only add to the frustration and confusion.  That is the simplest explanation of one aspect of the problem of teaching someone with dyslexia.  How could this possibly be a benefit?

            Perhaps we are viewing this from the wrong angle.  We tend to look at dyslexia completely as problem because it affects the efficient teaching of a group of students as a whole.  First let’s look at the visual aspect of dyslexia.  We grasp most of our everyday situations in a visual context and our mind is set up to process visually complex situations as quickly as possible.  We know from experience with optical illusions even something as simple as roadway shimmer due to heat waves that our visual interpretation of reality can be misled.  In an attempt to look at how communication may evolve in the future, using technology to supplement our normal verbal methods, Greg Bear in Eon, suggested a method of using images as a language.  Already with such languages as Chinese humans have been using pictograms to represent visual images. In fact recently it was found that dyslexia was more apt to occur in a student learning English than Chinese due to the association of letters to sounds where in Chinese languages the characters represent syllables with multiple pronunciations.  Learning Chinese actually takes a different kind of mental activity and it is possible to be dyslexic in Chinese but if a speaker of both languages suffers from dyslexia, it will occur in only one language.  So instead of going through the regimen of converting direct perception into written or verbal communication and then having someone else reverse the process – what if you could show them what you meant as if you both sat down in a movie theater and watched it together?

            As technology continues to develop, more and more of our methods of teaching have become visual.  New computers come with visual step-by-step guides that show rather than tell us what we need to do to operate certain programs.  As any writer will tell you this follows the golden rule of “show, don’t tell”.  Going back to Bear’s Eon, the communication occurring at a visual level, called “picting” can be highly complex, because it can also be exact, since there is less room for interpretation.  It can also be quicker because his contention is that eventually we will augment our minds with either mechanical or nanotechnological aids.  This of course means faster processing, more accurate processing and greater storage.  But it still doesn’t solve those issues of words that have no visual context- or does it?  If you have two objects like two coins how you refer to both of them?  Visually we look at their spatial orientation and that’s exactly how the communication would deal with that problem.  Other issues such as “the” are irrelevant.  If we see one item with no contextual background, then we are only focused on that specific item.  If we see a coin above a group of similar coins then we can assume it is “a” coin to which we are referring. 

So how does this help us with ephemerals such as emotions?  Well we could see either the other person we are communicating with demonstrating the emotion through various physical signals we are already used to interpreting or perhaps even a visual representation of ourselves experiencing the emotion.  Obviously visual communication isn’t perfect.  Think of trying to show someone 12,678 coins as compare to 12,593.  With a visual representation we would have a hard time distinguishing the difference between the two unless there was an order to their display.  So obviously there are also must be some series of conventions that go into a purely visual language.  Add the interpretations of the these conventions to the idea of optical illusion in communication and you can see that establishment of a purely visual communication will not abolish confusion or create universal truth.

But where does that leave the folks with dyslexia?  Actually with their primarily visual focus, they are ahead of the game.  Much as our children, currently learning to read from computer screens instead of the physical artifacts of books are more adaptive to change, the dyslexic person is perhaps already preparing to communicate in the visual medium.  It is obvious that the practical applications of visual communication at a level that would make it truly effective are not currently available and are still only just beginning to be properly developed.  So could it be that the dyslexic folks are simply early instead of being at a disadvantage?  Are we seeing a natural development of a potential that will take advantage of our visually immersive world? Is this a step of punctuated evolution occurring right now? Perhaps it is of an unfamiliar nature based on the processing of information rather than a merely physical adaptation. 

Ron Davis also points out that dyslexics have the ability to perform multiple perceptive functions in the time that one ordinary function occurs.  For example a dyslexic attempting to read an unfamiliar word moves that word through repeated orientations until they find one that matches the rules that they have been taught to read.  Letters to a dyslexic are not consistently horizontally oriented and the confusion of an unfamiliar word, to which no direct visual link may be applied can cause the dyslexic’s mind to repeatedly move the word through various orientations, or flipping letters front to back or scrambling letters.  This visual flexibility is thought to be a distinct advantage to a dyslexic person who will shows a gift for solving three dimensional puzzles because they can move the image in their mind through various rotations more quickly than a typical person.  Imagine being able to quickly flip through possible orientations of an electron in various states, flying vehicles in a three-dimensional open environment, or a space ship in an asteroid field.  So Davis believes that a dyslexic person has better perception of the space around them and can effectively visualize changes in it.  He also is convinced that the speed at which a dyslexic processes these shifts of perspective can be hundreds or thousands of times faster than our ordinary thought process. 

If this is truly the case, why haven’t we seen these gifted folks advancing and leaving us behind?  Could it be that our current methods of education are chaining their learning potential?  Are we focusing on the unified achievement of the whole and forcing mediocrity on those who might outstrip us?  Will the advances and continued focus in the visual aspects of learning finally open the door for these individuals?  For now we still treat their visual focus as a disability and strive to find methods of making their learning fit our methods.  Perhaps the dyslexics are outside of the learning curve instead of behind it.  We would do well to remember that eventually we maybe left behind with our conventional methods, as communication becomes more visually oriented in the future.

If you take a moment a view the trailer for the movie you will notice that it is rated PG, the reasons given are as follows: