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Henry Winkler on battling dyslexia "School was this immovable object," he recalls. "I was told I wasn't living up to my potential, that I was stupid. My parents, being short Germans, were convinced I was merely lazy. "So I was grounded for most of my life. I did not see the moon during my junior year. When you are in the bottom of the class, you're constantly feeling less-than. You're always working overtime to achieve some sort of normalcy or cool factor, which I had none of." /// Winkler's stepson, Jed, when he was in third grade was found to be dyslexic. Listening to the experts describe Jed's condition, Winkler, then 31, said, "That's me." It was less of a lightbulb moment than one might think. "Everything was illuminated, but nothing was changed," Winkler says.

"At least then I knew there was a reason why I was having such difficulties. First you go through a tremendous amount of anger. Because all those arguments, all that disappointment, all that punishment and grounding was for nought." In retrospect, the struggle wasn't completely worthless. "Dyslexia taught me kindness," he says. "I know what it feels like to be treated like you're not up to snuff." Before he'd ever heard the word "dyslexia," Winkler developed ways of coping with his confounding brain. He was admitted to the Yale School of Drama on the basis of an audition and, after graduating, paid the rent by doing commercials. "Reading cold was, like, out of the question," he says, "I improvised everything. They'd say, 'You aren't reading the words,' and I'd say, 'I'm just giving you the essence.' I was really good at getting commercials." > from article: He's happy these days - Henry Winkler battled early dyslexia and some post-Fonzie doldrums to create an evergreen career as a director, actor and author. By Mimi Avins, Los Angeles Times Nov 25, 2005 > one of his books: Hank Zipzer Collection : The World's Greatest Underachiever - by Henry Winkler, Lin Oliver

giftedness and misdiagnosis Many gifted and talented children (and adults) are being mis-diagnosed by psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other health care professionals. The most common mis-diagnoses are: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (OD), Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and Mood Disorders such as Cyclothymic Disorder, Dysthyinic Disorder, Depression, and Bi-Polar Disorder. These common mis-diagnoses stem from an ignorance among professionals about specific social and emotional characteristics of gifted children which are then mistakenly assumed by these professionals to be signs of pathology. /// Despite prevalent myths to the contrary, gifted children and adults are at particular psychological risk due to both internal characteristics and situational factors. These internal and situational factors can lead to interpersonal and psychological difficulties for gifted children, and subsequently to mis-diagnoses and inadequate treatment. Internal Factors Historically, nearly all of the research on gifted individuals has focused on the intellectual aspects, particularly in an academic sense.

Until recently, little attention has been given to personality factors which accompany high intellect and creativity. ... Perhaps the most universal, yet most often overlooked, characteristic of gifted children and adults is their intensity (Silverman, 1993; Webb, 1993). One mother described it succinctly when she said, "My child's life motto is that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess." Gifted children -- and gifted adults-- often are extremely intense, whether in their emotional response, intellectual pursuits, sibling rivalry, or power struggles with an authority figure. > from article Mis-Diagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children: Gifted and LD, ADHD, OCD, Oppositional Defiant Disorder - by James T. Webb, Ph.D. > related book: Misdiagnosis And Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults : ADHD, Bipolar, Ocd, Asperger's, Depression, And Other Disorders by James T. Webb, Edward R. Amend, Nadia E. Webb, Jean Goerss, Paul Beljan and F. Richard Olenchak. > related article: Misdiagnosis of the Gifted by Lynne Azpeitia, Mary Rocamora > related pages : mental health.....intensity / sensitivity resources dysfunction / disorder

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The Attention Different Child The term "Attention Different" identifies children who pay attention differently, but who are not deficit in the sense of Attention Deficit Disorder. Whereas a normal child will pay attention to what adults around him direct him to attend to, be it his schoolwork, his chores, or his performance of some task, the Attention Different child marches to his own drummer by fate and circumstance. * The attention of the child with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), for example, may be captivated by a rapidly changing inner collage of images, colors, feelings, and thoughts. * The obsessing child stares fixedly through you, showing in his classic "fifty yard stare" that he is putting all his attention on the obsessive feelings flickering through his mind.

* The Tourettic child pays attention to the commands of his musculature to tic this way or that or to utter strange sounds. * The child with Bipolar Disorder is captivated--pays attention to--extreme internal stimuli such as his mood states of joy, elation, and depression. * The child with Asperger’s Syndrome is powerfully self-absorbed, paying attention only to his own thoughts and anxieties, because paying attention to things in the outer world is so difficult. The Attention Different child is born with a tendency to be oversensitive to certain types of stimulation. The Asperger’s child typically cannot stand to be talked to directly (direct communication is felt as overwhelming). The ADD child may not be able to tolerate the feeling of his clothing on his skin. > from article by George T. Lynn - from his site ChildSpirit > book : Genius! Nurturing The Spirit Of The Wild Odd And Oppositional Child - by George T. Lynn, Joanne Barrie Lynn - with a premise that the genius - the “guiding spirit” of neurologically different children - is necessary for the survival of humankind.

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pathology and giftedness "Societal attitudes create what we consider normalcy to be. So when you talk about pathology, you are talking about deviation from what is presumed to be in the norm, and anything that is outlying statistically, or different from what we consider the norm, gets labeled pathology or 'bad.' "Now there are definitely disorders. Gifted people are by no means disorder-free. ... I'm in the process of thinking more about the connection between giftedness and ADD. "I think they are very different. You can be ADD without being gifted, and you can be gifted and struggle with ADD. And the giftedness allows them to function better than you'd expect, but the ADD prevents the giftedness from being expressed as powerfully, as positively, as it could otherwise be. Kathleen Noble, Ph.D. - from interview ~ ~ ~

It's well known among researchers of the gifted, talented and creative that these individuals exhibit greater intensity and increased levels of emotional, imaginational, intellectual, sensual and psychomotor excitability and that this is a normal pattern of development. These characteristics, however, are frequently perceived by psychotherapists and others as evidence of a mental disturbance... > from article Misdiagnosis of the Gifted - by Lynne Azpeitia and Mary Rocamora ~ ~ ~ "The issue of pathologizing giftedness is very important to me as I work with parents -- just the insistence that gifted kids, with their high levels of psychomotor overexcitability (Dabrowski's stuff) have ADD or ADHD is enough to have huge numbers of kids not only misdiagnosed, but inappropriately drugged! Stephanie S. Tolan - from interview - she is co-author of book "Guiding the Gifted Child"

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Jonathan Lethem, the audaciously talented author [of the] novel The Fortress of Solitude, suffers from what he calls a "particular form of autism." A symptom of this peculiar and most writerly malady is that, in Lethem's mind, a summertime game of stoopball on a Brooklyn street and a caped crusader sailing through the air (disparate scenes from Fortress ) are both equally real and important.  "I don't see the boundaries between these things that other people do," says Lethem, 39. "Art and fantasy are both realms of the impossible in our lives. Almost everyone at some level yearns to be a superhero or an artist, wants to be something so much more than they are. And that's as real a part of their lives as anything else." from article: Lethem creates 'Fortress' of childhood longing - by Maureen Pao, USATODAY Oct 30 2003 - photo from Naropa University interview

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Tom West suggests that left-hemisphere deficiencies, such as dyslexia, are fundamentally linked to right-hemisphere strengths, such as visual thinking, spatial ability, pattern recognition, problem solving, heightened intuition and creativity. Linda Kreger Silverman - from her book Upside-Down Brilliance - referring to West's book:

....In the Mind's Eye: Visual Thinkers, Gifted People With Dyslexia and Other Learning Difficulties, Computer Images and the Ironies of Creativity

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.. .. Visual-spatial learners are individuals who think in pictures rather than in words. They have a different brain organization than auditory-sequential learners. They learn better visually than auditorally. They learn all-at-once, and when the light bulb goes on, the learning is permanent. They do not learn from repetition and drill. They are whole-part learners who need to see the big picture first before they learn the details. They are non-sequential, which means that they do not learn in the step-by-step manner in which most teachers teach.

They arrive at correct solutions without taking steps, so "show your work" may be impossible for them. They may have difficulty with easy tasks, but show amazing ability with difficult, complex tasks. They are systems thinkers who can orchestrate large amounts of information from different domains, but they often miss the details. They tend to be organizationally impaired and unconscious about time. They are often gifted creatively, technologically, mathematically or emotionally. Linda Kreger Silverman ....Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner

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AUDITORY-SEQUENTIAL Thinks primarily in words Has auditory strengths Relates well to time Is a step-by-step learner Learns by trial and error Progresses sequentially from easy to difficult material  Is an analytical thinker  Attends well to details Follows oral directions well  Does well at arithmetic  Learns phonics easily Can sound out spelling words etc

VISUAL-SPATIAL Thinks primarily in pictures Has visual strengths Relates well to space Is a whole-part learner Learns concepts all at once Learns complex concepts easily; struggles with easy skills Is a good synthesizer Sees the big picture; may miss details Reads maps well Is better at math reasoning than computation Learns whole words easily Must visualize words to spell them etc from Gifted Development Center page

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.. .. I can still go through all 634 plaintiffs. I learned to do that because of my dyslexia. I had no real coping skills; I could not read and comprehend in my brain the way a lot of you do.  So I learned most of everything in my life by memorization, and it paid off for me in Hinkley. I've been able to read documents and I scan, and I know what I'm looking for -- I operate off a hunch.

I can be on page 550 and stop and go, "Wait a minute, that's not what they said on page 69," and go back and find the exact thing, because as I'm scanning, I'm memorizing. Erin Brockovich  -  about the Hinkley, California vs PG&E lawsuit featured in the movie; Brockovich is Director of Environmental Research, Masry & Vititoe Law Offices [commonwealthclub.org Q & A, February 22, 2001]  ....Take It From Me: Life's a Struggle But You Can Win  by Erin Brockovich   ~ ~ To compensate for her dyslexia, Brockovich regularly stayed up late to struggle with and eventually memorize the details of all of her files so she wouldn't "screw it up" if she was required to read from one of them.   source: dvd:*Erin Brockovich  [deleted scenes and commentary]

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Just for fun... Did Einstein have Asperger's Syndrome? At the age of 2, when presented with his new baby sister Maja, he responded with "where are the wheels?" He wasn't social nor was he athletic. He didn't do well in school. He had quite a bit more patience and determination than others. Other children would build houses of cards up to 4 stories while young Albert would methodically build his house up to 14 stories. "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." What do you think?  // from Twice Gifted site page : Asperger's Syndrome

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Autistic writer Temple Grandin suggests that people with Asperger Syndrome have a kind of creativity suited to their tendency to think in pictures. They are not good at following conventional rules to get to their results, but are powerfully visionary and will get new ideas as feeling-images. She profiles Albert Einstein as someone with Asperger, recounting that he developed the theory of relativity from a vision he saw while pondering the relationship between mass and energy. > from the book Genius! - referring to her book Thinking in Pictures

Since writing Thinking in Pictures, which described my visual way of thinking, I have gained further insights into how my thought processes are different when compared to those of people who think in language. ... Visual thinking is a tremendous advantage. Temple Grandin from article : My Mind is a Web Browser: How People with Autism Think

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more :......learning differences : page 2: quotes articles sites.......books: learning differences.......

ADD / ADHD....left brain / right brain......dysfunction / disorder resources : articles books sites.....

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