THE DYSLEXIA SOLUTION

Volume 4 • #5 • May 2005

NEWSLETTER

You never know where some useful piece of information is going to come from. For over thirty years I have stumbled onto odd bits of knowledge from a dozen or more fields, none of which apparently had anything to do with dyslexia. They have included such a variety of areas as epilepsy, high speed photography of athletes, depression, ADD, eye motions, Buddhism, strokes, and 3-D television. Yet in each specialty it turned out that there was some piece of information that fitted with others like parts of a jigsaw puzzle to add to our understanding of dyslexia.

For years it has appeared that the poky interhemispheric transfer of information from one side of the brain to the other had to be part of the problem. This delay could be seen with high speed photography and in the erratic eye motions and double regressions characteristic of dyslectic reading. It also accounted for the fact that when we by-passed that slow corpus callosum, we could teach the kids to read. Unfortunately this isolation was only possible in the auditory system. The wiring of the visual system makes it impossible to isolate a signal to one hemisphere. To read, you need to use the fovea, and the fovea sends its information to both sides of the brain.

For over thirty years I wished I could find a way to stimulate the language areas with a visual signal as well. Recent information indicates that I may have been going at it backwards. Instead of cutting out the slow one and using only the fast signal, it now appears that you can simply speed up the slow one! For many years people in a variety of different fields have known that a brighter visual signal travels faster than a darker one. Now why didn’t I know that?

A psychotherapist has been using special glasses he devised that enable the wearer to deliver a brighter signal to one eye than to the other. He had no interest in dyslexia. He just needed something that would stimulate the left hemisphere, because such stimulation has been demonstrated, especially in studies of Buddhist monks, to have a remarkable calming effect that reduces depression. I have known for years that when we stimulate the left side auditorily, it also reduces depression, but I just regarded that as icing on the cake.

Nowadays I have a student put on the glasses when he comes in for his lesson and keep them on until he goes home. He keeps them on as he reads the phonics book and even while he is doing a spelling exercise. The results have been quite startling. Not only have the students’ learning speed doubled, but the Jumping Jacks calm down. If you want to find out more about these glasses, check out the web site: www.neuviewglasses.com. No, I don’t sell the glasses nor have anything to do with their inventor. But if you decide to try them, please, please, let me know how it works. We need more data. This could be a real breakthrough.