Learning Disabilities

Tips for parents to help kids enjoy reading this summer: "Reading Tips"

A Different Take on Dyslexia By: Pamela Dozois

Dyslexia is a disorder that affects millions of people. It comes from the Greek, “difficulty with words” and is a language based learning disability.

Dyslexia affects the ability of a person, even one with above average intelligence, to read, write and spell. The causes for dyslexia are neurobiological and genetic. It is estimated that one in 10 children is dyslexic and more males are affected than females. But a dyslexic diagnosis is not barrier to success.

Dr. Phyllis Books is a pioneer in working with the body and its role in the learning processes. A former teacher, she felt a calling to learn more abut chiropractic methods and, following her instincts, she ultimately graduated from Parker College of Chiropractic in 1986. She also done extensive postgraduate work in family systems, accelerated learning styles, psychology, neural associative techniques, energy medicine, brain-mind research, pediatrics and nutrition.

“As a teacher, I had always been interested in why some children had learning disabilities” said Dr. Books. “It wasn’t until I learned about the body and brain physiology that I had a grasp of the problem and I never would have learned about it had I remained a school teacher”.

As a chiropractor, she strives to rehabilitate individuals who suffer with this condition. She incorporates various techniques to this end including cranial sacral work. Her approach is also drugless.

“I start with the very foundation of the learning process, the body itself”, Books said. “Our body houses the entire nervous system and our capacity to learn. If the nervous system is not properly developed and correctly organized, which is always the case in someone with a learning difference, the other components of learning don’t have a foundation on which to build. Once the foundation itself is safe and stable, we then have the right setting for optimal learning.”

She said her goal is rehabilitation, not treating learning differences as a permanent condition you must learn to live with. Contrary to popular belief, she said, learning differences can be temporary conditions that are treatable, and it’s never too late for people with dyslexia to learn to read, process and express information more efficiently.

Sixty – nine year old Valley resident, Ron Snodgrass, started seeing Books in January 2004. He had suffered from dyslexia all of his life and at his 50th high school reunion openly thanked everyone for helping him get through school. He had to work twice as hard as anyone else, but dyslexia didn’t stop him.

“Imagine, I went into contracting. In school I couldn’t tell the difference between a ½ inch and 2/5 of an inch”, said Snodgrass. He now owns Snodgrass Construction. He also became a pilot.

“I was great at the flying test, it was a breeze”, said Snodgrass, “but the written tests were hell. I have to take them over twice, both for private and commercial licenses, and those tests are five to six hours long”.

Over the years, Snodgrass had utilized the services of many chiropractors in his quest to find a cure for this debilitating condition. It wasn’t until he came across Books that he began to see results. Over a period of eight weeks, he saw her twice a week, and noticed that his reading skills began to improve everyday, along with his speed and comprehension and even his spelling.

“The process is to get you to focus”, said Snodgrass. “I’m reading now as though I’ve been reading all my life. It’s like coming out of a dark tunnel”. He still visits her once a month for a tune-up.

Another of her patients is a young girl from Lompoc. She is home schooled and was doing very poorly academically. She had gotten to the point where she just didn’t care about learning. After several sessions with Books, the girl is getting some good grades, which has renewed her love of learning.

Books has also been successful working with individuals who have a stuttering problem, concussions, athletic injuries, TMJ, migraines, ADD, hyperactivity and balance problems.

“Applying light touch to the cranial nerves and bones around the head, I am often able to clear up stress that is associated with birth trauma”, said Books.

Books also started the Applied Structural and Social Integration Society International Foundation (ASSISI), a non-profit corporation established in 1994 to conduct research projects for “Foundations in Learning”.

Books will be teaching a class for health care professionals in the late summer titled, “Books Neural Therapy”. She will also be conducting a free lecture on “Concussions and Mild Head Trauma” at the Rob Rosenberry Physical Therapy and Performance Fitness Center on Tuesday, April 19. For reservations, call 688-5000.

She practices one week a month in the Valley at the Valley Alternative Medical Center, 261 Alisal Road in Solvang. For more information on Books, call 686-5767, or visit www.booksneuraltherapy.com

Dyslexic children can be rewired.

Rutgers Researcher: Brains In Dyslexic Children Can Be 'Rewired' To Improve Reading Skills
2003-03-05

(NEWARK) – In a scientific first, researchers have shown that the brains of dyslexic children can be "rewired" through intensive remedial training to function more like those found in normal readers.

Paula Tallal, Board of Governors Professor of Neuroscience at Rutgers-Newark, and other members of a multi-university research team used brain-imaging scans of dyslexic children to demonstrate that areas of the brain critical to reading skills became activated for the first time and began to function more normally after only eight weeks of special training. In addition, other regions of the brain also lit up on the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans in a compensatory process that the dyslexics may have used as they learned to read more fluently.
The researchers' groundbreaking findings were published Feb. 24 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition. The other authors include faculty from Stanford and Cornell universities, the University of California's Los Angeles and San Francisco campuses, and one of the co-founders of Oakland-based Scientific Learning Corporation.

Dyslexia, sometimes called "word blindness," is a disorder that affects 5 to 10 percent of Americans, and is characterized by difficulties in processing language. Usually these problems are severe enough to interfere with performance in school, but they cannot be attributed to a poor education, personal motivation, or impaired sight or hearing.

The investigators, working at Stanford, extensively used Fast ForWord Language, a computer program designed by Tallal and other researchers at Scientific Learning Corporation. The program focuses on helping children become more adept at processing the rapidly changing sounds inside words. A dyslexic child may, for example, have difficulties distinguishing between letters that rhyme, such as B and D.

"If you hear the sound 'ba' in 'butter' and 'da' in 'Doug,' the only way we know the difference is in the first 40 milliseconds of the onset of those sounds," Tallal explained. "The ability to extract sounds out of words is what is called phonological awareness." Words can be broken into sounds, and these sounds have to be mentally connected with letters. Although the process might seem intuitive, it is actually a learned skill, Tallal said.
One portion of the study involved asking children if two letters of the alphabet rhymed, while their brains were imaged with fMRI scans. The scans of the 20 dyslexic children in the experiment – who struggled with the task – contrasted sharply with those of the 12 normal readers in the experiment's control group. The dyslexics' scans showed a lack of activity in the language-critical temporal regions of the brain. The training program, which included dyslexic children aged 8 to 12 years, was designed to help them learn to process and interpret the very rapid sequence of sounds within words and sentences by exaggerating them and slowing them down.

"These are the building blocks you have to have in place before you can learn to read," Tallal said. "I think Fast ForWord is building the scaffolding for reading, and doing it based on scientific knowledge of the most efficient and effective way of helping the brain learn."

The dyslexic children used the Fast ForWord Language computer program for 100 minutes a day, five days a week, as part of their regular school day. The program consisted of seven exercises adapted as computer games. In one exercise, for example, when a picture of a boy and a toy was shown, a voice from the computer asked the player to point to the boy – a step that required understanding the very brief difference in the sound of each word's first consonant.

"Each child worked at his or her own level," Tallal said. The goal was to have the children process sounds correctly in words and sentences of increasing length and grammatical complexity, she added. The study's authors emphasized that continuous intervention would be necessary to make the dyslexics' improvements in reading skills stick and advance.

"In light of President [George W.] Bush's legislation, 'No Child Left Behind,' which mandates that only scientifically validated applications be used for intervening with children, this program has the potential to help address the crisis we are facing in the large number of children failing to meet [educational] standards," Tallal observed.

Dyslexia May Involve Both Vision And Hearing

Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center
2003-11-10

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Dyslexia may stem from how the brain processes sight and sound together – rather than simply a problem "decoding" the written word – reported researchers from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. "For the first time, there is evidence that dyslexia is a multi-sensory disorder," says Mark Wallace, Ph.D., associate professor of neurobiology and anatomy. "It isn't solely a problem with visual processing or with language. This is a novel way of looking at the disorder."
Wallace said the finding could lead to a simple test for early diagnosis – even before school age – and better methods for teaching people with reading disabilities. "Until now, experts have thought that dyslexia was either a visual processing problem or a problem involving language areas of the brain," said Wallace. "But our study suggests that it's actually a problem combining visual information with auditory information."

Forth he study, 36 people with dyslexia and 29 people without the disorder were tested on their ability to tell which of two lights appeared first. The participants sat in front of a video monitor and pushed a button to report their perception. In both dyslexic and non-dyslexic individuals, sounds presented through headphones were found to help performance. When lights were accompanied by a sound, participants were better at discriminating lights presented very close together in time. For participants without dyslexia, the sound needed to occur within about 150 milliseconds of the light to get such a benefit. Longer intervals failed to help. People with dyslexia, however, showed benefits even with delays as long as 350 milliseconds. "In essence, the brain fuses things that happen very close together in time, and for dyslexics, this fusion appears to happen over longer periods of time than in non-dyslexic persons," said Wallace. "We believe this time difference is the fundamental problem that dyslexics have when learning to read. Early reading involves matching what you see with what you hear. But in dyslexics, we believe this matching process is disrupted. The sights and sounds of words are inappropriately matched. So, while the average person very quickly matches the written word "dog" with the sound "dog," a child with dyslexia may have much more difficulty." Lynn Flowers, Ph.D., a co-researcher and assistant professor of neuropsychology, said the study demonstrates that lifelong dyslexic individuals integrate visual and auditory information differently than good readers. "The study did not use letters and speech sounds, suggesting that there may be a very basic sensory integration deficit in dyslexia that underlies reading difficulties," Flowers said. Wallace said the finding suggests better ways to teach people with reading disabilities. "We believe that the most effective approaches will use a combination of visual and auditory cues," he said. "Because the brain is very changeable in young children, we hope that by using such methods early, we could change the brain's architecture so that the children could process sight and sound normally."
He said the finding provides a basis for the effectiveness of a method called the Orton-Gillingham approach that relies on the use of sight and sound together to teach reading. Wallace said the test could be used for early diagnosis because it doesn't involve reading, just the ability to push a button when a light comes on.

The researchers are now using functional magnetic resonance imaging, a technology for viewing the brain and seeing which areas "light up" when they are activated, to learn more about the disorder. "We're exploring what happens in the brain when a person with dyslexia reads," said Wallace. "The future is exciting. We hope this is the first in a long series of studies to learn more about this common and often debilitating disorder." Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center is a health system comprised of North Carolina Baptist Hospital and Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

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