What is LD & ADD

Estimated reading time 14 minutes

LD, ADD, & Giftedness

What exactly are learning disabilities (LD), such as language-based learning disability and dyslexia? And what is attention deficit disorder (ADD)?

In a 2000 Roper Poll, 63% of Americans confused LD with mental retardation (qtd in Willemin). So, it is crucial to define what learning disabilities are.

How Playing an Instrument Benefits Your Brain Video

Terms for LD

Over the decades, teachers and doctors invented a host of terms to describe LD (West 307):

Association Deficit Pathology
Central Nervous System Disorder
Congenital Alexia
Dysgraphia
Dyscalculia
Dyslexia
Hyperactivity
Hyperkinetic Behavior Syndrome (an older term for ADD/ADHD)
Hypoactivity
Language-Based Learning Disability
Maturational Lag
Minimal Brain Damage
Multisensory Disorders
Neurologically Handicapped
Organic Brain Dysfunction
Perceptually Handicapped
Primary Reading Retardation
Psycholinguistic Disabilities
Strephosymbolia
Word Blindness

Notice the emphasis on the problems of visual learning in these labels. Perhaps this came out of the efforts to deal with teaching students with LD and ADD.

Doctors and teachers collected data, trying their best to make sense of the flood of, sometimes contradictory, information. Then, they made educational and psychological models.

However, for decades they focused almost exclusively on the weaknesses of LD students, taking almost no notice of their strengths. This frequently impacted the student’s self-esteem negatively.

LD & Giftedness

Doctors and teachers made the connection between giftedness and LD only in the last 25 years. Susan Baum talks about the seeming paradox of LD and giftedness coexisting.

“How can a child learn and not learn? Why do some students apply little or no effort to school tasks while they commit considerable time and effort to demanding, creative activities outside of school? These behaviors are typical of some students who are simultaneously gifted and learning disabled.

“For many people, however, the terms learning disabilities and giftedness are at opposite ends of a learning continuum. In some states, because of funding regulations, a student may be identified and assisted with either learning disabilities or giftedness, but not both.

“Uneasiness in accepting this seeming contradiction in terms stems primarily from… incomplete understandings. This is not surprising, because the experts in each of these disciplines have difficulty reaching agreement.

“Some still believe that giftedness is equated with outstanding achievement across all subject areas. Thus, a student who is an expert on bugs at age 8 may automatically be excluded from consideration for a program for gifted students because he cannot read, though he can name and classify a hundred species of insects.

“Many educators view below-grade-level achievement as a prerequisite to a diagnosis of a learning disability. Thus, an extremely bright student who is struggling to stay on grade level, may slip through the cracks of available services because he or she is not failing”.

The Visual Thinker

Dr. Linda K. Silverman on LD & Giftedness

While working with gifted students, Dr. Linda K. Silverman developed the idea of the visual-spatial learner.

In her words, “Around 1980, I began to notice that some highly gifted children took the top off the IQ test with their phenomenal abilities to solve items presented to them visually or items requiring excellent abilities to visualize. These children were also adept at spatial tasks, such as orientation problems.

“Soon I discovered that not only were the highest scorers outperforming others on the visual-spatial tasks, but so were the lowest scorers. The main difference between the two groups was that highly gifted children also excelled at the auditory-sequential items, whereas children who were brighter than their IQ scores had marked auditory and sequential weaknesses.

“It was from these clinical observations and my attempt to understand both the strengths and weaknesses that the concept of the ‘visual-spatial learner’ was born”.

Auditory-Sequential Learners

Auditory-sequential learners think primarily in words and are straight-line logical thinkers.

Our education system is geared to teaching this type of student. First, instructors teach simple concepts, gradually advancing sequentially to harder material. Next, they build a picture of the whole concept out of a collection of puzzle pieces.

Normally, students are taught to read first. (This applies to reading text, math, or music symbols.) Then, later they are taught information and skills through lectures and books. Auditory-sequential learners as a rule test well on written, timed exams.

Visual-Spatial Learners

Visual-spatial learners think mainly in pictures and have a tendency to grasp the whole, but miss the parts.

They may test poorly on written, timed tests, but normally test well on practical exams and in real-world situations. Visual-spatial learners can be as different from each other as they are from verbal-sequential learners.

The Visual-Spatial Identifier

Silverman studied 750 middle schoolers using the test she developed, called the Visual-Spatial Identifier. The results showed that 33.3% of the students where firmly visual-spatial. Another 30% slightly favored visual thinking.

However, only 23% where firmly verbal-sequential. This suggests that almost two-thirds of students would benefit, to one degree or another, from multisensory teaching methods. Nevertheless, it is my belief, based on decades of teaching experience, that virtually everyone can benefit from a multisensory approach.

LD & Picture Thinkers

The Advantages to Being a Picture Thinker

Ronald Davis describes visual-spatial learners as “picture thinkers”. There are benefits to being a picture thinker.

Leonardo da Vinci imagined the helicopter centuries before there was an engine to run it. Einstein daydreamed that he rode a motorcycle on a beam of light at the speed of light, imagining what it looked like. This thought experiment helped form the theory of relativity.

Nikola Tesla, the inventor of alternating current, honed the design of his generators in his head by running simulations through his imagination. “Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind” (qtd in West 143).

According to Davis, picture thinkers see their imaginations as if they were real. This is the fount of the visual thinker’s creativity, but this is also where problems can arise.

Tesla sometimes found it difficult to tell reality from imagination. “In my boyhood… when a word was spoken to me the image of the object would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. These were certainly not hallucinations… for in other respects I was normal and composed” (qtd in West 143).

Giftedness & Multi-Dimensional Thinking

Thomas G. West, in his book In the Mind’s Eye, discusses the pros and cons of being a visual thinker. He speculates that lacking the ability to think visually would be a deficit in the wild.

“In the remote past (or in distant, hidden corners of the world today), a genetic makeup that promoted a natural facility with reading, but not, say, with hunting or finding one’s way easily in the wilderness, would have been considered a disadvantage…

“In some circumstances, such a spatial disability might have been so important that many of those with poor spatial sense would, in time, have been selected out of the population, rarely surviving to adulthood and procreation” (83).

Long ago, a woodsman would have found it an advantage to have the ability to recognize a rock or tree from many different angles to keep from getting lost in the forest. Likewise, suppose he glimpsed just the horns of a deer hidden in the foliage. He would find it valuable to visualize the rest of the deer in his mind’s eye, thus creating a better target.

Using his imagination, the hunter could do two things:

recognize an object from an angle he had never seen it from before
mentally create an image of a whole object from a glimpse of only a part of the real object.

“These are predominantly visual-spatial skills and would have little verbal content. In such a culture, a propensity toward reading skill would be relatively unimportant” (West 83).

The ability to make and control objects in the mind and recognize patterns is the gift Davis refers to in The Gift of Dyslexia. Davis calls this multi-dimensional thinking.

LD & the Disadvantages to Being a Picture Thinker

West also talks about the LD aspect of picture thinking when it comes to dealing with abstract symbols. He argues that, when dealing with 2D symbols, the orientation of the symbol becomes crucial to understanding its meaning.

For example, suppose someone carved a lower case “p” into a piece of wood. Then, he threw the letter into the air, and let it land on the floor. If he had not stated which letter he intended, you could not know if the letter was a “p”, “q”, “b”, or “d”. All of these letters remain the same except for their orientation on the page.

Imagine the picture thinker’s abilities starting to kick in while reading. His mind, at the subconscious level, starts flipping around the letters. Confusion would result. Davis has an example of this for the word cat. It shows forty different ways the word cat can be written with the letters in various positions.

I created an example similar to Davis’ using the word map. Even this small three letter word can be extremely confusing under these conditions. Besides the word map, the words mad, amp, Pam, wad, bam, and dam are possible. However, most of the time this would yield a confusing hash.

Disorientation Defined

When the visual thinker’s imagination interferes with his perception of the real world, Davis calls this disorientation.

“[Disorientation] occurs when we are overwhelmed by stimuli or thought. It also occurs when the brain receives conflicting information from the different senses and attempts to correlate the information” (The Gift of Dyslexia 15).

Davis developed two simple visualization exercises: the Davis Orientation Counseling and the Davis Alignment Procedure. They allow the visual thinker with LD and ADD tendencies to quickly and easily stop disorientation.

When oriented, the visual thinker can accurately perceive his surroundings – possibly for the first time in his life. My experience with Orientation has been extremely positive. It brings dramatic results in terms of reducing a students’ confusion.

LD, ADD, & Disorientation

More on Disorientation

The problem I have run into countless times is that parents of LD students often do not understand why their child struggles to learn. The parents see that their child is bright. So, all too often they conclude that the student is lazy.

It is hard to describe disorientation to someone who has not experienced it. Nevertheless, parents need to know that the student with LD or ADD is not stupid or lazy. I will try to show what a picture thinker sees.

Many visual-spatial students see a shimmer. I myself am a visual-spatial thinker. A normal page of text sits on the left side of the example below. (On the top if you are on a phone.) On the right side sits a page that shows what I see when I am not “oriented.”

The Shimmer

The visual-spatial student’s eye automatically keys in on the vertical, horizontal, and slanted lines created by the negative space in the text. (I drew lines on the right page of text to highlight the negative space.)

This creates a crisscross pattern of perceived lines intermingling with the text. First one set of lines appear then another, creating a shifting pattern: “the shimmer”. It could be that the shimmer is the visual thinker’s pattern recognition ability gone wild.

The visual-spatial student’s mind seems to lock onto patterns in the text – patterns that carry no information. Just the opposite, reading through the shimmer’s interference pattern is like reading text though two layers of fish nets swinging in a breeze.

Students have claimed similar sensations for music notation, “… [it is reported that] notation sometimes appears to fall away from the horizontal or seems watery” (Westcombe 12). In other words, it is like reading a book that lies at the bottom of a shallow creek bed.

What is Dyslexia Like Video

Color Overlays

Colored overlays reduce the contrast between the white page and the black notes, thus lessening the shimmer. This reduces fatigue, making it easier to read the score.

After trying out an overlay, one of my adult students said it made the notes stop “blinking”.

Observe that the optical illusion with the blue-green background, imitating the effect of a color overlay, has reduced the shimmer. The effect is even more striking if you lay a colored transparency over a printed version of the optical illusion. This substantially reduces the shimmer.

Parallels to Optical Illusions

The optical illusion creates a pulsation similar to the shimmer described above, generating a sense of movement from a phenomenon called optical distortion. The book Optical Illusions describes how optical distortion works.

“Take a look at the way the design pulsates. When you look at anything too close to you, the muscles around your eyes pull into a spherical shape to get the words and pictures into focus. Because the lens of your eye isn’t perfectly round, however, some parts of what you are looking at will be in focus, and others will look blurry.

“Normally, the differences in the clarity of your vision are on the outer edge of the object you are seeing, so you can still read the words and recognize the pictures. But in an illusion, such as this one – where all the lines come from different angles and meet at the center – it is impossible for you to focus clearly on all of it at once.

“Your eyes are always making tiny movements, no matter how hard you try. So the clear parts of the design and the blurry parts are constantly changing. This is called ‘optical distortion’, and it is what makes the picture seem to move, shimmer, swirl, or pulsate” (Brandreth et al 60).

LD, ADD, & Perception

Perception

Why do the shimmer and optical distortion look similar to the LD student? My theory is that disorientation and optical illusions are both perception issues. Any mind seeks out shapes and patterns, but the visually oriented mind even more so.

Dennis Coon defines perception as, “… the process of assembling sensations (‘data’ from the senses) into usable mental representations of the world…

“Perceptual organization may be thought of as a hypothesis held until evidence contradicts it. Perceptual organization shifts for ambiguous stimuli. Impossible figures resist stable organization altogether” (129).

The picture thinkers’ pattern recognition abilities make them prone to errors in perception, i.e. disorientation. However, it also allows them to see subtle patterns in data, in their surroundings, or in visual or aural art. Auditory-sequential thinkers might miss these insights because their brains are too quick to classify stimuli into categories.

How Optical Illusions Work

Harry Turner, an artist who creates optical illusions, discusses the subject of perception.

“We are not always aware of the extent to which lines in two dimensions deceive the eye (and mind). Think how you grasp a whole comic situation from the simple lines of a cartoon. The image that falls on the retina of the eye resembles a cartoon from which we try to interpret outside reality. Not surprisingly, we make mistakes.

“Richard Gregory [author of Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing] has described perception as continuous problem solving, because there is never enough information from the eye alone to specify external objects – the brain has to call on memorized sensory data to read a host of non-optical qualities into the images that are triggered by light falling on the retina.

“Our perception is so dominated by visual stereotypes that, for much of the time, we tend to see what we expect to see. All these optical illusions exploit this capacity to complete images in the mind’s eye on the basis of past experience, by stimulating the imagination to override the simple logic of two-dimensional graphics” (7).

What it Feels Like to Have LD

Can you find the illusion in the above example? (Hint: look for the repeated words.)

This is what it feels like to have LD. To look at something and see what is not really there, or to look at something and not see what is actually there. Davis even has an optical illusion that creates LD-like symptoms in people without LD.

Therefore, we see that orientation and disorientation have their seat in perception. Using the Davis Orientation Counseling or the Davis Alignment Procedure to turn off disorientation is the first step in controlling LD and ADD symptoms. The second step is to use multisensory techniques when teaching the visual thinker.

What is ADD?

ADD is NOT a Deficit of Attention

The most important thing to understand about people with Attention Deficit Disorder is that they do NOT have a deficit of attention. Just the opposite, they have too much.

Visual-spatial people are often hyper-aware of their surroundings. If a noise happens across the room from a person with ADD his attention is instantly drawn there. At the same time, it is drawn away from the task he is supposed to be attending to.

Davis elaborates, “The child is more environmentally aware and more curious than other people. A child who is often bored may be easily distracted. But even when he isn’t bored, something new entering the environment will immediately draw his attention.

“Even after ADD is corrected, the person will still remain more aware and curious than others, so to a degree this behavior will continue. Once the child learns to multitask, he will be able to divide his attention between the two points of interest at the same time instead of shifting it back and forth from one to the other.

“This will relieve the teacher’s burden somewhat, but the real solution would be to make the classroom the most interesting thing in the environment for the student” (The Gift of Learning 45 – 46).

Mental Exercises That Help ADD

Davis has two visualization exercises that help a person with ADD.

The first is found in The Gift of Learning, Chapter 13: Energy Dial Setting. As the chapter title suggests, the students learn to control their energy levels and sense of time.

The second mental exercise, multitasking, shows students how to pay attention to two things happening in their environment at the same time. The section on multitasking is found on p. 236 – 238 in The Gift of Learning.

I have found these mental exercises invaluable for helping students calm down and attend to tasks. (Parents of ADD children also need to read Chapter 14: Establishing Order.)

What is LD?

LD & the Symmetrical Brain Type

LD is not a result of brain damage, nor is dyslexia mental retardation. It stems from the visual learner’s brain being symmetrical rather than asymmetrical as is the case for most people.

“From the 1980s onwards the area of the brain chosen for special investigation by dyslexia researchers was the planum temporale – a region on the upper surface of the temporal lobe on either side of the brain. Earlier autopsy studies had shown that in about 65% to 75% of unselected brains the two plana were asymmetrical and of different sizes, the planum on the left side usually being the larger.

“In a study of the brains of eight individuals known to have been dyslexic in their lifetime it was found that in all eight cases the two plana were symmetrical… it has been suggested that there is significance in the fact that in the dyslexic brains examined to date the two plana were symmetrical…

“There is firm evidence that in most individuals it is the left half of the brain that controls speech, and it is likely, although not certain, that it is the right half that makes possible the recognition of pattern and the ability to view things as ‘wholes’.

“It therefore makes sense to suppose that in the case of dyslexics it is the left hemisphere that is relatively weak and the right hemisphere that is relatively strong.

“If this is correct it would also make sense of the familiar observation that it is the balance of skills in dyslexics that is unusual: they are relatively weak at what are apparently ‘left hemisphere’ tasks – reading, spelling, and the memorization of symbolic material – and relatively strong at apparently ‘right hemisphere’ tasks, for instance those required for success in art, architecture, and engineering” (Miles 3-5).

For updated information on the biology of dyslexia read:

Learning Differences and Spatial Ability: Part 1

LD is Hard to Define

What LD is can be hard to define. The terms learning disability and dyslexia often function as umbrella terms to describe a host of other issues:

language based learning disability (reading)
dyscalculia (math)
dyspraxia (coordination)
dysgraphia (handwriting)
ADD (attention)
hyperactivity (sitting still)
executive functioning (control of cognitive processes and inhibition control)
obsessive-compulsive (task persistence and anxiety)

Once again, visual-spatial learners can be as different from each other as they are from verbal-sequential learners. One student may be good at math but weak at reading. Another student may be the other way around. A third student may have a constellation of strengths and weaknesses.

To the neurologist, LD means a person with a symmetrical brain type. To the attorney, LD is defined by the law in terms of getting services from the state for the student. To the teacher, LD envelopes a plethora of learning issues that need to be addressed.

A Brief History of LD & Education

LD may have become an issue for teachers and doctors only after education became more widespread.

Before the 19th century education was optional. In addition, it was often only affordable for the wealthy. If a student struggled, his options were either to buckle down or to quit. (Quitting was still an option back then).

“Not long ago, working class (and even middle class) dyslexics could work around [academic failure] by avoiding formal schooling and going directly into a trade without academic qualifications… Unfortunately, today, especially in industrialized nations, there are few alternatives for anyone in any class who would choose to avoid the academic route.

“Today, even vocational schools are heavily oriented toward classroom work, written tests, and other staples of the academic approach, alternatives have become very restricted and the adverse consequences of academic failure even more pervasive” (West 153).

In the early 1800’s the Prussian Kingdom instituted a system of public schools in an effort to unify their country politically. Their success motivated other countries to followed suit. In the United States, the advent of public education was instituted gradually state by state.

“In 1852, the Massachusetts legislature passed the first compulsory school-attendance law in the U.S. By the end of the 1800’s, 31 of the 45 states had school-attendance laws. By 1918, every state had such a law” (Borrowman 72b).

Samuel Torrey Orton & LD

One of the early pioneers dealing with LD was Samuel Torrey Orton. In 1924, he worked in a mobile psychiatric unit in Iowa. The unit provided services for schools, doctors, and the welfare authorities.

From the hundred or so troubled students referred to the unit, there was a sixteen-year old, designated M.P. Unable to read at all, he seemed intelligent otherwise. M.P. was the first LD student that Orton had dealt with.

It is probably no accident that Orton started working with students with “word blindness” only six years after universal education. Before compulsory school attendance, schoolmasters had developed a curriculum that was effective for many pupils. When attendance became mandatory, it is likely that students with learning struggles began to appear in larger numbers.

Because students could no longer quit school, the burden now fell on the teachers and doctors to deal with the problem. The past one hundred years have been spent learning how to teach the visual-spatial learner.

What is LD & ADD Concluding Thoughts

The secret to teaching LD students is to not think of them as students with learning disabilities. Rather, think of them as people who have a different learning style, teaching to the strengths of the visual mind. Thus, why I prefer the terms visual-spatial learner, picture thinker, etc. as neutral, non-pejorative terms.

Realize that there are visual thinkers who do not have obvious LD or ADD tendencies. They can benefit from Davis Orientation Counseling and multisensory techniques as well.

For multisensory strategies applied to music see:

The Color Coding & More Blog Category

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References

Baum, Susan. “Gifted But Learning Disabled: A Puzzling Paradox.” ERIC. 10 December, 2000. <http://ericec.org/digests/e479.html>.

Borrowman, Merle L. “Education: The 1800’s.” The World Book Encyclopedia. 1976.

Brandreth, Gyles, et al. Optical Illusions. Sterling, 2003.

Coon, Dennis. Introduction to Psychology: Exploration and Application. 4th ed. St. Paul: West, 1986.

Davis, Ronald D., and Eldon M. Braun. The Gift of Dyslexia. New York: Perigee, 1997.

Davis, Ronald D., and Eldon M. Braun. The Gift of Learning. New York: Perigee, 2003.

Miles, T.R. “The Manifestations of Dyslexia, Its Biological Bases, and Its Effects on Daily Living.” Music and Dyslexia: Opening New Doors. Ed. T.R. Miles and John Westcombe. London: Whurr, 2004. P. 3-5.

Piper, Beam H. “Text Used For Shimmer Diagram.” Chart. Little Fuzzy. New York: Ace, 1962.

Shimmer Optical Illusion (https://www.truthinsideofyou.org/tag/optical-illusion/) by unknown author is licensed under CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) modified by Geoffrey Keith.

Silverman, Linda K. “Visual Spatial Learners: An Introduction.” Gifted Development. 29 June, 2000.<http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/Visual_Spatial_Learner/vsl.htm>.

Turner, Harry. Triad Optical Illusions and How to Design Them. New York: Dover, 1978.

West, Thomas G. In The Mind’s Eye. Amherst: Prometheus, 1997.

Westcoombe, John. “How Dyslexia Can Affect Musicians.” Music and Dyslexia: Opening New Doors. Ed. T.R. Miles and John Westcombe. London: Whurr, 2004. P. 9 – 17.

Willemin, Daniel. “I Really Don’t Care Anymore.” Online posting. 20 July 2000. Dyslexia Discussion Board. 21 July 2000. <http://www.dyslexiatalk.com/cgi-bin/disus/show.cgi?56/103>

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