Elisa's Journal

Has anyone out there had experience with the Davis Correction Method for Dyslexia? It sounds interesting to me. I'm going to try it on my two sons and will keep everyone posted.

The basic premise is this: Kids with dyslexia aren't abnormal. They just think in mental pictures, ie they use nonverbal rather than verbal thinking. Thinking in pictures is actually up to 2000 times faster than thinking in words. But to do that, they don't just rely on their visual perception. They use their mental perception as well. It's called the "mind's eye." Say a dyslexic toddler sees a round ball of white fur in the middle of the room. If he can't immediately recognize it, he becomes "disoriented." To resolve that disorientation, he uses mental pictures. His mind's eye will look at the object from thousands of perspectives until he surmises that it's a kitty. He does this before he sees a paw or ear, etc. This same disorientation is what makes these kids very creative, highly aware of their surroundings and therefore distractable (many have ADHD.) They're curious about everything and try to grasp unknowns through disorientation--which means they send their mind's eye out on the mission to figure it all out. But since the point of visual perspective is in a different location than the mental perspective (imagination/mind's eye,) they become disoriented and then seek to resolve the confusion. An analogy would be this: if you have an inner ear infection in one of your ears, you'll become disoriented and vertiginous, because one ear is telling your brain that your position and movement and orientation in space is different that what the infected ear tells it. I'm rambling, but it's tough for me to explain this concept. These kids also have a gift for intuition because their thought processes are so rapid the conscious mind isn't aware of them. They come up with ideas, premontions, uncannily accurate guesses, etc. without truly knowing how they arrive at them.

When these kids enter the world of words,they have trouble. Verbal thinking is linear. Picture thinking is evolutionary. Verbal thinking doesn't have a mismatch between visual and mental perspectives, but picture thinking does. Sure,they do fine when a word represents a real object. They can easiy make a picture of an elephant when they see the word in a sentence. But the 100 trigger words they can't make mental pictures for create a problem--like a, and, the, this, etc. In the sentence: "Brown elephants eat the bark from large trees," they see the color brown with the first word, then it changes to one or more brown elephants with the second, then the evolving picture becomes a group of brown elephants eating, then with the next word, the picture disappears because "the" is abstract. They can't form a picture of it. They can for bark, though. But they might get a picture of a dog barking instead. Then that picture dissolves with the next abstract word. Finally, they see large and then tree and are left with a picture of that. This is an over-simplification, but not by much. The process is so rapid, the kid isn't aware of what's going on. But they read poorly and with litte or no comprehension. The efforts they apply for resolving their confusion is what will turn the gift of dyslexia into a learning disability.

With the Davis method, the child learns to move his "mind's eye" onto a point in space about a foot above and behind his head and to conscious control its movement. If their interest is perked up by something happening nearby, for instance, that mind's eye wil jump from that point. But they can move it back right away. So when reading and writing, their visual and mental perspectives are matched. They won't be disoriented. That takes 30 minutes or so. SOme kids jump several grade levels in reading with that alone. The next step is symbol mastery. They mold each of the trigger words with clay and also mold a 3-D representation of what they feel it is. In other words, they establish a mental picture of it so that it's no longer abstract. It becomes as real as an elephant. The success rate is 97% You can have a Davis facilitator work with your child for 5 days and have it done with (except for some clay work at home for a while) or you can learn how to do it yourself. The 5 day deal runs around 2800 bucks, but when you're talking about something that could make or break a human being, many find it worth it and more. Adults over 70 can even do it. The youngest age is 8, however. If you want more info, go to www.dyslexia.com. Ohterwise, I'll keep everyone posted as to my progress with Lukas and Erik.