In this clip, Phil promises to explain how dyslexia works, how dyslexic people's brains "
work differently from other people's".
He starts by explaining what happens when those with dyslexia/learning difficulties write a letter of the alphabet:
"Their whole brain state, their neurology hits like a roadblock, it kind of judders to a halt. Often there can be fear, lack of confidence".
He then compares this to drawing a circle, and says "
most of them are quite fine with that". He seems to think this surprising because after all, drawing and writing and not that different 'mechanically", there's not much difference between drawing a circle and an O. But according to Phil, a difference occurs because "
they start to use different parts of their brain".
Phil: "
The part related to drawing has much less pressure attached to it, its not something that tends to stress most people, because drawing is something you don't then to get marked or, people make judgements about you on.. whereas writing has a much different response... and we often see as I say a lot of stress, a lot of frustration, a lot of anger, a lot of upset. So all we got do then its to make sure the part of your brain that does the mechanical thing of drawing gets activated when you think about writing.
Its actually quite easy".
What you need to do - this "
works for the vast majority of people":
"Think about something you're good at. What this will do, it actually wakes up that part of your brain that's creative, inspired confident, which is the part of the brain you need to be accessing when you're trying to do the writing stuff"
He then goes on to give a specific example of an exercise for kids how mirror transpose letters (e.g. their b's and d's face the wrong way). And says we can teach kids visual mnemonics to help remember which way the b and d face - he uses a picture of a bee of b and a picture of a dog for d.
My verdict
Novel useful information/advice: zero
The idea of using pictures to assist kids to learn letters - the only useful thing here - is not novel. Who is surprised to hear the writing induces stress in kids with dyslexia, but not drawing?
Psychobabble content: high
There are hints that dyslexia is all about stress and emotions and that by overcoming those, your kid won't be dyslexic any more.
Neurobabble content: though the roof!
Notice the gratuitous use of terms like brain and neurological, where you could easily have said the same thing without mentioning the brain at all. You could have talked about how we might have different emotional reactions to writing than we do to drawing. The brain parts is just window dressing. Of course we use a "different part of the brain" to draw letters and circles. That's mindnumbingly self-evident, and has no bearing on your recommended treatment - you just added it for effect!
Oh and for the encore - ppl with dyslexia are more creative, because they can think of lots of ways to spell a word, whereas those without dyslexia can only think of one!
