Thom Hartmann: You know, when I was, just to very quickly get back to this topic of psychological variations, let’s call them that. And ADHD, I started writing my books on ADHD in part because my son was going through this crisis and then I saw in it myself, and in part because 15 years before that I had been the executive director of the New England Salem Children’s Village and I’d seen it in all of our kids, most of the parents of the kids that we had and in fact I wrote in 19, what was the year, 1979?
One of the first articles, it was published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Molecular Psychiatry about ADHD and diet. I got to know Ben Feingold and we tried the Feingold diet at the New England Salem Children’s Village. And what is now the Hunter School as well. And in fact we still run a natural foods vegetarian diet for these kids which I think is a good thing. I think it’s therapeutic.
But in any case, I came to the conclusion that there are some significant strengths associated with this. And after I’d written my first book on the topic, I was doing a fair amount of lecturing and in London I was giving a talk and I was back to back with a guy named Ron Davis [Ken Davis - ed.]who had written a book called "The Gift of Dyslexia." And I had never met Ken before. And we had an opportunity to spend the afternoon together. And he was telling me his life story.
He had severe dyslexia. So severe that he couldn’t make it through school, that he dropped out like somewhere in junior high school, middle school. I mean he literally could not read. Had never successfully read a book all the way through. And yet he was a brilliant sculptor, a brilliant artist. But he couldn’t read. And he became a businessman, he became quite successful as being a businessman, and was able to hire people to do his reading for him. And made a little money and was able with that to do some research and the first thing that he did was he tracked down, if I am remembering this story correctly, and my apologies Ken if I’m not, but this is how I recall you telling me the story back 15 years ago. And Ken’s book I’m sure is still in print, “The Gift of Dyslexia.” He tracked down, you know, and you could do this with the yellow pages back then, you probably still can, as many sculptors as he could who were actually making a living as sculptors.
Now, I have in my entire life had an opportunity to meet one; when Louise and I lived in Vermont there was a shop, it was called The Gargoyle Shop and they sold old gargoyles and giant building things but this guy was also a sculptor and he did his own sculpture and it was brilliant. I mean it sold for thousands and thousands of dollars. And he was a famous sculptor. And I asked him do you have trouble reading? And he started laughing. He says, “I can’t read.” He says, “I have dyslexia so badly." He said, "I’m always mixing up numbers and letters.”
And what Ken found was that that was almost always the case with sculptors. That a sculptor can, or a person with dyslexia, they can look at a block of marble and literally see it from behind, see it in three dimensions. A “normal person,” you or I, would look at it and just see it in two dimensions, right, you know, left / right, up / down. We see a flat surface. But a person with dyslexia is able to disconnect their visual sense from being attached to their head and their eyes and have it float around so it’s looking from the back of what it is they’re looking at instead of from the front. Now this is brilliant if you’re trying to turn a block of marble into Da Vinci’s David [Michelangelo's] but it’s terrible if you’re trying to read.
And so what Ken Davis did is he developed a technique to teach kids with dyslexia how to anchor their attention in one spot so that they could turn things into that two dimensional flatness and still have that strength. My point is that I believe that people with ADHD have been some of the major transformational people in our world.
Ben Franklin had, could never keep a job, never kept a job more than five years in his whole entire life. He had 34 different careers, the last one in his 80s was creating the United States of America. Thomas Jefferson, I think probably actually he was more of an Aspy than ADHD. Thomas Edison, pretty classic case, he got thrown out of school when he was 7 years old, his teacher said he was unteachable, he was constantly interrupting, blurting things out. The point is that I think that there are tremendous strengths in these conditions and to the extent that some of them are genetic, I think that they’re there for a reason which is why I wrote my books about “Hunters in a Farmer’s World.” The whole idea of ADHD as a strength.
And on the other hand there are some kids who are very clearly damaged and I think our environment is becoming more and more toxic and we have to figure out ways to sort out you know what’s A from B.
Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.
