Struggling students do not have strange brains, they just use their brains strangely.
Most behavior and learning problems are not caused by abnormal brain structure, genetics, compromised health, or limited intellectual potential. They are often iatrogenic; caused by ill-timed and/or inappropriate instructional demand. Visually immature children subjected to persistent demand for which they do not yet possess requisite sophistication will either resist, sometimes with vigor, or use non-visual thinking strategies that cause long term learning problems. If our genetic endowment were a piano, environmental demand would be the composer of the song of our life. Behavior and learning characteristics emerge at the intersection of development and demand. The answers lie where nature and nurture meet, in the field of neuroscience called epigenetics. Timing is the most critical factor.
“A child reproduces what he sees and he learns what he reproduces”.
-DB Harmon, PhD
One Does Not Have ADHD, One Does ADHD.
ADHD is not a disease, it is a made up “diagnosis.” The behaviors are most certainly real, but there is no “condition.” ADHD is a lack of skill, not a condition.
Environmental stimuli control attention and behavior in visually incompetent children. They remain hyper-responsive to external stimuli until visual imagery emerges as the mechanism of reflective choice. Visualization allows prediction and choice to supersede environmental happenstance as the mechanism controlling behavior. Cats are hyper-responsive to environmental stimuli. External stimuli define and control cat behavior. Behavior of cats and yet-to-be visually competent children is controlled by environmental signals and they are not culpable for their behavior. Visualization is the skill that separates man from beast. It allows travel through time and space to consider the future consequence of current action and thus choose. When God blew the breath of life into Adam’s nostril with it came the Godlike capacity to transcend the constraints of space and time. The mature human mind sees and therefore chooses, and choose he must. ICONIX helps children learn to see, so they can see to learn and learn to choose well.
Pharmaceutical suppression of awareness of external stimuli may result in less distraction but is purely compensatory and stands in direct opposition to expanded visual skill. Fortunately, the “cure” is natural development culminating in visual dominance.
ADHD is lack of skill, not a medical condition.
Impulsive kids do not need drugs, they need SKILLS!
Does Your Child…
Struggle to maintain focus?
Struggle to sit still or control fidgeting?
Make choices without considering implications of their actions?
Fail to succeed academically?
Autism…
“To understand a child, one must understand his vision; to understand his vision, one must understand the child.” - Arnold Gesell, MD
One cannot treat what one does not understand.
There is no purposeless behavior.
If we don’t know what they are doing in there, we don’t know what we are doing out here.
What and how are they thinking? Absent those answers, response is futile.
One Does Not Have Autism,
One Does Autism.
Autism is not a disease, it is a constellation of behaviors associated with atypical visual attention. Weak tracking reflexes lead to less precise eye and hand movements, unstable eye teaming and abnormal visual attention which pervasively impacts sleep, emotional regulation, immune response, respiratory, digestive, cardiac and hormonal fluctuations, space-time thinking problems, reading of social cues, language and speech articulation and many other high order thinking skills.
ICONIX has designed instructional games, experiences and techniques to excite central visual attention to help children learn to visually grab objects as the vital gateway to language.
All children who struggle with language, social skills and executive functions need a careful assessment of visual attention because imbalance between central and peripheral vision is a newly understood factor that underpins many learning problems, none more dramatic than autism.
All behavior is purposeful. We must understand purpose and origin of observed behavior as the first step in developing proper response. Cure requires understanding observed behaviors. Prevention requires understanding of etiology.
Autistic behaviors are just that, behaviors, the real question is why the behaviors?
Autistic diagnosis obscures proper inquiry. Circular logic of behavior leading to diagnosis, and diagnosis explains behavior blocks the real question. Again, why the behavior?
Subtle and transient eye teaming errors, at just the wrong time, cause slight diplopia in central vision inviting a catastrophic attentional adaptation whereby the child shifts visual attention slightly off center to avoid double vision.
Dyslexia…
Dyslexia is a strategic error of thinking, too much language, not enough imagery.
The purpose of language, written and spoken, is the transmittal of imagery.
Vision is thought, thought is vision. Language is not thought, it describes thought.
Reading is a search for meaning in the form of imagery.
Standard reading instruction emphasizes language and neglects imagery.
Imagery is the purpose of reading.
It is the source of enjoyment, comprehension, and memory…Decoding defeats imagery. Subvocalization competes with imagery.
To understand reading, one must appreciate the primacy of imagery.
One Does Not Have Dyslexia,
One Does Dyslexia.
Dyslexia is not a condition, it is a strategic error of thought. Good, marginal, and poor readers are not separated by organic condition, intellect, or even skill, but by epigenetically determined strategy. The three types of readers are simply not doing the same thing. One adopts reading strategy at the intersection of reading demand and state of visual maturation.
Type III readers encounter reading demand before visual recognition skills are mature enough to visually recognize words, resulting in serial phonologic decoding as the primary means of deciphering words. Type II readers visually recognize words but were not quite visually competent enough to simultaneously construct imagery and thus use subvocalization as an intermediary transforming text into speech which they convert to imagery, an energy consuming drama. Finally, Type I readers were visually skilled enough in the early stages of reading instruction to both visually recognize text and simultaneously create imagery. All three types of readers engage in distinctly different behaviors directly determined by their state of visual maturation when they first learned to read.
The educational implications of this information could not be more important. We must prevent reading difficulties by ensuring that visual development skills precede reading instruction. Knowing what we now know, the remedial news is also very good and quite simple. Most struggling students respond quickly and well, as we re-teach reading the Type I way, while abandoning Type II, and heaven forbid Type III strategies.