David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

words—dyslexics have less gray matter. They don’t have as many brain cells in those regions as they should. As the fetus develops inside the womb, neurons are supposed to travel to the appropriate areas of the brain, taking their places like pieces on a chessboard. But for some reason, the neurons of dyslexics sometimes get lost along the way. They end up in the wrong place. The brain has something called the ventricular system, which functions as the brain’s entry and exit point. Some people with reading disorders have neurons lining their ventricles, like passengers stranded in an airport.
    While an image of the brain is being made, a patient performs a task, and then a neuroscientist looks to see what parts of the brain have been activated in response to that task. If you ask a dyslexic to read when he or she is having a brain scan, the parts that are supposed to light up might not light up at all. The scan looks like an aerial photo of a city during a blackout. Dyslexics use a lot more of the right hemisphere of their brains during reading than normal readers do. The right hemisphere is the conceptual side. That’s the wrong half of the brain for a precise and rigorous task like reading. Sometimes when a dyslexic reads, every step will be delayed, as if the different parts of the brain responsible for reading were communicating via a weak connection. One of the ways to test for the presence of dyslexia in a small child is to have him engage in “rapid automatized naming.” Show him one color after another—a red dot, then a green dot, then a blue dot, then a yellow dot—and check his response. See the color. Recognize the color. Attach a name to the color. Say the name. That’s automatic in most of us. It’s not in someone with a reading disorder; somewhere along the way, the links between those four steps start to break down. Ask a four-year-old: Can you say the word “banana” without the buh ? Or say, Listen to the following three sounds: cuh, ah, and tuh. Can you combine them into “cat”? Or take “cat,” “hat,” and “dark.” Which one of those words doesn’t rhyme? Easy questions for most four-year-olds. Really hard questions for dyslexics. Many people used to think that what defines dyslexics is that they get words backwards—“cat” would be “tac,” or something like that—making it sound like dyslexia is a problem in the way the words are seen. But it is much more profound than that. Dyslexia is a problem in the way people hear and manipulate sounds. The difference between bah and dah is a subtlety in the first 40 milliseconds of the syllable. Human language is based on the assumption that we can pick up that 40-millisecond difference, and the difference between the bah sound and the dah sound can be the difference between getting something right and getting something catastrophically wrong. Can you imagine the consequences of having a brain so sluggish that when it comes to putting together the building blocks of words, those crucial 40 milliseconds simply go by too quickly?
    “If you have no concept of the sounds of language—if you take away a letter, if you take away a sound, and you don’t know what to do, then it’s really hard to map the sounds to the written counterparts,” Nadine Gaab, a dyslexia researcher at Harvard, explained. “It may take you a while to learn to read. You read really slowly, which then impairs your reading fluency, which then impairs your reading comprehension, because you’re so slow that by the time you’re at the end of the sentence, you’ve forgotten what the beginning of the sentence was. So it leads to all these problems in middle school or high school. Then it starts affecting all other subjects in school. You can’t read. How are you going to do on math tests that have a lot of writing in them? Or how do you take an exam in social studies if it takes you two hours to read what they want from you?
    “Usually you get a diagnosis at eight or nine,” she went on. “And we find that by that point, there are already a lot of serious psychological implications, because by that time, you’ve been struggling for three years. Maybe you were the cool kid on the playground when you were four. Then you entered kindergarten and all your peers suddenly started reading, and you can’t figure it out. So you get frustrated. Your peers may think you’re stupid. Your parents may think you’re lazy. You have very low self-esteem, which