Edward Hallowell: psychiatrist and author of Delivered From Distraction. Founder of The Hallowell Center for Cognitive and Emotional Health.
Edward Hallowell’s biography reads like an intellectual rags-to-riches story.
At the end of first grade, I was still a poor reader, and, to this day, I’m painfully slow at getting through a book…I have a dyslexic brain, a disordered brain, call it what you will. My brain got me through Harvard as an English major and a pre-med minor. I graduated magna cum laude and went on to medical school, residency, and fellowship.
He has used his education and his gift to develop his own way of looking at dyslexia.
If you have dyslexia, you may learn to read, but you will read with difficulty. You will struggle to develop fluency, or the ease reading takes on for people who don’t have the condition. For them, reading becomes as automatic as riding a bike. They don’t have to think about maintaining their balance. That’s what it means to be fluent.
If you’re born with a brain that harbors dyslexia, I would say, “Lucky you! You have untestable and immeasurable potential. You’re a surprise package; no one knows what you can do, including you. But I can tell you from years of experience that you can do special things. You have many talents that can’t be taught, and a brain that eludes the predictive powers of our wisest sayers of sooth.
