Dr. Jim Russell, Adjunct Professor of Behavioral Studies at Webster University, was a recent presenter at the Learning Disabilities Association National Conference in Chicago. Dr. Russell addressed some of the recent neurological research about how adults with learning disabilities process information and the impact on reading skills and student retention.

The research shows that some people with learning disabilities process reading in the Broca's area. The Broca's area of the brain is used in higher-level thinking skills, and requires 3-5 times the energy to process while reading. This requires additional energy and time, and dovetails with the Shaywitz research which shows that most dyslexic adults do well with the higher levels of semantics, but do poorly at the lowest level, which is phonemic awareness (see The Neurobiology of Reading and Dyslexia, by Sally E. Shaywitz, M.D., and Bennett A. Shaywitz, M.D.).

Also supporting the Shaywitz research is new research that indicates that people with learning disabilities use more systems in the brain to read than people without learning disabilities use. In neurology, the more systems you use, the more your performance decreases, and the more time and energy you require to complete the cognitive task. (Average is 3 times longer and 5 times more energy)

Dr. Russell also described the latest Shaywitz research that was outlined in an article called "Poor Reading Means Poor Prospects," and investigates the apparent "fight or flight" conflict that we see in poor readers. In a nutshell, her theory is that poor readers who are still children initially try repeatedly to access the hippocampus in the brain, which is the "granddaddy" of memory storage.

However, if the information being taught was never processed in the first place, there is no way to integrate the new knowledge into memory for later output. The hippocampus is where you keep your ability to "fight back" in the learning process by accessing what you have learned. The amygdale, on the other hand, is the seat of emotions including anxiety, fear, and dread. When a person experiences enough failure, the thalamus basically shunts processing attempts straight over to the amygdale and the person wants to run (flight). By the time the person is an adult, the act of trying to read may be sufficient to trigger this flight response...and we wonder why adult education and literacy programs have so many problems with student retention. Maybe in addition to improving our intake and instructional procedures, it would help to increase our knowledge of how the brain works. Notice that the person was not born with this "attitude" [of flight]. It was a learned response to an inability to process information and resulted in a brain-based trigger response.

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