Speaker Notes
Dr. Lynley Ebeling
Lynley S. Ebeling, Ph.D
Neuropsychologist, Licensed Clinical Psychologist
Phone: (256) 476-2615
Fax: (256) 773-6545
E-Mail: [email protected]
We are so blessed to have Dr. Lynley Ebeling in our area. Dr. Ebeling and her family moved here from Southern Illinois. She has been testing and treating kids for 15 years. Dr. Ebeling used to work with many students from Brehm Preparatory School in Carbondale, Illinois, which is a school exclusively for students with learning disabilities.
Dr. Ebeling told us that brains develop from back to front, with the fully developed brain being complete by age 25. The brain stem develops first, then the cerebellum, the occipital lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe and finally the frontal lobe.
The Occipital Lobe deals with vision. The Parietal lobe helps you understand: left brain is logical, right brain is music, emotions, visual/spatial. The Temporal lobe is memory, with the left temporal where language and phonics are learned and the right temporal where you process what you see. The frontal lobe slows things down, is the judgment center and problem solving center. People with ADHD have a wiring glitch in their frontal lobe.
Dyslexia is a language disorder. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-IV defines dyslexia as a reading disorder:
A) Reading achievement, as measured by individually administered standardized tests of reading accuracy or comprehension, is substantially below the expected given the person�s chronological age, measured intelligence, and age-appropriate education.
The National Institute of Health�s dyslexia definition:
Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities and the provision of effective classroom instruction.
Dr. Ebeling told us you can�t make the brain �read�, you must teach reading. For dyslexics, in the left brain, there is a glitch and for dyslexics it never becomes automatic to read. The neuroanatomy of dyslexia is that based on fMRI( parts of the brain getting the most blood during reading) the left inferior frontal gyrus is the phoneme producer, the left parieto-temporal area is the word analyzer and the left occipito-temporal area is the automatic detector.
NIH dyslexia study findings;
23% to 65 % of dyslexic children have a parent with dyslexia
40 % of siblings have dyslexia
at least one type of reading disability has been linked to chromosome 6 and 15
Dr. Ebeling told us there is no cure for dyslexia. Early diagnosis, phonics based approaches like Orton-Gillingham and Wilson, that early intervention can help shape the brain to overcome the glitz but can�t make it go away. After a certain age compensatory strategies is the only thing possible because the older the person when diagnosed, the more likely the brain is too set in its ways to learn.