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Neurology of learning disabilities: what will the future bring? The answer comes from the successes of the recent past.

Article Excerpt
My involvement with learning disabilities (LD) began approximately 25 years ago, at a time when formal research training was uncommon for medical doctors, and the apprenticeship model was the way most of us began our research careers. Of all the topics I had heard Norman Geschwind--at that time my neurology chairman and mentor--speak about, language held particular fascination for me, perhaps because of my own experience with having to learn and become competitive in a new language at age 15. After completing my residency, I began to work on anatomic brain asymmetries in an attempt to further understand the biological specialization of the left hemisphere for many aspects of language function. Then, Geschwind invited Friedrich Sanides, a late student of Oskar and Cecile Vogt (Brodmann was an earlier student), to travel to Boston from West Germany and spend a year here teaching me about cytoarchitectonics as a neuroanatomical tool to deepen the study of brain asymmetries. This took place in 1977.

In 1978, Geschwind suggested that I take over a project begun by Dr. Brooke Seckel, a resident two years my senior, who had decided to change careers (I often wondered whether it was the project that did it). It concerned the study of a brain from an individual with developmental dyslexia who had died as a result of a fall down an elevator shaft. His brain had become part of the Yakovlev Collection at the Boston City Hospital, where all of this took place. Brooke had been testing the hypothesis, advanced by Geschwind, that the brain of a dyslexic would show two small plana temporale. In 1968 Geschwind and his then student Walter Levitsky had shown in the general population that the planum temporale, comprising...

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