Thomas G. West - Seeing What Others Cannot See: The Hidden Advantages of Visual Thinkers and Differently Wired Brains

Below is a letter I requested from Delos Smith. I initially wrote about Delos in In the Mind's Eye. Then we met at a conference and we became close friends. Delos had to have special language training when young. But for many years he worked for the Conference Board in New York City and became a favored radio and TV commentator on business issues. Long ago, I had read in an article on Leonardo da Vinci that he wrote in what is called mirror writing to keep people from understanding what he was writing. I did not know much at the time, but I strongly suspected that the expert who made this assertion was entirely wrong. Much later, I discovered that there are a significant number of people who quite naturally prefer to write in mirror writing. Indeed, they prefer to do many things in a way that would appear backward to most of usincluding playing music and even speaking. Delos is one of these people. At my request, he provided some details about his life-changing experience associated with mirrored music. This is his story, so I decided to include it here without modification or commentary. I hope that his story will help to provide a better understanding of different kinds of brains and different kinds of minds.

Thomas G. West

December 17, 2013

Dear Tom:

This is the story of mirror day when I played the song Oh, My Darling Clementine backwards (retrograde) and had my first musical feeling in my life. I played the song at 9:30 pm on Thursday, December 9, 1976. At 9:31 pm on that day my life had been changed completely. I didn't know that I would be leading a completely different life at that moment.

All I knew then was that I needed to ask a lot of questions about my early childhood challenges. I had thought they had been taken care of with my work with Sam and June Orton and Katrina de Hirsch. After their work, the Ortons declared that I was a normal boy and now could compete with my classmates. The date was September 1944. I was 9 years old and entering the 4th grade. From kindergarten through the 3rd grade I had been carried by my schoolthe Horace Mann School that was operated by Teachers College of Columbia University. The school was actually located in the Teachers College building. From September 1944 to December 9, 1976, at 9:30 pm I and my parents considered me normal.

Normal was defined as having the ability to be able to comprehend the material in my school. This was true. I was able to comprehend the material but at the same time I was very inconsistent in my schoolwork. For the most part I did understand the work but at the same time I was puzzled by how my teachers were teaching me.

Then came December 9, 1976, at 9:30 pm when everything changed. At that moment I knew I had no understanding what my childhood problems wereand I had little understanding of what my work with the Ortons was all about.

I knew that starting in the 3rd grade I was pulled out of my classroom and directed to another classroom where I met with an Orton teacher who drilled me for an hour on the basic tools of the English language. These hourly classes started in the summer after I completed the 2nd grade. The special sessions would continue six days a week until I entered the 4th grade when I was then 9 years old.

When I was 34 or 35 years old, I decided to make a New Year's resolution. I had two traumas that I did not understand or comprehend. One was public speaking. Any public speaking terrified me because I would always speak some gibberish during my presentations. In schools my classmates found my mumbled language hilarious. As an adult it was just downright awful.

The other trauma was my total lack of musical abilitysimilar to other members of my family. I couldn't sing on key with others. In dance I was totally out of step. At college I was required to take ROTC for the first two years. My marching was a total disaster. I was never in step. In fact, I was almost thrown out of the college because I was out of step at an Armed Forces Day. I took dance lessons with Arthur Murray during college. After a few lessons the Arthur Murray people gave me my money back because they were unable to teach me. I also noticed that my parents had no musical ability at all and most members of my family had no musical ability at all either. The whole family was out of step. Why?