And, as Galaburda, Sherman and others 2 have demonstrated over a number of years the greater number of neurological anomalies in dyslexia appear in the left hemisphere lower and higher language areas. It remains our experience that we assess and teach approximately three boys to every girl. But, for the first time I, for one, am questioning whether the neurological anomalies in dyslexia have a greater impact on the language learning abilities of boys than girls because of the 'normal' processing schema now exposed. An open mind is needed as further research unfolds. Localisation, gender differences and plasticity in the brain seem simple concepts on the surface but when you consider that there are about 100 billion neurons in the brain and each of these is connected by several dendrites receiving messages into the cell body and by an axon carrying messages out you start to wonder at the organisation needed.
Axons can be several feet long, can go down the spine and across the hemispheres of the brain.
Messages travel at up to 360 miles per hour along the axons to the synapses where they are fired across to the new dendrite by a special chemical trigger. Tentative evidence is beginning to emerge that there may be abnormalities in living brain lipid metabolism as demonstrated in adults with dyslexia and other developmental disorders 7 . Galaburda's 1996 conclusion is shown in Figure 1. The latter was a previously discredited theory, but in November '96 Wood et al confirmed the involvement of these two chromosomes following a study on families taught by June Orton. This study will be presented in early 1997 in the American Journal of Human Genetics .