David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

David Boies You wouldn’t wish dyslexia on your child. Or would you? ...

1. If you do a brain scan on a person with dyslexia, the images that are produced seem strange. In certain critical parts of the ...

ventricular system, which functions as the brain’s entry and exit point. Some people with reading disorders have neurons lining ...

conceptual side. That’s the wrong half of the brain for a precise and rigorous task like reading. Sometimes when a dyslexic read ...

someone with a reading disorder; somewhere along the way, the links between those four steps start to break down. Ask a four-yea ...

problem in the way people hear and manipulate sounds. The difference between bah and dah is a subtlety in the first 40 milliseco ...

“If you have no concept of the sounds of language—if you take away a letter, if you take away a sound, and you don’t know what t ...

subjects in school. You can’t read. How are you going to do on math tests that have a lot of writing in them? Or how do you take ...

may think you’re lazy. You have very low self-esteem, which leads to an increased rate of depression. Kids with dyslexia are mor ...

2. So far in David and Goliath, we’ve looked at the ways in which we are often misled about the nature of advantages. Now it is ...

was conceived by Robert Bjork and Elizabeth Bjork, two psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, and it is a b ...

answer must be that the ball costs 5 cents. Here’s another question: If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how lo ...

Frederick, and it measures your ability to understand when something is more complex than it appears—to move past impulsive answ ...

Technology—perhaps the brainiest college in the world—averaged 2.18 correct answers out of three. Students at Carnegie Mellon Un ...

CRT the normal way, and the students averaged 1.9 correct answers out of three. That’s pretty good, though it is well short of t ...

MIT. That’s strange, isn’t it? Normally we think that we are better at solving problems when they are presented clearly and simp ...

across. They’ll use more resources on it. They’ll process more deeply or think more carefully about what’s going on. If they hav ...

and inadequate. The struggle did not give her a new appreciation of science. It scared her away from science. But there are time ...

University London puts the number somewhere around a third. The list includes many of the most famous innovators of the past few ...

successful businesspeople—and on a whim asking how many of them had ever been diagnosed with a learning disorder. “Half the hand ...