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

ventricular system, which functions as
the brain’s entry and exit point. Some
people with reading disorders have
neurons lining their ventricles, like
passengers stranded in an airport.
While an image of the brain is being
made, a patient performs a task, and then
a neuroscientist looks to see what parts
of the brain have been activated in
response to that task. If you ask a
dyslexic to read when he or she is
having a brain scan, the parts that are
supposed to light up might not light up at
all. The scan looks like an aerial photo
of a city during a blackout. Dyslexics
use a lot more of the right hemisphere of
their brains during reading than normal
readers do. The right hemisphere is the