Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Ron Davis?
Ronald Dell Davis is co-founder and director of the Reading Research Council, a counselling centre in Burlingame, California. He has had successful careers as an engineer, businessman and artist. Severely learning disabled as a child, he was first thought to be mentally retarded, but was later diagnosed as dyslexic. After struggling with his problem until age 38, he came to realise his own creative thought processes were the cause of his reading problems. This was followed by the discovery of how he could turn off the symptoms. From that discovery and subsequent research has come a new understanding of the nature and cause of dyslexia, and the Davis Orientation Counselling™ and Davis Symbol Mastery™ procedures.
What is Ron Davis’s theory about dyslexia?
Ron has explained in his book, “The Gift of Learning” (2003:9) that human beings use two different types of thought – verbal and non-verbal. Some people thus primarily think with the sounds of symbols and words while others think primarily with visual images. He explains that most adults use both types of thinking to some degree. They have learned to associate the sound of a word or its printed form to a mental image. It is not until a child has learned the language that the verbal thinking method is learned; and some children learn the language later than others. A dyslexic child will not develop verbal conceptualization skills until at least age nine. This suggests then that non-verbal conceptualization, or “picture thinking”, is more basic to human nature. All humans can do it from birth.
What does a Davis Program involve?
Your facilitator is able to provide a program suitably tailored to the client’s needs and goals. Programs are available to address reading, handwriting, mathematics, attention problems and auditory orientation. Each is a structured program that is intended to be completed over five consecutive days – a total of 25 to 30 hours.
The reading program is composed of two parts: Davis Orientation Counselling™ corrects the perceptual distortions and Davis Symbol Mastery™ corrects the symptoms of dyslexia.
Davis Orientation Counselling consists of a precise sequence of processes which utilize imagination, creativity and balance. These processes enable the dyslexic to establish a stable reference point for mental perception. When confused, the dyslexic tends to automatically move his reference point in an effort to recognise something. This moving of the reference point is what causes disorientations and the accompanying false sensory perceptions associated with dyslexia. When a stable reference point is established and used to perceive from, perceptions become accurate, consistent and in agreement with reality.
Once the dyslexic has control over disorientations and false sensory perceptions, there still remains one factor to address: the original confusion about the symbol that started the symptom producing sequence.
A disorientation sequence is triggered by an encounter with an unrecognized symbol that is sufficiently confusing to exceed the threshold for confusion. If we remove the confusion from the symbol, the disorientation sequence does not occur.
To remove the confusion from a symbol (letter, number, word), the client does Davis Symbol Mastery. This is a sequenced procedure whereby the client objectively creates the elements of a symbol as his/her own – what the symbol looks like, sounds like and means. The client is required to create and experience an association of these three elements so that it will no longer confuse the person, trigger disorientation or require a compulsive solution.
As more and more of the confusing symbols are mastered, disorientations cease to occur during reading and the compulsive solutions begin to disappear.
Compulsive solutions:
After a dyslexic has gone through the sequence of confusion, disorientation, false sensory perceptions, assimilation of incorrect data, mistake, emotional reaction, and frustration a great many times, he or she will create or adopt coping procedures and behaviours to prevent future similar occurrences. These coping procedures and behaviours are in effect solutions for the confusions which triggered the whole sequence in the first place. Because these solutions are connected to the survival and sanity of the individual, they become compulsive.
It is the compulsive force contained in these “solutions” that prevents the normal learning process from occurring and therefore creates the disability aspect of dyslexia. The solutions can be in any and every form imaginable; however, they will always manifest themselves as methods of learning, doing or knowing something.
Where can I get more information?
Common mis-spellings of the word dyslexia include: dislexia, deslexia, dislecsia, deslecsia, dyslexya, dyslecsia, dyslecsea, dyslexsea, dyslexsia
