Our passion for human learning and learning differences began in the 1990s when our own children began to struggle in school.
We were physicians and scientists, working at a university, so we did what such people do. We read everything we could get our hands on in the scientific and educational literatures, so we could understand why they struggled and help them learn better.
What we learned eventually led us to leave our academic posts and move back to Brock’s hometown of Seattle, where we founded the Eide Neurolearning Clinic.
There we saw both children and adults with all kinds of learning differences which we described in our first book, The Mislabeled Child (Hyperion, 2006). Then in following years we grew more and more fascinated by the individuals we met with dyslexia, as we noticed that they shared certain strengths, not just challenges.
This recognition of strengths led us once again to dive into the scientific literature, where we discovered a large and growing body of evidence supporting our observations. We also became convinced that those strengths rose directly from the same underlying brain differences that led to dyslexic challenges. In 2011 we published what we’d learned in our book The Dyslexic Advantage, which has gone on to sell over 200,000 copies and has been translated into over a dozen foreign languages, and was followed by a revised edition in 2023.
In 2013 we began our work to develop new tests that would help us make quality dyslexia identification and strengths assessment accessible to everyone. A year later we were joined by pioneering technologist Nils Lahr, who shared the dream of bringing the kind of assessment and understanding they had received to those who didn’t have access to similar testing. That’s how Neurolearning SPC was born.
With the help of Nils and his team of engineers, and later by gifted psychometrician Dr. Mark Moulton, who used a highly creative machine learning approach to create a scoring system of remarkable accuracy and power, we were able in 2019 to launch our first screener to the public
In the years since, we have tested many thousands of individuals, ages 7 to 70, and have continued to refine our systems and reports. But the goals that led to our initial founding are the same ones that drive us to this day: to make high quality dyslexia assessment affordable, accessible, and available for everyone.
