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Thomas G. West

Tom West, Advisory BoardThomas G. West is the author of In the Mind’s Eye — Creative Visual Thinkers, Gifted Dyslexics and the Rise of Visual Technologies, selected as one of the “best of the best” for the year by the American Library Association (one of only 13 books in their broad psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience category). A second edition was released in 2009 with Foreword by Oliver Sacks, MD, who states: “In the Mind’s Eye brings out the special problems of people with dyslexia, but also their strengths, which are so often overlooked.  Its accent is not so much on pathology as on how much human minds vary. It stands alongside Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind as a testament to the range of human talent and possibility.”

In the Mind’s Eye was published in Japanese translation in as Geniuses Who Hated School. A Chinese translation was published in 2004 and a Korean translation was released in late 2011. In connection with In the Mind’s Eye and his other writings, Mr. West has been invited to provide presentations for scientific, medical, art, design, computer and business groups in the U.S. and overseas, including groups in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan and twelve European countries.

For years West wrote a column, “Images and Reversals,” on the broad effects of powerful information visualization technologies for Computer Graphics, a quarterly publication of the international professional association for computer graphics artists and technologists (SIGGRAPH — an organization with many creative, visual-thinking dyslexics). These columns were collected into a book with the title: Thinking Like Einstein — Returning to Our Visual Roots with the Emerging Revolution in Computer Information Visualization.

Prior to writing In the Mind’s Eye, Mr. West worked with engineering and consulting organizations where he managed a large international research and training program in Egypt, helped to redesign a national computer information system and integrated strategic planning for several federal government agencies, with periodic travel to the Middle East and the Far East.

West is now working on a third book, this one dealing with high level creativity and original discovery, visual thinking and visual technologies along with the role of brain diversity (including dyslexia, Asperger syndrome and other alternative modes of learning and thinking) in several leading-edge entrepreneurial businesses as well as several individual scientists and technological innovators (including one British family with many visual thinkers, many dyslexics and four Nobel Laureates).