[MUSIC] >>Welcome to "A World of Difference: Embracing Neurodiversity."

I'm Darryl Owens.

Usually, when king of comedy, Chris Rock, opens his mouth, you brace for something funny if wrapped in an uncomfortable truth.

Four years ago, Rock opened his mouth and shared his truth.

The comic, then in his early 50s, had been diagnosed with nonverbal learning disability.

In a way, the star of "Grown Up," in revealing his diagnosis, was letting the world in on a bad joke.

The neurological condition, known alternatively as nonverbal learning disorder or nonverbal learning disability, isn't widely known or understood.

Worse, because it affects different individuals in different ways, the condition may be grossly underdiagnosed.

Yet, the visual spatial issues and struggles with fine motor skills, decoding body language and facial expressions, and other issues that children with nonverbal learning disability navigate can be mitigated with early intervention and support, meaning individuals with NVLD can find success.

On this episode, we meet a Kentucky teen and promising artist who is learning as a homeschooler to navigate nonverbal learning disorder.

Next, our panel of national experts helps demystify the condition and provide a roadmap to help kids with the condition rock in the classroom and beyond.

Later, you'll meet our latest difference maker, a Harvard scientist and entrepreneur for whom a string of learning differences hasn't quelled his quest to unlock the DNA strand to revive the wooly mammoth.

First, we travel to Northern Kentucky, where Kyra Flaugh dreams of one day becoming a forensic scientist even as she works hard like a CSI on picking up clues that decipher peers' facial expressions and vocal tones.

HealthDay special correspondent Mabel Jong brings us the story.

[MUSIC] >>16-year-old Kyra Flaugh dreams of becoming a forensic scientist one day.

It's a challenging career choice, but Kyra is used to facing adversities head-on.

When she was nine years old, she was diagnosed with nonverbal learning disorder, NVLD.

People with NVLD typically have strong verbal skills but trouble understanding facial expressions, vocal tones, and subtle gestures.

>>I don't read social cues very well, and it's really hard to, like, function, and my anxiety makes it all worse.

And NVLD is not what it seems 'cause I talk a lot and I don't read, like, body language or, like, verbal tones or anything like that.

>>Kyra's mother remembers how easily overwhelmed she got as a little girl but says she thought it was just normal childhood behavior.

>>She was uncomfortable in certain situations, she'd scream and hide under tables, and we just thought that was just a reaction to things, or we didn't really see it as a problem until it started getting worse.

If I had to correct her as far as like, "Don't do that," or, "I don't want you to do that," or trying to get her to do something like that, sometimes we ended up in horrible meltdowns.

>>So Kyra's parents took her for an evaluation at a local children's hospital.

The initial diagnosis was ADHD, which didn't match what they were seeing, so they decided to get a second opinion.

>>So we went and talked to a psychologist, and he evaluated her and said, "This is nonverbal learning disorder, and it's often misdiagnosed as ADHD."

And so I was like, okay, let's investigate this, and my husband and I started researching and went to the NVLD Project and just doing things online.

And when we looked at the symptoms and compared to what our psychologist was telling us, we're like, oh, this makes sense.

>>While NVLD doesn't impact intelligence, it can cause struggles with motor skills, attention, reading comprehension, and multitasking, all very important to learning.

That's one reason Kyra is homeschooled.

Over the years, she's also received math tutoring, occupational therapy, and been part of an online educational co-op.

>>I need to take breaks a lot because I don't really focus that easily.

And I need to move a lot 'cause I can't really stay still.

And I have to draw while I'm listening.

And I don't take things seriously, so I get in trouble a lot for making jokes and speaking when I'm not supposed to, >>But it's forming friendships that Kyra worries about most right now.

She says it's difficult to explain her disability to others.

>>I struggle with keeping friends 'cause I often feel excluded and judged.

And I normally can't keep a friend group because it's really hard for me emotionally and mentally 'cause, like, I don't know what I do wrong, and everybody's like, I feel like everybody's, like, mad at me all the time.

>>Michelle says when middle school hit, typical adolescent emotions combined with nonverbal communication through texting made matters worse.

>>We've had a rollercoaster of emotions.

The biggest thing is depression and anxiety and self-harm.

She actually went through a phase where she was cutting and had suicidal thoughts, and those are things that are very real for teenagers, but kids with learning disabilities, I think that that's amped up even more because they cannot process what's going on around them.

>>To help process her emotions in healthy ways, Kyra joined her church youth group, began painting and writing stories, and volunteered at the Cincinnati Art Museum.

But her mother remains her rock in times of turmoil.

>>We've started a new thing this semester where we debrief, and we'll talk about the day.

What went well, what did you struggle with?

Let's talk about how we can handle that differently.

She sees her counselor on a weekly basis, she sees her psychologist once a month.

And the biggest thing that we have tried to help her with is teaching her to advocate for herself.

So when you don't understand something, ask.

"I don't know what your face is saying, can you tell me if you're angry or what you're feeling?"

>>As she works towards high school graduation and beyond, Kyra says she dreams of a world where everyone, neurodivergent and neurotypical, would be free to be themselves.

>>Everybody would be friends.

There would be no expectations or hate, because I feel like everybody that's, like, neurodivergent is expected to be the same as other kids.

And since we aren't, we're kind of, like, judged and stuff.

>>Michelle's message for other parents with NVLD children?

Find your tribe.

Don't be afraid to reach out to professionals for help and to your community for love and support.

For "A World of Difference," I'm Mabel Jong.

[MUSIC] >>Thanks, Mabel.

Next, our experts explore the scope of nonverbal learning disability and provide interventional strategies that support children's success.

[MUSIC] Dr. Joshua Diehl is an associate teaching professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Notre Dame.

His areas of expertise include neurodevelopmental disorders, intellectual disabilities, autism spectrum disorder, child psychopathology, and neurodiversity.

His primary focus is on neurodevelopmental disorders with an emphasis on individuals with autism spectrum disorder and their families.

His work on the clinical uses of robots for ASD treatment has been featured on NBC, MSNBC, PBS, Times of India, WebMD, and in the Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Amy Margolis is an associate professor of medical psychology at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York City and the director of its Environment, Brain, and Behavior Lab for Developmental Visual-Spatial and Learning Disorders.

She's also lead scientist on research on nonverbal learning disability funded by the NVLD Project, a nonprofit organization focused on nonverbal learning disability.

Dr. A.J.

Marsden is a former US Army surgical nurse who now serves as an associate professor of psychology and human services at Beacon College in Leesburg, Florida.

Beacon is a nonprofit liberal arts school and America's first accredited baccalaureate institution dedicated to educating neurodivergent students with learning and attention issues.

She specializes in human development, motivation, emotion and attitudes, and abnormal psychology.

She's been quoted or featured in more than 60 media outlets and co-wrote the popular Myth on the Mind column for Psychology Today.

And we're gonna begin our conversation with Dr. Diehl.

Can you explain nonverbal learning disabilities in simple terms for parents who may not be familiar with the condition?

>>Well, we do tend to use pretty complex terms as experts, don't we?

And they can often be confusing even to us, we have a lot of trouble communicating sometimes about these.

But really what we're talking about primarily are visual-spatial deficits.

So we're talking about things that can manifest in, you know, being able to put together puzzles or, you know, reading maps or, you know, understanding where you are in space and how close things are to you.

And so this can also affect everyday sorts of things that are important, like being able to do math.

So seeing how, if you're doing multi-step problems, how everything lines up, or even looking at geometry and being able to understand the relationships of different shapes to each other.

And so that's primarily what we're talking about.

Now, there can be other things that can occur as well.

We see a lot of kids that have social skills deficits as well.

So knowing when to start conversations, knowing when to end them, being able to make friends.

So these are things that are all things that sometimes we see but we don't see in everybody.

Now, the thing to understand is that, you know, all humans have strengths and areas in need of support, and not everybody who would have this diagnosis might have all of the things that I've talked about.

And that's okay, because we really wanna think about individuals as individuals with strengths and areas in need of support.

>>All right, well, thank you, doctor.

So Dr. Margolis, how common is nonverbal learning disability, and are there any demographic trends regarding who gets diagnosed?

>>Well, we undertook a study to figure out how common nonverbal learning disability is in the general population.

There have been a few studies in the last two decades trying to estimate how common NVLD was, but they only looked at youth with learning disability diagnoses.

So we looked in three large data sets and replicated our finding that NVLD seems to be, NVLD being nonverbal learning disability, seems to occur in somewhere between 3 and 4% of children in North America.

We replicated this, as I said, in three large data sets.

And we didn't really see discrepancies or differences in rates by different demographic variables.

And in fact, well, there is this kind of myth in the literature that maybe only people from higher income brackets or mostly white individuals have this problem, and that probably arises because of access to services and diagnoses and not anything to do with biology.

And when we adjusted our sample weights to better represent the census of the regions where we were estimating, where we were studying the children, the rates went up when we had to increase the weight that we gave to, say, Black youth in our sample.

So we don't think that there are racial or ethnic disparities that we've seen so far, and the disparities that I think probably do exist exist because of unequal access to services, which come from all kinds of demographic and other factors, structural factors.

>>All right, thank you, Doctor.

So Dr. Marsden, how can parents differentiate between the challenges of normal childhood development and the signs of nonverbal learning disability?

>>That's a great question, Darryl.

It can be really difficult to determine, you know, what's normal and maybe what is a sign of NVLD.

What exactly's going on, it can be really hard to differentiate.

Like we talked about before, there's some characteristics that overlap with other disabilities, so sometimes they can get diagnosed with ADHD or ASD or maybe an anxiety disorder or some other specific learning disability, but it's really this, it's really a nonverbal learning disability.

So some of the really early signs during infancy, usually everything's pretty normal.

Maybe there might be some issues with gross motor skills, they might not crawl very well, they might scoot on their butt instead of crawling normally, they might start walking a little bit later.

But again, not every child is gonna experience that.

Some of the more common characteristics that we see in more of the children start to show in preschool and elementary school years.

So things like having a really hard time with puzzles and not wanting to play with Legos and doing any type of visual-spatial task, they have a really hard time with that.

A lot of people assume that because this is called nonverbal learning disability that they can't speak, that they can't form words or that they have a really hard time with talking, and that's not true.

They're actually really great, they have a great vocabulary, they use words a lot.

They just have a hard time starting and stopping conversations and knowing what to say and what not to say.

So sometimes we say that there's a lot of talking going on but not a lot of connecting with other people.

So they have a great vocabulary and they talk a lot and they oftentimes learn to read at an early age, but they still struggle with a lot of things, like the spatial reasoning skills and things like that.

They also struggle sometimes with fine motor skills, like gripping a pencil and being able to hold a pencil.

They struggle with their social abilities, and this really starts to show in the middle school years.

They have a hard time socializing, they have a hard time making friends.

They prefer to hang out with one person as opposed to a group of people.

But again, this differs from individual to individual.

Some of these characteristics might not be displayed in everybody, so it can be difficult to diagnose.

>>All right, thank you.

So Dr. Diehl, let's get parents some help here, because this sounds like it's really complex and overwhelming.

What are some practical strategies that parents can employ at home to help their children with nonverbal learning disability be able to better navigate social situations and decode social cues?

>>Well, I think first and foremost, social interactions are supposed to be fun.

This is how you make friends, this is how you learn new things.

It really is, in its essence, supposed to be fun, but if you struggle with them and you have a lot of failures, they can be less and less fun.

And social interaction, it's a skill.

It's a skill that you have to build.

I like to talk with kids as if it's a muscle that we're trying to build.

Some people have bigger muscles in certain areas and smaller muscles, so we really want to try to build those things up.

Now, for parents, it's important to think that social skills in general are broad.

There are lots of things that go into social interaction.

So it's important to focus on what seems to be particularly hard for your child.

It could be different from child to child, so what are the things that it seems like they struggle with?

Now, it could be a lot of things.

So when you're practicing, you don't want to try to help with everything at once.

You want to try to kind of break it down and focus on things that you might be able to just kinda block everything else out and just focus on that one thing.

Maybe your child has difficulty with turn-taking, and there are things that you can do to practice turn-taking that are fun, like playing board games, things like that.

Sometimes it might be knowing when to start a conversation or even knowing where to end a conversation.

Now, you can do fun things where you're having a conversation with them and their job is to tell you the things that maybe you're doing well or maybe you aren't doing really well, and you can be really funny with those interactions.

>>Watch the full Ask the Experts segment on our website at awodtv.org if you wanna learn more about this topic.

You can also watch or listen on Facebook, YouTube, or on your favorite podcasting platform.

[MUSIC] Next, let's meet our latest difference maker.

Nothing would seem too difficult for a guy whose cutting-edge biological engineering work was critical to the groundbreaking Human Genome Project or who is refining genome sequencing to revive extinct species without the Hollywood hokum and who is looking to retire botox shots by unlocking the key to actually reversing aging.

Nothing but ninth grade, that is.

George McDonald Church struggled with dyslexia, obsessive compulsive disorder, and attention deficit disorder and had to repeat ninth grade on his way to a PhD at Harvard University in molecular biology.

For Church, much of his genome work is focused on actualizing human potential.

Even without gene-editing technology, that's something the man who was included in the 2017 class of the TIME100 knows something about.

Senior correspondent Brad Kuhn brings us his story.

[MUSIC] >>Meet Dr. George Church.

Scientist, entrepreneur, and human Guinea pig.

Dr. Church is one of the smartest people on the planet, a folk hero of synthetic biology leading the worldwide push to make the human genome as accessible as a personal computer.

You may have seen him on late night TV talking about bringing the wooly mammoth back from extinction or read about how Duke flunked him for spending too much time in the lab but later gave him an honorary doctorate for his success at Harvard.

His bestselling book "Regenesis" outlines his vision for increasing longevity and eradicating disease through gene-editing.

Dr. Church has accomplished all of this despite and possibly because of having to live with dyslexia and narcolepsy.

>>There are many times in my life, especially when I was young, where I would say, "I can't believe that they're paying me to do this."

>>Dr.

Church began collecting dragonfly nymphs from the salt marsh behind his childhood home near Tampa and later built his own computers from surplus electronic parts.

He combined these twin obsessions with an intense curiosity in a neurodiverse worldview to forge his own career path as a benevolent mad scientist, eventually focusing his efforts on editing the human genome with an eye toward correcting some of nature's crueler typos.

>>I liked almost everything I studied, and so I didn't wanna leave any of 'em behind, you know, it's like kid not wanting to leave his toys he's outgrown.

And so I was constantly looking for something that demanded, and it wasn't just me indulging myself, that actually I wanted something, a project that would require all these as different disciplines, and it was crystallography.

So I got introduced at my second year in college, which turned out to be my last year in college as well.

And it required math and computer science just to do the Fourier transforms, it required physics to understand diffraction, and then chemistry and biology 'cause I was doing crystallography on biomedical molecules like RNAs.

And I just loved having to do all these things.

And I think a lot of other people felt that it was a nuisance because it would slow down your career because you'd have to learn all the, you know, getting a double major or, you know, that sort of thing, it just would slow you down, so.

But I was addicted to it.

>>Church has struggled with dyslexia since childhood but learned to work around it through independent study and by memorizing pictures.

>>It wasn't impossible to read, it just was so difficult that I would, I don't know, you could call it laziness or you could just say I just did what I could.

>>Narcolepsy has forced him to adopt a shark-like lifestyle of perpetual motion.

>>Since I'm basically unemployable except for the little bit of creativity I have, you know, I just didn't wanna take chances with it.

>>He became enamored with augmented humans when he saw Walt Disney's animatrons at the 1964 World's Fair.

>>When I went back to Florida, I realized that, you know, I had no exposure to science or engineering at all other than that brief experience in New York.

And I just sort of felt like it has to be out here somewhere, it has to be.

And I just kept looking, and so I eventually just said, "Well, if I can't find it, I gotta recreate it."

>>That dream took a leap toward reality when he stumbled upon one of the world's first networked computer stations in his high school basement.

>>I didn't know any better, I was just looking through the disk drives and I'd find other people's programs.

And I would try to figure out what they did.

And I would reverse, you know, I would, like, run them and I would change them and then see what happened.

And that was basically genetics, in a way.

As you make a mutation, you see what it does.

>>Despite his success, or maybe because of it, Church still has a soft spot for that lonely, dyslexic kid in Tampa trying to solve the mystery of the disappearing nymph.

>>If I had any regrets, it was not taking enough chances.

It seems like I took a lot of chances, but I think I would've encouraged my younger self to be a little more confident.

>>And to parents who might be worried their neurodiverse child is lost in their own world, he says... >>Just get help.

You know, you know, be part of a community.

And one thing that's really nice about the internet world for parents is that it used to be you would be the only person with this burden, or this opportunity, depending on how you look at it, but on the internet, you can find other parents that have come up with very clever solutions.

>>For "A World of Difference," I'm Brad Kuhn.

[MUSIC] >>Thanks, Brad.

And congratulations, Dr. George McDonald Church, for making a difference.

And that does it for this edition of "A World of Difference: Embracing Neurodiversity."

I'm Darryl Owens.

I'll see you back here next time.

You can watch episodes of "A World of Difference" on the Beacon College Facebook and YouTube channels and on the show's website, awodtv.org.

The website also provides tip sheets and other resources for your parenting journey.

You can watch the show from the PBS app, available on your favorite streaming device, and you can listen on your favorite podcasting platform.

Thank you for watching and supporting "A World of Difference."

[MUSIC] [AIR WOOSHES] [MUSIC]