The Dyslexic Advantage Read online

  Individuals with dyslexia who possess prominent I-strengths also frequently show an impressive ability to spot relationships of togetherness—that is, correlation or cause and effect—between things, ideas, or experiences. This ability is sometimes referred to as pattern detection, and pattern detection has often been noted by experts on dyslexia to be a special dyslexic strength.4 Strength in detecting relationships of correlation or cause and effect is a useful skill in many fields, including science, business, economics, investment, design, psychology, leadership, and human relationships of all kinds. Jack Laws expressed his awareness of the pervasiveness of cause-and-effect relationships in nature in his description of the “three-dimensional web [of] relationships between things” that he often sees, and in his recognition that “things are as they are because of their relationships with everything else.”

  Another dyslexic scientist who has demonstrated an acute perception of the interconnectedness of nature is Dr. James Lovelock. Lovelock is best known as the formulator of the Gaia hypothesis, which states that the climatic and chemical components of the earth’s crust and atmosphere interact to form a complex system that maintains the earth in “a comfortable state for life.”5 Lovelock was first led to posit such connections when he noticed subtle correlations in the variations of the chemical composition of earth’s atmosphere and oceans. While other scientists before Lovelock had recognized that the earth’s atmosphere was almost perfectly suited for biological life, none had realized that this special balance was maintained by the interactions of a tightly linked network of chemical processes: they’d observed the same parts but had missed the interconnections that form the whole system.

  Strength in Shifting Perspectives

  The second I-strength is the ability to see connections between different perspectives, approaches, or points of view. This I-strength helps its possessors see that a particular problem, idea, or phenomenon can be studied using different approaches and techniques, borrowed from different disciplines or professions.

  Individuals with this I-strength prefer interdisciplinary rather than specialized approaches when taking on new problems or projects. They typically reject traditional ways of categorizing knowledge into “watertight” fields or disciplines and are dissatisfied with narrow and highly reductive approaches. Instead, they try to use as many different approaches as they can to solve problems and further their understanding, and they often borrow and adapt techniques from many different sources, applying them in new ways.

  This way of viewing information often leads individuals with dyslexia to become “multiple specialists” who are knowledgeable in several fields rather than highly specialized in a single one. As a result of this interdisciplinary mind-set, they often find new and creative ways to apply approaches from one field to others where they’re not usually used. Sometimes their recognition that interesting questions require new approaches leads them to seek broader training. For example, James Lovelock already had a Ph.D. in physiology when his growing interests in environmental science and climatology led him to pursue a second doctorate in biophysics. Ultimately, it was this blending of professional perspectives that suggested to him that the earth’s biosphere might be understood and studied as if it were a physiological system.

  In the past, many individuals with especially severe dyslexic challenges, unable to complete their professional training through traditional academic routes, were forced to acquire their skills through work experience or self-education. For example, John “Jack” Horner always knew he wanted to become a paleontologist, but after dyslexic difficulties caused him to flunk out of college seven times, he was forced to abandon conventional schooling. Eventually Horner worked his way up from an entry-level post as a museum technician and became one of the world’s foremost paleontologists. Today he’s both a full professor at Montana State University and curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies.

  The special combination of strengths and challenges that many individuals with dyslexia possess often causes them to have unusually varied life histories and careers. We’ve often thought that if the life stories of many of these individuals were placed on a series of “story tiles,” it would be impossible to assemble the tiles in the correct sequence. However, in retrospect, the twists and turns their lives take usually make sense—they just couldn’t be predicted in advance. The logic of Interconnected reasoning that directs their life journeys is so completely different from traditional logic that unless it’s viewed carefully it may seem to be no logic at all.

  Strength in Global Thinking

  The third and final I-strength is the ability to combine different types of information into a single unified big-picture or global view. This I-strength reflects the ability to perceive the “whole” that can be made by combining different “parts” and to identify its central essence. This critical skill is one of the chief components of the dyslexic advantage, and as we discussed in chapter 4, it results from a fundamental variation in the way that dyslexic brains are organized and structured to form larger circuits, which unite multiple processing centers. We can better understand this big-picture reasoning strength by examining one of its key components: gist.

  Gist is the main point, essence, or overall meaning of a thing, idea, concept, or experience. It’s the “rough,” coarse, or bird’s-eye view, rather than the fine-detail view: the forest rather than the trees. Gist deals with overall shape or contour, or the core meaning. Gist detection helps us recognize the overall context or setting, so we stand a better chance of being able to fill in any information we find ambiguous or unclear and to determine what’s relevant and what’s not. For example, when a telephone or radio message is garbled by static, we use gist detection to determine the context of the message as a whole, then we use this knowledge of context to fill in the details we’ve missed.

  All verbal messages have a gist, but this gist can’t be determined by simply “adding up” all the primary meanings of each of the words in the message, then “computing” the global meaning like a sum. Instead, the gist or overall meaning of the message must be distilled by carefully considering all the possible meanings of all the words and phrases, then determining the essence of the message as a whole. Through this search for gist, clues about the source’s meaning and intent can be identified, as can the source’s mood and style. These clues reveal whether the source is trustworthy, flippant, alarmed, emphatic, etc. Ultimately, these gist-determining skills lie very close to the core of what we mean by “understanding,” and they’re essential for determining the meanings of all but the simplest verbal messages and especially for complex messages like stories, plays, poems, jokes, or social interactions.

  Gist also lends power to the other I-strengths. Gist detection allows us to determine the fitness of analogies and metaphors. It also helps us decide which perspectives, viewpoints, or approaches we should use to best understand some object of thought. In these ways, gist can be thought of as the ability to detect the relevant context or broader background of an object, idea, or message.

  Researchers have shown that individuals with dyslexia tend to rely more heavily on gist detection than do nondyslexics for comprehending verbal information. T. R. Miles and colleagues at the University of Bangor in Wales presented both dyslexic and nondyslexic college students with four sentences of increasing complexity and measured how long it took each student to master the verbatim repetition of the sentences. While none of the twenty-four nondyslexics needed over eight repetitions to master the fine details, the dyslexic students averaged considerably more trials and some required as many as twenty-five. Despite these difficulties in mastering the fine details, the dyslexic students performed just as well as the nondyslexics in retaining the gist of the sentences.6

  Many dyslexic readers are particularly dependent upon background clues and context to home in on gist. That’s why many dyslexic readers show better comprehension for longer rather than shorter passages—especially if the extra pas
sages contain helpful contextual clues. We often listen as dyslexic students misread every second or third word of a complex passage and wonder how they’ll ever understand what they’re reading. Yet when the passages provide helpful background context, we often find that the comprehension of even severely slow and inaccurate readers is surprisingly strong and in some cases outstanding. This kind of “upside surprise” is due largely to their ability to use contextual clues to grasp the gist of the passage, which allows them to correctly guess at the identities of the individual words.7 In contrast, when passages contain few contextual clues, comprehension usually worsens as the passages grow longer.

  This beneficial effect of extra context is why many dyslexic readers enjoy books that are part of a series. Series books contain many of the same characters, settings, and activities and often use similar words. A similar improvement in comprehension can be seen when individuals with dyslexia are pre-equipped with a summary of the passage they’ll be reading, shown a film version, or supplied with a list of key words.

  This skill in gist detection is also very helpful in areas besides reading. Many individuals with dyslexia and prominent I-strengths develop a settled habit of searching carefully for gist and context in all areas of life. As a result, they often look for deeper and deeper layers of meaning and context beneath the obvious meanings. This pattern of continually “peeling back the onion” to find the deeper significance of an idea or thing or occupation is one we’ve seen repeatedly in the individuals with dyslexia we’ve studied. Often it plays a key role in their success, leading them to question things and ideas that have long been taken for granted, and allowing them to find secrets that have been “hidden in plain sight,” in a way that often makes others ask, “Why didn’t I notice that?” We’ll illustrate the value of this gist-detection skill in a later chapter, when we discuss the work of a highly successful individual with dyslexia.

  CHAPTER 12

  Trade-offs with I-Strengths

  Just like the rest of the MIND strengths, I-strengths are often accompanied by cognitive trade-offs. In fact, each of the I-strengths we’ve discussed so far comes with its own set of “flip-side” challenges.

  Trade-offs with Strength in Perceiving Relationships

  While the ability to see broad fields of meaning is useful for detecting relationships of similarity, or “likeness,” the tendency to identify more “distant” or secondary relationships rather than to fix immediately on primary connections can also worsen performance in certain settings. It’s especially likely to cause problems in settings where speed, accuracy, reliability, and precision are more valued than creativity, novelty, or insight.

  One such setting is standardized tests, including the IQ tests we described before. For example, in tasks like linking picture concepts or identifying verbal similarities (which we described in the last chapter), many individuals with dyslexia are so extravagantly good at coming up with insightful but nonprimary connections that we often find their test scores—which are based entirely on the number of “right” or primary answers they give—misleading.

  This dyslexic talent for finding unusual connections can also lead to difficulties in the classroom. Most of the tasks students are asked to perform in school—like reading fairly literal texts, responding to simple questions, or acting on straightforward instructions—are easier for minds that routinely fix on primary meanings. Students who call up more distant meanings can appear confused or “off target,” especially if they don’t “get” the simple answers that everyone else does or if they become confused by ambiguities that no one else detects.

  This broader pattern of associations can also worsen speed, precision, accuracy, and reliability on tasks that are best approached in a straightforward and literal matter. A classic example is the multiple-choice exam. Cynics might be forgiven for suspecting that multiple-choice exams—with their terse, dense, noncontextual sentences—were designed specifically to trip up individuals with dyslexia who excel in detecting secondary meanings or distant word relationships. These examinees will often pore over a multiple-choice exam like a lawyer vetting a contract, finding loopholes, ambiguities, and potential exceptions where none are intended. While their classmates evaluate questions with a “reasonable doubt” standard, they search for “proof beyond the shadow of a doubt.” As a result, even a hint of uncertainty leads them to reject answers that most students would identify as correct. If their reading is also somewhat dodgy, the multiple-choice exam usually becomes a nightmare. But even dyslexic students who read longer passages or whole books with excellent comprehension may struggle with multiple-choice exams.

  For some individuals with dyslexia, each word or concept may be surrounded by such a rich network of associations that these associations can become overwhelming and give rise to unintended substitutions. Sometimes these substitutions involve “near-miss” or similar-sounding words,1 like adverse/averse, anecdote/antidote, persecute/prosecute, conscious/conscience, interred/interned, imminent/eminent, emulate/immolate. While such errors are usually attributed to problems with sound processing (that is, difficulty with phonological awareness), a careful examination of dyslexic word substitutions suggests that factors other than impaired word sound processing are often also involved. Consider Mark, whom we saw in our clinic. Mark is a highly creative boy with a great fund of knowledge and a lively imagination. Yet he often struggles to say what he means. Sometimes his verbal substitutions involve words with similar sound structures, such as:“There were three people out in the missile.” [middle]

  “I was looking at an add column.” [ant colony]

  “Look at the winnows.” [minnows]

  “Those people are cocoa.” [cuckoo]

  “Being dizzy can really affect your carnation.” [coordination]

  “That purple light caused an obstacle illusion.” [optical]

  At other times, though, Mark substitutes words that bear only a slight structural similarity to the intended word (e.g., sounds, length, “rhythm”) yet share some relationship of meaning:“We made this for Dad’s graduation.” [celebration]

  “Max, quit ignoring me.” [annoying]

  “Jim was there at the book club.” [chess club]

  At still other times, Mark substitutes words with almost no structural similarity, so that the relationships are purely conceptual:“Don’t eat that—it will spoil your breakfast.” [dinner]

  “That was a great Valentine’s, wasn’t it!” [Christmas]

  “Mom, where’s the bacon?” [baloney]

  “Those curtains have polka dots.” [stripes]

  Conceptual substitutions like these are referred to as paralexic or paraphasic errors; and when made during reading they’re sometimes called deep substitutions. While they are less common than sound-based errors, in our experience more individuals with dyslexia make them (at least occasionally) than is generally supposed.

  In her autobiography, Reversals, dyslexic author Eileen Simpson vividly describes her frequent paralexic substitutions. One example she cites is her unintentional substitution of the word leaf for feather—a conceptual rather than sound-based substitution. Over time, Simpson learned to cover such slips (when they were pointed out to her) by pretending that they were intentional puns or jokes.2

  We believe this tendency to substitute related items is the flip side of dyslexic strengths in perceiving distant conceptual relationships. In support of this idea, we’ve found that the individuals who make these substitutions the most often excel on tests that require the ability to spot distant connections, like ambiguities or similarities.

  Special strength in recognizing relationships of “togetherness” also comes at a cost. That’s because skill at detecting correlations or causal relationships has been shown to be enhanced if your attention system is a little bit distractible. Many studies have found that individuals with dyslexia experience difficulty screening out irrelevant environmental stimuli, like noises, movements, visual patterns, or other sensation
s. This sensitivity to environmental distractions is one of the main reasons dyslexic students often need special accommodations for testing and other work that takes focused concentration: they’re just not that good at automatically screening out irrelevant environmental stimuli. These distractions invade their conscious awareness and steal working memory resources.

  At the other end of the distractibility scale, the ability to quickly and subconsciously distinguish relevant and irrelevant stimuli so you can ignore those that are irrelevant is called latent inhibition. Latent inhibition sounds like an unmixed blessing, and it’s definitely useful in circumstances requiring tight attentional focus—like tests or silent work time at school. In fact, latent inhibition makes you the kind of student most teachers dream of having. However, before you conclude that students who test high in latent inhibition and low in distractibility are the lucky ones, you should know that there’s an inverse correlation between latent inhibition (or freedom from distraction) and creativity. What this means is that the highest creative achievers tend to score lower on tests of latent inhibition and to be somewhat distractible. In fact, one study looking at Harvard students showed that nearly 90 percent of those who showed unusually high creative achievement scored below average in latent inhibition—just like individuals with dyslexia.3 This is a critical fact to keep in mind when evaluating the balance between focus and distractibility in individuals with dyslexia.

  Trade-offs with Strength in Shifting Perspectives

  The second I-strength—the ability to shift between perspectives—is also remarkably useful, so long as you recognize when the shifts are taking place and they’re under your control. However, we often find that individuals who can shift perspectives easily are subject, especially when younger, to switching perspectives without realizing it, and this can complicate certain tasks. For example, on a biology paper dealing with animal behavior, a student may begin by describing behaviors, then shift (appropriately) to a discussion of the neurological sources of that behavior, then veer off topic to consider other points of neuroscience that don’t relate to the central topic. The student may also bring in elements of personal experience or opinion where they don’t really belong and forget that he’s writing a scientific treatise rather than an autobiography or opinion piece. Often such students’ papers will have an air of free association that can be fascinating but takes them far from where they need to go. For students with strong perspective-shifting abilities, learning to control the team of horses that’s tied to their mental chariot often takes great effort and prolonged and explicit training.