The Dyslexic Advantage Read online

  This ability to shift perspectives and to see things in interdisciplinary ways can create problems with organization as well. For example, high I-strength individuals with dyslexia are often horrific filers of papers. This is not, as is often supposed, simply because they have trouble alphabetizing but because they can think of too many places to file each paper and are more likely to lose papers that have been filed neatly away in distinct folders. As an alternative, they frequently prefer to keep papers in stacks where they can more easily find them. There are some wonderful pictures of Einstein’s office at Princeton that beautifully illustrate this dyslexic “filing system.” (They can be found online by searching “Einstein’s office.”) Fortunately, hyperlinked computer files and search capabilities have helped to reduce this problem.

  Trade-offs with Strength in Global Thinking

  The primary trade-off with strength in global or big-picture thinking is that it can create a greater dependence upon context and background information. Global thinkers have a top-down reasoning style that works best when a big-picture overview is already in place, so that new chunks of information can be added to conceptual frameworks that have already been built. That’s why big-picture thinkers often learn best when they have at least a general understanding of the goals or ends at which they’re aiming.

  Big-picture, top-down learners are often a poor fit for the typical classroom, where bottom-up teaching approaches predominate. Schools often ask students to memorize new bits of information before explaining their meaning or significance. This approach doesn’t really work for top-down learners because they can remember only things that make sense to them and new information that can be related to other things they already know. If they can’t see the point of something they’re asked to learn, it just won’t stick. Without a big-picture framework to hang their knowledge on, the information is simply incomprehensible.

  This dependence upon context is why “stripping down” instruction to the bare minimum to avoid overloading individuals with dyslexia often results in failure. Individuals with dyslexia who have a top-down, big-picture learning style typically learn better from approaches that convey information with greater conceptual depth, rather than from more superficial or survey-type approaches.

  Individuals with this style also show several other characteristic patterns. For example, it’s common to find dyslexic global thinkers at the upper levels of schooling still feeling lost far into the term, then suddenly finding that things become clear when enough of the big pieces are finally available to reveal the whole picture. Students with this pattern are often also more aware of (and bothered by) the gaps and deficiencies in the things they’ve been taught because they’re more aware that parts of the picture are still missing. Students with this pattern typically do better the longer they stay in school: upperdivision college courses are generally easier for them than entry-level ones, and graduate school and postdoctoral work go even better than college.

  For individuals with dyslexia who have this highly interconnected learning and conceptual style, a few simple steps can help them learn more effectively and enjoyably. For longer reading assignments, providing them with an overview (gist and context) of assigned passages beforehand can improve their reading speed, accuracy, and comprehension. If any new or special vocabulary will be included, giving them a list of key words in advance can be very helpful. Previewing the practical relevance and applicability of the information they’ll be asked to master will improve retention and motivation. Tying in new information with things they’ve already learned also improves memory and comprehension. And beginning each new course or unit by previewing the major points that will be asserted, and the route that will be taken to demonstrate them, can keep dyslexic students better oriented, more confident, and better able to learn.

  To demonstrate how I-strengths and the challenges that go with them can appear at various stages of development, let’s look in the next chapter at an individual with dyslexia who excels in Interconnected reasoning. His name is Douglas Merrill.

  CHAPTER 13

  I-Strengths in Action

  When Douglas Merrill was young, he struggled to make basic academic connections. As he told us, “Reading was—and is—challenging, so getting through assignments meant using a bunch of tricks.” With writing, “every other letter was backward.” And with math: “Every summer my mother was reteaching me to add, subtract, multiply, and divide all the way up till I was in college. . . . Math never clicked for me. Even when I was in high school I failed algebra.”

  Not surprisingly, Douglas’s self-esteem suffered: “I always felt defective, which caused the sorts of things you’d expect in a kid, like superdefensiveness and hostility, because I felt like I was failing.”

  Douglas labored to get by on extra effort and sheer force of will, but the results were disappointing. It was only when he reached middle school that he realized that despite his difficulties with rote and fine-detail tasks, he also had special strengths. One of his most important strengths was his ability to think and communicate using stories. “Pretty early on, I started writing stories to answer problems instead of doing what the assignment actually asked. So if you look at my junior high school papers, what I was doing for most of my classes was writing short stories. I was never going to be able to remember all the details that would be required to lay out a terse step-by-step outline. But I could remember the story arcs.”

  Douglas gradually realized how widely this technique could be used, but he was slowest to realize its relevance for math. “The breakthrough came in high school when I failed algebra. My dad’s a Ph.D. in physics, and my brother’s a Ph.D. in math, and one of my sisters is a practicing physicist working in nuclear power plants, so everyone but me is great in traditional math. When I failed, it forced me to look for something I did unusually well because I had to find some way to balance how awful I felt. I realized I could tell overall stories better than most people, and when I looked through what I had done wrong in algebra, I realized I was playing exactly to my weaknesses. I was not trying to make the math into a story. I was trying to memorize ‘step A, step B, step C’ by rote without creating any meaningful story about how they were connected, and that maximized my likelihood of failing.”1

  Though school remained hard, Douglas began to make slow but steady progress. After graduating from high school he went on to the University of Tulsa, where he discovered a special fondness for studying the big ideas and forces that shape our world, and for interdisciplinary approaches to those topics: “I have always been interested in the overlap between psychology, sociology, and history; the three work together to constrain what we can do, how we can do it, and how we view ourselves.”2 Unable to limit his focus to one subject, Douglas dual-majored in economics and sociology. In his spare time—which he claims to have had plenty of, as a self-described “can’t-get-a-date geek”—Douglas picked up another skill set that eventually played a big role in his life: he became an expert at cracking computer programs and in computer security.

  After college, Douglas combined his interests in big-picture questions, learning and cognition, and computing by pursuing a Ph.D. in cognitive science at Princeton, where he performed groundbreaking research on learning, decision making, and artificial intelligence. When we asked him what motivated him to study cognitive psychology, Douglas responded, “Pure vindictiveness. I’d spent a lot of my life thinking through tips and tricks and different ways to solve problems, and I thought it would be interesting to think through how you could model that problem solving—how to think about it and how to formally describe it.”

  As he studied these questions, Douglas realized that his insights into his own thinking could be useful for others, too. “When I investigated human problem solving, one of the things I studied was people learning math and programming—partially out of a sense of irony—and I found that even ‘normal’ people who are pretty good at the traditional rote skills do better if they form stories, wit
h starting and plot elements and end of a story, for even things like writing programs. Now, no one I studied did this to the extent that I did, but I demonstrated a huge problem-solving improvement when you teach ‘normies’ to do what I did instinctively. That’s something traditional schools could definitely teach to make their students more successful.”

  After earning his doctorate, Douglas went to work as an information scientist for the RAND Corporation, a prestigious think tank that researches public policy questions. At RAND, Douglas combined his expertise in decision making and computer security to perform studies for clients—including the U.S. government—on computer security and “information warfare,” or attempts by hostile entities to cripple an information system. Douglas found that his ability to think in stories and to see “the big picture” was incredibly useful in helping him imagine methods of attack that could exploit those weaknesses and to detect gaps in information security systems. Douglas also found that at RAND his big-picture, interdisciplinary, story-based thinking style was a perfect fit. As he told us, “RAND . . . is fundamentally a narrative place, so you’re telling policy stories about what ought to happen, backed up by data, and that plays really well to my strengths. I can work with the people who do the data analysis itself, and I can say, ‘Oh, here’s where we’re going.’ I didn’t understand that at the time, but that skill of being able to say, ‘You know, I think we’re going to head over there . . . ,’ was actually super useful—especially when I left to go into business.”

  Douglas’s unique combination of skills eventually brought him to the attention of private-sector recruiters and to a series of high-level jobs at Price Waterhouse, Charles Schwab, and eventually a small Bay Area start-up with the unlikely name of “Google,” where he served until 2008 as the chief information officer. Since leaving Google, Douglas has worked as president of Digital Music and COO of New Music for EMI Recorded Music, and he’s now heading his own start-up company. And he’s only just turned forty.

  When we were preparing to talk to Douglas, we noticed that in his previous interviews he’d often used analogies to make his points. We asked him whether detecting similarities was a key element of his thinking. “Absolutely, I love analogies. They’re my bread and butter . . . if you’ll let me use an out-of-date analogy. Often, the things I’m interested in doing arise from some analogy I come up with. I don’t understand what I’m doing until I have a few analogies to describe it. The first element of my storytelling is asking, ‘What’s the story going to be like?’ Then, for each major point, I brainstorm analogies.”

  When we asked him if he preferred to solve problems using interdisciplinary approaches and multiple perspectives, Douglas responded, “Yeah, totally. I just think there’s lots of different views on problems, and that by seeing more than one you’re better off.”3

  Clearly, Douglas is equipped with remarkable I-strengths. As you’ll see after you’ve read parts 5 and 6, he also has remarkable N- and D-strengths. So what about M-strengths, or the kind of spatial reasoning ability that many people think of as the characteristic dyslexic strength? Douglas laughed when we asked him. “I’m abysmal at spatial reasoning. If I close my eyes I can’t tell you which way my office door is from where I’m sitting. But what I can do is tell you that it’s nine turns from my office to my house, and they’re on average three blocks apart. So I don’t know where my house is from here, but I guarantee I can get you there.”

  Turns out that individuals with dyslexia with powerful I-strengths have many ways of making connections.

  CHAPTER 14

  Key Points about I-Strengths

  In the last few chapters we’ve discussed the critical role that Interconnected reasoning plays in the thinking of many individuals with dyslexia. Key points to remember about I-strengths include:• The ability to spot important connections between various kinds of information is an important—and possibly even the most important—dyslexic advantage.

  • I-strengths include the abilities to see relationships of likeness and “togetherness”; connections between perspectives and fields of knowledge; and big-picture or global connections that create heightened abilities in detecting gist, context, and relevance.

  • I-strengths appear to be enhanced in individuals with dyslexia because their brain microcircuitry is biased toward the creation of highly interconnected, long-distance circuits that favor top-down, global processing and the recognition of unusual relationships.

  • This structural and cognitive bias creates a trade-off between enhanced I-strengths and challenges with fast, efficient, and accurate fine-detail processing.

  • Dyslexic learners with prominent I-strengths can be greatly aided in learning by performing a few simple steps, including providing summaries or overviews of longer reading passages, pre-learning key vocabulary, providing information about the practical importance and usefulness of material being taught, tying in new information with things pre-existing knowledge, and beginning courses or units with an overview of the goals, “the big picture,” and outlining the lesson plan that will be followed.

  Interconnected Reasoning in Real Life

  Let’s close by examining how I-strengths have helped another highly talented individual with dyslexia: philosopher, thought leader, author, and corporate CEO Dov Seidman. As a younger student, Seidman struggled greatly in school. In fact, he jokes that his only two A’s in high school were in physical education and auto shop. Then, in college, his approach to learning was revolutionized by his serendipitous encounter with philosophy. As Seidman told us, “I fell in love with philosophy. With my professors’ encouragement, philosophy helped me overcome my dyslexic challenges. Unable to read hundreds of pages, philosophy rewarded me for the careful consideration of one idea, and my disability transformed into a strength.”

  Philosophy, at its roots, is the search for gist—for context and connections of all kinds. It focuses primarily on big-picture views rather than fine details, and Seidman found both that his mind was perfectly suited to philosophy and that philosophy was developing his mind in exciting ways.1 The methods and disciplines he learned through its study taught Seidman to see “through the words to the ideas that lay beneath them” and to focus on general principles—what we’ve been calling gist.

  Seidman found he had a natural ability to create frameworks for understanding the world, addressing how we as humans seek alignment in our relationships and among competing interests. Seidman went on to earn simultaneous bachelor’s and master’s degrees, summa cum laude, in philosophy from UCLA. He later earned a B.A. with honors in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University.

  Seidman then decided to test his blend of skills and interests at Harvard Law School, and immediately following he took a job in a large law firm. In his book, How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything . . . in Business (and in Life), Seidman describes what happened next: “Toiling away in the law library, it dawned on me that someone somewhere had researched the very issue I was working on, and inevitably knew more about it than I did (which was zero). I saw an opportunity to make legal knowledge accessible to a large number of people in business at a low price.”2

  Let’s pause for a moment to review what occurred. Seidman was performing the kind of routine legal research that thousands of young attorneys perform every day without ever deeply questioning what they’re really doing or why they’re doing it. But Seidman was different. His mind had become attuned to looking more deeply at the work he was engaged in, and this “philosophical habit” led him to step back from his task to search for its gist and context.

  Seidman’s search revealed two things: how redundant it was for him to research a topic that countless lawyers had previously researched, and the opportunity this redundancy provided to create a company that offered expert legal research on a wide range of topics. That’s how Seidman’s company, LRN, was born.

  As LRN grew, Seidman made another important discovery: “[T]he core of our efforts lay in
helping our clients put out fires by responding to legal challenges that had already arisen. I began to believe that we could be of better service by helping them . . . prevent these legal problems from arising in the first place.” In other words, rather than simply focusing on their immediate need for research, Seidman again stepped back to search for the underlying sources of that need.

  As Seidman analyzed the causes of his clients’ problems, it struck him that they weren’t ultimately best understood from a legal, regulatory, or compliance perspective but from the perspective of organizational and individual behaviors and the values that root and guide those behaviors. As Seidman told us, “the ancient philosopher Heraclitus once said character is fate, and corporations are analogous to individuals in having a character, patterns of behavior, and the capacity to earn a reputation.” These realizations led Seidman to conclude that the key to preventing corporate legal problems was to teach corporations to do everything they did—from managing employees to producing products to dealing with clients—the same way a person of good character would. In other words, Seidman combined the perspectives of philosophy, law, and business to create a new way of viewing the interactions, behaviors, interests, and obligations of individuals and corporations, which would lead to better corporate behaviors and to better business outcomes.