The Dyslexic Advantage Read online

  This is the narrow view of Christopher, Kristen, and James that emerges when we focus exclusively on their dyslexia-related challenges. Now let’s see how they appear when we broaden our focus to look instead at their strengths.

  One Dyslexic Family: A Second Look

  Christopher, at age nine, already shows many of the talents and abilities that are common among individuals with dyslexia. First, he shows very strong three-dimensional spatial abilities, which have revealed themselves in several ways since early in life. For example, when Christopher was only three, his family was staying at a large hotel, which had been formed by combining several older and very different structures into one enormous complex. After checking in at the front desk, the family walked for several minutes through a confusing labyrinth of passages to reach their room. Once there, they deposited their bags and walked out again in search of dinner. When they returned to the hotel several hours later, Christopher announced that he would lead the family back to their room. To his parents’ astonishment, he did so without a single hesitation or mistake.

  Christopher’s spatial abilities have also revealed themselves in his persistent love of building. Although he enjoys using just about any kind of building material, LEGOs are a special favorite, and he often spends hours using them to build complex and unique designs in a room in his house devoted solely to this purpose. He also displays a passionate interest in science and how things work.

  Christopher also shows many impressive verbal strengths, despite some persistent focal language challenges. He’s always had a great love of stories, and even before he could speak he would listen with rapt attention to the reading of lengthy stories, like The Velveteen Rabbit. Now that his reading skills have improved he’s become a voracious reader, and he reads for both entertainment and information. Despite his difficulties with verbal output, Christopher’s verbal scores were some of his strongest on his IQ testing.

  Kristen also appears much different when we look at her from this “broadened” perspective. Although her school career was marked by difficulty remembering many kinds of abstract verbal facts, Kristen’s memory is remarkably good in other ways. By mentally “tapping out” numbers on an imaginary keyboard, Kristen can recall a long list of phone numbers, including those of many places where she’s worked or lived and friends’ numbers stretching back into childhood.

  In addition, Kristen, like Christopher, has a very strong spatial sense and can quickly and indelibly learn her way around new environments. She also has a phenomenal visual memory for people and places from her past and can still easily “see” where she sat in all her school classes as a child, who sat around her, what many of them wore, and how the walls of her classrooms were decorated.

  Many—perhaps most—of Kristen’s memories have a strong contextual, personal, or “episodic” element, involving elements of past experience. Kristen experiences these memories like dramatic scenes playing out in her mind. They portray information about where she first encountered each fact, object, individual, fashion, song, or other remembered item, including whom she was with, what she saw or heard, and how she felt. Kristen also experiences a similar sensory-immersive experience of sounds, colors, touch sensations, and emotions when she reads or hears stories. As we’ll see in later chapters, this type of vivid episodic memory is extremely common in individuals with dyslexia, and it is often accompanied by weaknesses in abstract verbal, or semantic, memory.

  As with many of the strong “personal” learners with whom we work, Kristen also finds learning to be a very personal, almost intimate, act. During her years in school, this made her learning highly dependent upon her relationship with her teachers and her interest in her course materials.

  While Kristen’s memory skills are impressive, they did little to help her with her schoolwork—though, channeled properly, they clearly could have. Instead, her vivid recall of personal experiences often created a powerful inducement to daydream. As a result, it took a great deal of interesting “outside” stimulation from her teachers to hold her attention.

  Eventually, however, these cognitive traits became the foundation for Kristin’s highly successful career. After finishing college, Kristen went to work for a firm that designed and furnished office spaces. She quickly became one of the most productive design and sales representatives in this nationwide operation. Kristen credits much of her professional success to her spatial and personal memory skills, which allow her to imagine how interior spaces will look when changed in various ways. She also finds that her restless energy, drive, and dislike of desk work—all of which made it so hard for her to sit passively in class every day—are ideally suited for a job that requires visits to construction sites, suppliers’ showrooms, clients’ offices, and frequent phone calls to troubleshoot issues.

  Kristen’s father, James, also discovered that many of the cognitive features that troubled him in school became keys to his success in the working world. While inside the classroom he showed few early signs of promise, outside of school he displayed a remarkably bright and precocious mind. At age six he built his first radio-controlled boat, which he designed to include a special compartment to carry his lunch. He spent much of his time “taking things apart” to see how they worked, and his interest in electronics was further piqued when an electrician visited his home to install a new stove and took the time to demonstrate his tools and techniques.

  James also developed an interest in magnetism. When he was a student during World War II and dozens of sand buckets were brought to his school for fire safety, James demonstrated that the sand was full of iron by running a magnet through the buckets. Rather than receiving encouragement for his interest in experimental science, James was disciplined for “playing” in the sand.

  In tenth grade James finally found a science teacher who could answer his insightful questions and who was able to lead him into new and deeper areas of interest. Chemistry and physics became special passions, and he reveled in the pleasure of having a teacher who saw him as especially promising. In response, James not only completed all the required reading, but he also labored through several more advanced books. Outside of school, James strengthened his knowledge of electronics by working for the electrician who’d earlier befriended him. During the summer after his junior year of high school, James put this knowledge to work by building a commercial-grade AM radio station, which he sold to a local entrepreneur.

  After earning his degree in physics at Reed College, James went to work for Battelle Memorial Research Institute in Richland, Washington. There he quickly distinguished himself as a talented and creative inventor. He received his first patent for an electron beam welder, then he followed up with a steady stream of inventions that he created to solve problems for clients.

  However, James’s most famous invention had its origin not in a client’s problem but in one of his own. James has always loved classical music, and he loves to play his favorite recordings again and again and again. Back when all his music was stored on LP records, he was driven nearly crazy by the hisses, scratches, and skips that accumulated when he played his favorite records repeatedly. Seeking to eliminate the wear that came from repeated physical contact between a stylus and a grooved vinyl record, James imagined a system where an optical reader would detect digital information embedded on a small plate, with which it never made physical contact. Over the next several years, James invented the seven components that together became known as the compact disc system. The impact of this invention on data storage and retrieval—not just for music but for all types of information—has been profound. In fact, you’ll find James T. Russell’s compact disc system on many lists of the most important inventions of the twentieth century.

  Now nearing eighty, James is still active as an inventor. He has nearly sixty U.S. patents to his name and four more currently in process. He continues to work nine hours each day in the laboratory he’s built in his home, and he’s confident that his best inventions are still to come
.

  Dyslexia and Talent: An Essential Relationship

  The lives of James, Kristen, and Christopher—though in some ways unique—display many of the features we commonly observe in individuals with dyslexic processing styles. In fact, it was seeing these patterns repeated in the dyslexic families with whom we work that convinced us that certain strengths are as much a part of the dyslexic profile as challenges in reading and spelling.

  Please notice that we’re not saying merely that individuals with dyslexia can be talented in spite of their dyslexia—like Lance Armstrong overcoming cancer to become a seven-time Tour de France winner or Franklin D. Roosevelt overcoming polio to become president of the United States. Instead, we’re claiming that certain talents are as much a part of dyslexic processing as the better-known challenges—that the strengths and the challenges are simply two sides of the same neurological coin.

  We can explain what this connection is like using an example from the sport of baseball. Consider the following players:

  If you’re at all familiar with baseball, you’ll recognize at least a few of these names, and if you’re a real fan, you’ll recognize them all. These are some of the greatest stars who’ve ever played the game. Consequently, you may be surprised to learn that another thing they have in common is that all are among the top one hundred all-time “leaders” in striking out while at bat!

  This seems like a rather unwelcome distinction, since striking out is unquestionably a kind of mistake—like misspelling a word or misreading a sentence or writing illegibly. If you knew nothing more about these players than that they’d struck out more than almost all the other batters in major league history, you’d probably conclude that they were poor players. You might even conclude that they shared a kind of hitting disability, like “dysfunctional batting syndrome” or “contact deficit disorder.”

  However, one thing is certain: if you didn’t also know that these players are the top nineteen home-run hitters of all time, you’d have a highly incomplete—and seriously misguided—impression of their value and ability as players. Although striking out is clearly undesirable in itself, when viewed in the context of the game as a whole, we discover that even the greatest players strike out a lot if they swing hard enough and often enough to hit a lot of home runs. Since avoiding strikeouts isn’t as important in baseball as scoring runs—which these big-swinging home-run hitters did extremely well—the list of strikeout leaders turns out, rather surprisingly, to be a list of some of baseball’s greatest winners, not its losers.

  This relationship between home runs and strikeouts is a lot like the connection between the strengths and challenges in dyslexia. The “home runs” that dyslexic brains have been structured to “hit” are not perfect reading and spelling but skills in other kinds of complex processing that we’ll discuss throughout this book. And it’s because dyslexic brains have been organized to make these “home runs” possible that they’re also at higher risk for “striking out” when they try to decode or spell words. The weaknesses are simply the flip side of the strengths.

  Discovering these strengths—and how they can be used to help individuals with dyslexia find success in the classroom and the workplace—is what this book is all about. We’ll begin our search for these strengths in part 2, where we’ll look at how dyslexic brains have been shown to differ from nondyslexic ones, both in how they work and in how they’re structured. As you’ll see, these differences aren’t responsible for just the challenges associated with dyslexia; they’re the source of important advantages as well.

  PART II

  How Dyslexic Brains Differ

  CHAPTER 3

  Differences in Information Processing

  Before we discuss some of the key differences between dyslexic and nondyslexic brains, let’s take a moment to look at the behaviors or “symptoms” associated with dyslexia that these differences are intended to explain. We’ll begin by listing dyslexia-associated challenges, because that’s what experts have usually focused on.

  The first challenges that many children with dyslexia display involve language. Some dyslexic children are late-talking. Many others alter, leave out, or reverse word parts (e.g., berlapse/relax, wold/world, pasghetti/spaghetti) or even invent their own unique words for things. Dyslexic individuals often struggle to retrieve words from memory, and they may be slow to master the use of tenses, cases, pronouns, or other grammatical rules.

  In the preschool or early elementary years dyslexic children often struggle to perceive rhymes, and many have difficulty learning to break words into their component sounds (e.g., c-a-t) or learning the names and sounds of different letters. Early in school most—but not all—dyslexic children will show obvious struggles with reading and spelling. (A few, whom we’ve elsewhere called stealth dyslexics, have problems so subtle or “stealthy” that they evade early detection and often only come to attention later for problems with writing or underperformance.)1

  Many dyslexic students also show problems with handwriting and written expression; basic arithmetic and rote memory for math facts; processing speed; motor coordination; mishearing and difficulty hearing in background noise; visual function for near work; following directions; keeping information in their mind (working memory); mastering procedures; planning and organization; error detection; time awareness and pacing; sequencing; and mental focus and attention. Individuals with dyslexia may also show subtle difficulty in learning the rules that describe how words work together in groups (grammar and syntax). These latter problems are often recognized only in the middle to upper elementary grades when students are asked to express more complex ideas and to read or write more structurally complex sentences.

  This list of challenges may make it seem that individuals with dyslexia face a whole host of different “problems.” Actually, all these findings can be traced back to a small number of variations in brain structure and function. It’s only because these variations occur in basic processing systems that are used for many different functions that they can give rise to such a wide variety of “symptoms.”2 For most individuals with dyslexia, it’s likely that only a very few underlying variations are responsible for all their dyslexia-associated findings. This is true even for many of the individuals with dyslexia who receive multiple diagnoses, like dyslexia “plus” attention deficit disorder, dyspraxia, developmental coordination disorder, or auditory processing disorder.

  In this chapter and the next, we’ll look at four important brain variations that have been found to be associated with dyslexia. We’ll examine how these variations in brain function or structure may be responsible for both the dyslexia-associated challenges we’ve listed and the dyslexic advantages we’ll discuss in later chapters. Let’s begin, in this chapter, by looking at two dyslexia-associated variations in information processing (or cognition).

  Phonological Processing

  The first pattern we’ll discuss is a variation in the brain’s phonological (or “word sound”) processing system. This system is used to process phonemes, the basic sound components in words. English has approximately forty-four phonemes, and just as the letters of our alphabet can be strung together to form printed words, phonemes can be strung together to form all the spoken words in English.

  For the past thirty years most reading specialists have favored the phonological impairment theory as the most likely explanation of the brain basis of dyslexic reading and spelling problems. Think back for example to the definition of dyslexia cited in chapter 1, which states that dyslexia-associated reading and spelling difficulties “typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language.”

  There are several good reasons for believing that phonological impairments play a key role in causing dyslexic reading and spelling challenges. Problems with phonological processing have been found in at least 80 to 90 percent of individuals with dyslexia, and they can clearly contribute to many of the challenges mentioned earlier in this chapter. The role that phonological
processing impairments play in the reading and spelling challenges many individuals with dyslexia display has been especially well worked out. While we’ll save a fuller discussion of this role for our chapter on reading, there are several key points we should mention here.

  The phonological processing system plays a key role in analyzing and manipulating the sound structures of words. Many of these functions are important for matching word sounds and the letters used to represent them—that is, for mastering the rules of phonics which underlie decoding (or sounding out words) and encoding (or spelling words). Two of the most important phonological processing (or phonological awareness) tasks underlying these skills are sound segmentation (or the ability to split incoming words into their component sounds) and sound discrimination (or the ability to distinguish word sounds from one another). Most individuals with dyslexia struggle with one or both of these tasks and as a result have difficulty mastering the basic skills underlying reading and spelling.

  Even though phonological processing involves low-level or fine-detail language processing—that is, processing of the most basic building blocks of language—it forms the foundation for the entire language structure and supports many of the higher language functions. That’s why severe problems with phonological processing can cause difficulty at all levels of language, such as mastering word meanings, learning how words interact when used in groups (that is, grammar and syntax), and understanding how words work together to form “discourse-level” messages like paragraphs or essays. When the higher-order language problems resulting from phonological impairments are severe, they are called “specific language impairment,” but the underlying process remains the same.