The Dyslexic Advantage Page 7
The Cognitive Basis of M-Strengths
There are two key components to exceptional M-strengths. The first is an imagery system that can stably store and accurately display spatial information in a mental spatial matrix. The second is skill in manipulating these mental images by rotating, repositioning, moving, or modifying them, or by making them interact or combine with other mental images.
Recently, researchers at the University College of London have discovered a set of specialized cells in the brain’s hippocampus (a complex structure at the base of the brain whose two seahorse-shaped lobes play many key roles in memory formation and spatial processing) that appear to be responsible for creating the brain’s mental matrix, or 3-D spatial lattice.15 They’ve named these cells “grid cells” because together they create a matrix of reference vectors that act like coordinate lines on a 3-D map.16
If it helps, you can picture these intersecting vectors as the bars of an infinite jungle gym. This spatial matrix allows us to plot information about where objects are in space—much like a 3-D GPS navigation system. This mental spatial coordinate system can help us interact with the real world, determining where we are in relation to other objects, or the sizes and shapes of those objects, or whether and how these objects are moving or changing in orientation. It can also help us reason about imaginary spatial environments or objects.
As we saw above, to be useful for real-world spatial reasoning, our spatial imagery must form a continuous 3-D web of interconnected perspectives. A simple “photographic snapshot”—no matter how vivid or detailed—is of limited use if it can’t be manipulated or connected with other views and perspectives. The spatial coordinate system created by the grid cells helps—in cooperation with other functional centers of the brain—to tie these perspectives together.
This spatial information can be presented or “displayed” to the mind as various forms of spatial imagery. The most obvious form of spatial imagery is visual.
An excellent example of a dyslexic individual with impressive M-strengths and a remarkably clear and lifelike visual display of spatial imagery is Canadian entrepreneur Glenn Bailey. After academic problems caused him to drop out of school, Glenn became a highly successful businessman. One of his many successful ventures has been the development and construction of residential real estate. Glenn described for us how his ability to generate and voluntarily manipulate vivid, lifelike, 3-D visual imagery often helps him in this business. “When I see a property I can instantly construct a new house on it. I can see exactly how that house is going to look, and I can walk through every room in that house, and out into the garden, and everywhere. I can turn those thoughts into reality. And that’s how my development company was created for high-end houses. Even right now, sitting here, I can do a detailed walkthrough in my mind of every house and property we’ve ever built.”
Although stories like Glenn’s might cause us to assume that strong visual imagery is essential for spatial reasoning, the experience of “MX” shows clearly that this assumption is false. MX was a retired building surveyor living in Scotland who’d always enjoyed a remarkably vivid and lifelike visual imagery system, or “mind’s eye.” Unfortunately, four days after undergoing a cardiac procedure MX awoke to discover that though his vision was normal, when he closed his eyes he could no longer voluntarily call to mind any visual images at all.17
MX was tested using a whole series of spatial reasoning and visual memory tasks. As a control, a group of high-visualizing architects performed the same tasks. Surprisingly, it was found that although MX could no longer create any mental visual images while performing these tasks, he scored just as well as the architects did. As he performed the tasks, MX’s brain was also scanned with fMRI technology. In contrast to the architects, who heavily activated the visual centers of their brains while solving these tasks, MX used none of his brain’s visual processing regions.
These studies suggested that while MX had lost his ability to perceive visual images when engaging in spatial reasoning, he could still access spatial information from his spatial database and apply it to Material reasoning tasks with no detectible loss of skill. In other words, MX had gone quite literally overnight from having remarkably vivid visual imagery to having none at all, without any apparent loss in his spatial imagery abilities. This is a dramatic demonstration of the difference between spatial reasoning and visual imagery.
Spatial imagery can actually be perceived in many ways besides clear, lifelike visual forms. As long as the hippocampus can create its spatial grid from information gathered through the senses, it seems relatively unimportant what form of imagery the individual uses to “read” or access this information. Think, for example, of a blind person who recalls the contours of a friend’s face: this spatial information is recalled in a nonvisual form, as a form of tactile or “muscular” (somatosensory) imagery, yet it can be every bit as accurate and detailed as visual imagery.
We can also demonstrate the variety of useful spatial imagery styles by examining what other individuals with dyslexia with impressive M-strengths have said about their own forms of spatial imagery. Let’s start with legendary physicist Albert Einstein.
In addition to having remarkable M-strengths, Einstein showed many dyslexia-related challenges, such as late-talking, difficulty learning to read, poor rote memory for math facts, and lifelong difficulty with spelling. Einstein described his own spatial imagery in the following way: “The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined.”18
This kind of abstract imagery is especially common among spatially talented physicists and mathematicians, for whom the flexibility of such imagery seems to be particularly valuable. Dyslexic mathematician Kalvis Jansons, a professor at University College in London, has written, “To me, abstract pictures and diagrams feel more important than words. . . . Many of my original mathematical ideas began with some form of visualization.”19
Jansons has also described experiencing spatial imagery in a completely nonvisual form—as feelings of movement, force, texture, shape, or other kinds of tactile or motor images: “It would be a mistake to believe . . . that non-verbal [spatial] reasoning has to involve pictures. For example, three-dimensional space can be equally well represented in what I often think of as a tactile world.”20 Jansons has employed this “tactile” spatial imagery in his professional work by using knots to study important principles of probability.
Dr. Matthew Schneps of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shared with us a related form of spatial imagery. Matt is an astrophysicist, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, and an individual with dyslexia. Matt described his spatial imagery to us as consisting of a feeling of movement or process—rather like a machine at work. When pursuing an idea or hypothesis, Matt sometimes feels like he’s activating a lever in a machine he imagines in space, in order to turn a series of gears and observe how the spatial map changes as he tests various configurations.
Dyslexic attorney David Schoenbrod described to us still another type of nonvisual spatial imagery. David is Trustee Professor of Law at New York Law School, a pioneer in the field of environmental law, and a key litigator in some of the most important environmental cases of the last fifty years, including the landmark lawsuits that led to the removal of lead from gasoline. He is also a talented sculptor, architect, landscape designer, and builder. David described his spatial imagery to us as a strong sense of spatial position unaccompanied by clear visual images: “In recalling autobiographical stories I recall spatial arrangements in some detail—like the layout of the room, the arrangement of the furniture, where the other people and I were, and the ordination to the points of the compass—but this recollection is neither lifelike nor schematic, but rather in grayscale, and almost vanishingly faint. In general,
I know the shape of things, but I don’t really see them. It strikes me that the fact that I see form more than color is why I have been more attracted to sculpting than painting.”
We’ve described these different forms of spatial imagery in some detail because we too often meet educators and individuals with dyslexia who believe that lifelike visual imagery is the key to spatial reasoning. As a result, they often overlook the value of other forms of spatial imagery. In truth, it doesn’t seem to matter much whether your mental imagery is lifelike and visual or whether it is abstract, positional, or movement or touch related. So long as you can use this imagery to understand spatial relationships, you can use it to make important comparisons and predictions, or to combine, change, or manipulate spatial data in various ways. The ability to reason spatially is highly valuable for many tasks and professions, and individuals with dyslexia are often blessed with prominent M-strengths. However, as we’ll discuss in the next chapter, M-strengths often come with several trade-offs.
CHAPTER 7
Trade-offs with M-Strengths
Two recurring themes in this book are, first, dyslexic advantages arise from variations in brain structure that have been selected for their benefit, and, second, these variations also bring “flip-side” trade-offs that can make certain tasks more difficult. As you’ll see, each of the MIND strengths has its own set of trade-offs, and M-strengths are no exception. We’ve seen one trade-off already, and that’s relative weakness in certain 2-D processing skills. While this weakness is of little consequence for most day-to-day functions, there’s one area where it can create important problems: symbol reversals while reading or writing.
Struggles with Symbols
We often encounter two opposite and equally mistaken beliefs about symbol reversals and dyslexia. The first is that all young children who flip symbols are dyslexic. The second is that symbol reversing is never associated with dyslexia. To sort out the truth about this topic, we must examine how spatial skills develop in the human brain.
No child is born with the ability to identify the 2-D orientation of printed symbols—or of anything else, for that matter. The ability to distinguish an object from its mirror image is actually an acquired skill, and it must be learned through experience and practice.
Over the last decade researchers have found that the newborn human brain forms two mirror-image views of everything it sees: one in the left hemisphere and the other in the right. Usually this duplicate imagery is helpful because it allows us to recognize objects from multiple perspectives, so that a toddler who’s been warned about a dog while looking at its left profile can recognize that same dog from its right.
Unfortunately, when trying to recognize the orientation of printed symbols—or any other item with a natural mirror, like a shoe or glove—this ability to generate mirror images becomes a burden. Before a child can reliably distinguish an image from its mirror, he or she must learn to suppress the generation of its mirror image.1
Some children have an especially hard time learning to suppress this mirroring function. When they first learn to write, many children will reverse not only symbols that have true mirrors (like p/q or b/d), but essentially all letters or numbers. For most children these mistakes begin to diminish after only a few repetitions. However, until the age of eight as many as one-third of children continue to make occasional mirror image substitutions when reading or writing. If such mistakes are only occasional and the child has no real difficulty with reading and spelling, these errors are neither important nor a sign of dyslexia.
However, for some truly dyslexic children—in our experience roughly one in four—letter reversals can be a much more persistent and important problem. These children may reverse whole words or even whole sentences, and at the single symbol level they may reverse not only “horizontal” mirrors like b/d or p/q, but also “vertical” mirrors like b/p, b/q, d/p, d/q, or 6/9. They may make so many reversals when reading that it worsens their comprehension.
Published studies have shown that many younger dyslexic children have more difficulty rapidly determining letter orientation than their nondyslexic peers, though this difficulty declines with age.2 In our experience persistent reversals—not just for letters and numbers, but even for drawings and other visual figures—are most often a problem for those who are most gifted with M-strengths. Leonardo da Vinci is an extreme example of this. His lifelong dyslexic difficulties in reading, word usage, syntax, and spelling were combined with phenomenal M-strengths. While many people are aware that Leonardo wrote his journals in mirror-image script, few know that he also drew many of his sketches and landscapes in mirror image.
We’ve worked with many individuals with dyslexia who’ve continued to reverse symbols when reading—or more commonly writing—well into their college years and beyond. Most of these individuals experience sporadic errors, but we met one student who unintentionally “lapsed” into writing full paragraphs in mirror image whenever she grew tired. Probably not coincidentally, she’s now a graduate student in architectural history.
One reason that spatially talented individuals with dyslexia may be especially susceptible to reversals is that their brains are just so good at rotating spatial images. Listen to dyslexic designer Sebastian Bergne: “If I’m designing an object, I know the exact shape in 3-D. I can walk around it in my head before drawing it. I can also imagine a different solution to the same problem.” 3 While this image flexibility may be useful when you’re trying to design a chair or a teapot, it’s less useful when you’re trying to read or write symbols on a 2-D surface. Dyslexic biochemist Dr. Roy Daniels was one of the youngest members ever elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, but even as an adult he still confuses mirrored letter pairs like b/d and p/q both when reading and when writing. To compensate, he does all his handwriting in capital letters, “to help me tell the difference between letters like b and d.”4 Dr. Daniels is far from unique in this regard.
It’s likely that difficulties with procedural learning, which we discussed in chapter 3, may contribute to these persistent reversals because the ability to turn off the symmetrical image generator is itself a kind of procedure that must be learned through practice.5 As a result, it will be mastered more slowly by individuals with dyslexia who show procedural learning challenges.6
Ease of Language Output
A second trade-off that we often see in individuals with dyslexia with prominent M-strengths is difficulty with language output. Parents and teachers are often puzzled to find that their bright dyslexic students struggle to answer apparently “simple” questions—especially in writing. This difficulty can be particularly intense when the questions are open-ended and students are given a great deal of latitude in how they respond. Difficulty answering questions of this kind is one of the most common reasons why older dyslexic students are brought to our clinic. We’ve found that this difficulty is often particularly bothersome for dyslexic individuals with high or even gifted-level verbal IQs, because the ideas these students are attempting to express are often so complex.
The research literature suggests several possible reasons why dyslexic individuals with impressive M-strengths may be especially vulnerable to expressive difficulties. First, some of the brain variations associated with dyslexia may enhance spatial abilities at the direct expense of verbal skills. Psychologists George Hynd and Jeffrey Gilger have described one such variation. In this structural variation, brain regions that are usually used to process word sounds and other language functions 7 are essentially “borrowed” and connected instead to brain centers that process spatial information. Drs. Hynd and Gilger first identified this brain variation in a large family with many members who showed both dyslexia and high spatial abilities. They then identified this same variation in the brain of Albert Einstein, who, as we’ve mentioned, displayed a similar combination of spatial talent and dyslexia-related language challenges.
Einstein’s comments on his own difficulties putting his i
deas into words provide useful insight into the challenges many of our high M-strength dyslexic individuals experience. Although Einstein eventually became a talented writer, he once complained that thinking in words was not natural for him, and that his usual mode of thinking was nonverbal. To communicate verbally he needed first to “translate” his almost entirely nonverbal thoughts into words. Einstein described the process this way: “[C]ombinatory play [with nonverbal symbols] seems to be the essential feature in productive thought—before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others. . . . Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously [italics added] only in a secondary stage.”8
We’ve found that many individuals with dyslexia—and especially those with prominent M-strengths—identify closely with Einstein’s descriptions both of his primarily nonverbal thinking style and of his difficulties in translating his thoughts into words. While translating nonverbal thoughts into words can be difficult at any stage of life, it is often especially difficult for children and adolescents, whose working memory capacities are still far from fully developed. This is likely one reason why children from families with a high degree of spatial and nonverbal attainment are often slower than other children to begin speaking.9