The Dyslexic Advantage Read online

  In fact many (though not all) high M-strength individuals with dyslexia reason in largely nonverbal ways and often find it difficult to translate their thoughts into words. This means that they will often show a gap between their conceptual understanding and their ability to express or demonstrate that understanding in words. It’s important that those who work with these individuals be sensitive to this challenge. There’s a long and quite shameful tradition among certain psychologists and educators of treating “nonverbal reasoning” as if it were at best a poor cousin of verbal reasoning and at worst a kind of oxymoron—like “civil war” or “act naturally.”

  In fact, nonverbal reasoning is real, scientifically demonstrable, and often a key component of creative insights of all kinds, and it deserves to be taken seriously in all its forms. While students with dyslexia should try their best to express their thoughts in words, it’s also critical that parents, teachers, and later employers learn to recognize that some valid forms of reasoning may be difficult to put into words and may be better expressed as drawings, diagrams, or other forms of nonverbal representation.

  Besides this fairly direct trade-off between spatial and verbal ability, studies have also demonstrated a more indirect way that strong spatial and visual imagery skill can hinder verbal functions. Dr. Alison Bacon and her colleagues at the University of Plymouth in England asked dyslexic and non-dyslexic college students to supply a valid conclusion to a series of syllogisms for which they’d been given major and minor premises.10 For example, if they were given the premises “All dogs are mammals” and “Some dogs have fleas,” they were asked to provide a conclusion, such as, “Some mammals have fleas.”

  The researchers found that the dyslexic students reasoned just as well as their nondyslexic peers when they were given premises that provoked little imagery (e.g., all a are b, no b are c, how many a are c?), or when the visual imagery contributed directly to the solution of the syllogism (e.g., some shapes are circles, all circles are red, how many shapes are red?). However, when the syllogisms contained terms that provoked strong visual imagery unrelated to the reasoning process (e.g., “Some snowboarders are jugglers, all horsewomen are snowboarders, how many horsewomen are jugglers?”), the dyslexic students performed significantly worse than the nondyslexics. The authors concluded that their vivid mental imagery was swamping their working memory and hindering their verbal reasoning.

  This potentially distracting role of visual imagery has important implications for how we teach dyslexic students with strong imagery abilities. Think, for example, how needlessly burdened a student with strong imagery abilities will be by visually elaborate story problems in math. Many teachers have been taught that using imagery helps children with strong spatial and visual skills, but this is true only if the imagery is directly useful for solving a problem. Irrelevant imagery is distracting and worsens performance.

  A final point to remember about language development in individuals with dyslexia—and especially those with prominent M-strengths—is that their language is simply developing along a different pathway than that followed by their nondyslexic peers. The brain systems that help “translate” non-verbal ideas into words are some of the latest-developing parts of the brain. For many children and adolescents with dyslexia, difficulty putting complex ideas into words is a normal feature of development and one that diminishes with maturity. That’s why their progress must be judged by its own standards, rather than by standards that apply to the nondyslexic population. Focusing too much on their challenges can make us overlook their special strengths, as we observed with one very special child, Max.

  CHAPTER 8

  M-Strengths in Action

  As an infant Max was late to start talking, and when he finally began to speak it was in a language all his own: ma was water, dung gung was vacuum cleaner, and wow wow was pacifier. When he started preschool at age three and a half, Max’s mother remembered, he had difficulty “catching on to things that the other kids seemed to simply absorb. He never learned the songs or rhymes, couldn’t remember the names of the other kids, and could rarely retell what happened during the day.” In first grade he went to a Montessori school, but “he didn’t ‘discover’ academic knowledge and skills on his own. He needed to be explicitly taught.”

  Through the end of first grade Max made little progress in reading, math, or writing. He seemed to have a hard time staying focused. He also struggled to retrieve words and information from memory. His kindergarten and first-grade teachers found that he seemed to learn much better one-on-one than in a large class, so Max’s mother decided to homeschool him for second grade.

  One-on-one, Max slowly began to learn. Although he still required frequent repetitions and refocusing, by the end of second grade he was reading—slowly—and his writing began to take off (though it largely left his spelling behind). The following is a response he wrote to the question “Tell me about going to the [Seattle] Science Center”: we went a long wae and thin we wint in sid. And we qplab [played] with the ecsuvatr [excavator] and thin we trid too pla with the tic tac toe mushen [machine] and thin we wint too the bug thing and thin we wint too the binusho [dinosaur] thing and thin we wint toe the ecsuvatr and thin we left.

  Outside of school, Max found plenty to occupy his time. When he was a toddler he became fascinated by wires and circuits, and as he grew older he developed a sophisticated interest in electronics. He especially liked experimenting with small-scale power generation, using sources like solar, wind, and water to generate electricity.

  Max also developed a deep interest in nature, and he loved to spend time in the woods surrounding his home near Seattle. Max laid out a nature trail on his family’s property, but as many Northwesterners have learned, he soon found that “walking” plus “woods” equals “wet feet.” So Max began to install an elaborate series of drains to remove the standing water that collected across his trail. He also built bridges over the spots he couldn’t drain. Max’s drainage project was remarkable for a child not yet ten years old. Not surprisingly, it did draw remarks—from psychologists.

  When Max was in fourth grade his mother took him to be evaluated for his difficulties with schoolwork. The psychologist diagnosed ADHD. This seemed plausible given Max’s problems with auditory-verbal working memory, distractibility, and lack of focus for schoolwork. However, the psychologist was also concerned by Max’s “intense” interest in electronics and drainage, his focus on solitary pursuits, and his difficulty talking with—and like—other children. So in addition to ADHD, the psychologist diagnosed Max with Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. As one of his recommendations, the psychologist suggested that Max take social skills classes.

  Although Max’s mother questioned the Asperger’s diagnosis, she agreed that Max needed to improve his social skills, so she took him to see a speech-language pathologist (SLP). Fortunately, the SLP understood that social skills consist largely of complex rules for behavior that have been learned and practiced until they’ve become habits. Under the SLP’s supervision, Max was taught social skills in a clear and explicit manner, and he practiced them during structured interactions with another child until these skills became automatic.

  Max continued to improve both socially and academically. Between ages seven and a half and ten his reading vocabulary shot up from the 35th to the 98th percentile, and his math calculation rose from the 45th to the 99.9th. However, he still showed the lower Working Memory and Processing Speed scores that we typically find in our “young engineers.”

  At that point, Max was making great strides in most areas, though his reading comprehension and fluency lagged behind his conceptual abilities, and his writing remained slow. He also made frequent errors in his writing with spelling, conventions, sentence structure (syntax), and organization. The following is an essay that Max wrote at age ten, which he entitled, “The Derte road.”

  This trip we whent to bary my Grate Grandma on this dert road. So when we got on the road in
are fourrunner my teeth were chattring but they stoped when we got on the bumpy port. It was 13 miles in to the drte road so I just relaxed . . .

  We met Max shortly before his eleventh birthday. While the “numbers” from our testing mostly confirmed what others had found, our interpretation was somewhat different. We identified his challenges with reading and writing fluency, spelling, syntax, rote and working memory, focused attention for auditory-verbal material, processing speed, sequencing, and organization, but we also found many of the wonderful strengths that individuals with dyslexia often show. Max showed tremendous spatial and nonverbal reasoning powers, his understanding of math concepts was amazing, and his ability to interact knowledgeably on a wide range of complex scientific subjects was extremely impressive. We were also struck by the intellectual “flavor” Max displayed as he approached his work. He showed a charming naïveté and inventiveness on many tasks that children his age usually dash through without even giving a thought, so although his work was slower it was often more creative. Max also made many interesting observations that showed how his mind was reaching out to probe the connections between ideas.

  We also discovered several important details about Max’s family. Max’s father has a Ph.D. in chemistry, and his mother has a degree in biochemistry—both high M-strength fields. Max’s mother also has dyslexia-related processing traits and talents. Although she struggled with reading and writing as a child, she now works as a medical writer. Both of Max’s maternal grandparents were also scientists, and Max’s great-grandmother has often remarked how much Max reminds her of his grandfather when he was a boy. Perhaps “family resemblance” provides a better explanation for Max’s “intense” interest in drainage and erosion than autism, since his grandfather spent his career as a professor of geophysics at UCLA.

  Ultimately, we made several suggestions to help Max in areas where he still struggled, but we also explained that in the most important respects Max was right on target for his development—that is, for the kind of late-blooming growth and maturation that children display when they combine dyslexic processing, outstanding M-strengths, and procedural learning challenges.

  M-Strengths and Development

  We’ve shared Max’s story because we want you to see what dyslexic children with impressive M-strengths look like while they’re still developing—before their mature talents are fully apparent. While it’s enormously helpful to look at the childhoods of successful dyslexic adults, sometimes the perspective provided by hindsight can make their successes seem almost inevitable—as if their challenges weren’t really so severe, and they were never really at risk of failure. Somehow these stories can lack the power to convince us that the slow, awkward, inarticulate, inattentive, and dyslexic early elementary child before us might actually have a chance to become one of the great engineers, architects, designers, mechanics, inventors, surgeons, or builders of the twenty-first century. Yet this is often unquestionably true.

  We constantly meet skeptics who respond by pointing out that not every child will become an Albert Einstein or an Isaac Newton. This is true, but even Einstein and Newton didn’t look like “Einstein” and “Newton” in second grade: Einstein was remembered as a slow, uncooperative child with a nasty temper who repeated everything he said (echolalia), while Newton was remembered as a simpleton whose only apparent use was to make small wooden toys for his sisters and schoolfellows.

  Even though evidence of classroom success may be thin for many high M-strength children with dyslexia, they often display their creative potential quite clearly outside the classroom, in their desires to build, experiment, draw, and create. Recall compact disc inventor James Russell building his remote-control boat at age six, Lance Heywood “tinkering” on his electronics projects, or Max building his nature trail and experimenting with solar power. These activities should be taken much more seriously because for a dyslexic child with substantial M-strengths, a toy is never “just a toy” or a drawing “just a doodle.” These activities provide a window into their future, and failure to regard them seriously does these children a grave disservice. One amazing young child with dyslexia whom we saw in our clinic built a K’nex structure so elaborate that it won second prize in a nationwide competition; yet when he brought it to school and asked his teacher if he could show it to the class he was told, “We don’t have time for that; we have important work to do.” Another was scolded by his teacher for doodling: “If you spend all day drawing buildings on your papers, you’ll never get anywhere.” Ironically, this child’s father is a successful architect who makes his living in just that way.

  When he was young, pioneering neurosurgeon Dr. Fred Epstein showed a sustained interest only in mechanical activities, like building elaborate model airplanes. Because of his dyslexia, Epstein barely made it through college and was initially rejected by all twelve of the medical schools to which he applied. However, as an adult Epstein developed many new and highly innovative surgical techniques for treating previously inoperable spinal cord tumors—techniques that saved literally thousands of children’s lives. It’s important to realize that when Epstein was devising these techniques he wasn’t using skills he’d picked up in some classroom but the skills he’d developed at his workbench in the garage, building model airplanes.1

  To identify our next generation of talented engineers, inventors, and physicists, we shouldn’t be using pencil-and-paper “talent searches” or seeing who’s fastest at the “mad math minutes.” We should be searching for spatial prodigies in LEGO Stores and hobby shops—just like athletic scouts hang around ball fields. Many of our next generation’s great Material reasoners are currently struggling in school while their talents are going unrecognized, and we owe it to them to pay closer attention to the ways that they typically develop.

  CHAPTER 9

  Key Points about M-Strengths

  Material reasoning—the ability to reason about the physical characteristics of objects and the material universe—represents one of the most common and important talent sets found in individuals with dyslexic processing styles. Key points to remember about M-strengths are:• The ultimate purpose of M-strengths is to create a continuous, interconnected series of 3-D perspectives as a basis for reasoning about real-world, global, or big-picture spatial features, rather than about fine-detail or 2-D features.

  • The spatial imagery perceived by individuals with M-strengths may take many forms, from clear visual imagery to nonvisual perceptions like force, shape, texture, or movement.

  • The form that spatial imagery takes is less important than the uses to which the reasoner can put it.

  • M-strengths often bring trade-offs like symbol reversals and subtle language challenges.

  • Individuals with dyslexia in general—and those with prominent M-strengths in particular—show a late-blooming pattern of development, and their developmental progress should be judged on its own terms, rather than by standards created to judge nondyslexics.

  • Individuals with dyslexia who show prominent M-strengths may struggle in the early grades but often show signs of impressive creativity outside the classroom.

  • Dyslexic children with prominent M-strengths have tremendous potential and often grow up to become remarkable and creative people.

  Let’s end this section by returning full circle to where we began: with Lance Heywood and his family. Not long after we interviewed Lance, we got a call from his wife, Jenny. She had some questions about their older son, Daniel. We’d seen Daniel in our clinic several years earlier. Like his father, Daniel is dyslexic; and like his father, Daniel has remarkable M-strengths.

  For the last five years, Daniel has supplemented his homeschooling curriculum with courses at a state university. His coursework has focused on the spatially related disciplines in which he excels, like physics and higher math. Like his father, Daniel often solves problems in his own unique ways, rather than using procedures he’s been shown in class; but he usually gets the answers righ
t, as his outstanding grades attest.

  Daniel’s also been a member of the university’s robotics team, and for the last several years he’s traveled with them to compete against other universities. One year he designed a crucial component for the team’s Mars rover, which finished second in a national competition.

  Jenny informed us that Daniel was now applying for full-time enrollment at several colleges with strong engineering and biorobotics programs. Daniel wants to learn to build medical devices for people with physical disabilities. Jenny mentioned one of the schools to which Daniel was applying, and we told her we had a contact there Daniel might like to meet—the department chair, in fact.

  We’d seen her children. For dyslexia.

  PART IV

  I-Strengths Interconnected Reasoning

  CHAPTER 10

  The “I” Strengths in MIND

  “Everything is about relationships. Things are as they are because of their relationships with everything else. You can’t just look at anything in isolation.”

  As Jack Laws spoke to us by phone from his home in San Francisco, it became clear that his view of relationships and interconnection wasn’t just a throwaway line but a true expression of his way of understanding and experiencing the world. It’s a view he’s shared with the growing number of readers of his amazing field guides on the wildlife of California, published under the name his parents gave him in tribute to another great California naturalist: John Muir Laws.

  Anyone who’s read Jack’s field guides or attended his lectures knows that he’s a teacher of exceptional skill. But as a child Jack never expected he’d have anything to teach because he found it so hard to learn.