The Dyslexic Advantage Read online

  Jack was in the second or third grade when he first realized “there was something odd going on with my brain.” Even though he was clearly bright and hardworking, he seemed unable to learn many things his classmates mastered easily, like reading, getting his letters to face the right way, and memorizing math facts.

  Jack’s parents took him for evaluation, and he was given a diagnosis of dyslexia. Targeted learning therapy greatly reduced—but didn’t eliminate—his challenges with reading, spelling, writing, and math. “The therapists tried to tell my teachers how to help me learn, but the diagnosis of ‘dyslexia’ wasn’t a part of their training, and they weren’t in a place where they could really hear it. This was new stuff, and I had teachers who thought that the best way to make me learn was to embarrass me more in front of the rest of the students—and that didn’t really work for me. So I was bumped around to a number of different schools. I was smart enough to see that other kids could do this stuff, but try as I might I couldn’t, and over time I became increasingly convinced that I just wasn’t one of the ‘smart kids.’”

  While Jack got little encouragement in the classroom, outside of school there were several “bright rays of light” that buoyed his spirit and encouraged the growth of his mind. “My dad was an amateur bird-watcher, and my mom was an amateur botanist; so on all of our family trips we would study nature together. I kept field notes of my observations, but it was difficult for me to write; so instead I made lots of diagrams and sketches of the birds that I would see, and the flowers I would find, and what the bugs were doing, and those sorts of things. Those notebooks became my way of training myself to look more closely at the world around me. If I wanted to sketch an object, I had to look at it again, and again, and again, and I discovered that even the most common things still held secrets and discoveries for me.”

  It was on these family outings that Jack first recognized that an intricate web of relationships connected everything in nature. “On these family trips, I was either down on my belly looking at flowers with Mom, or finding birds with Dad, or exploring around the mountain meadows catching frogs. So I wasn’t just out in flowers, or out in birds: I was out in a place that had all of these different elements, and they were interacting with each other. So my sketchbooks were full of whatever I was looking at—not only bugs or only birds, but from a very early start, I was actually looking at ecosystems.”

  Jack’s other “bright ray” was Scouting. “I had a wonderful experience in Boy Scouting. I became an Eagle Scout and a leader in my troop, and I discovered that I could tie the fastest bowline knot in the San Francisco Bay Area Council. I was really good at leading a group of kids . . . solving problems . . . helping people get along with each other . . . demonstrating first-aid skills. And I really did well with map reading: I could look at a topographical map and the landform would three-dimensionally pop out at me, and I could route-find better than anybody else. That helped me have more self-confidence, which was a really important part of my childhood. But academically . . . school: not so much.”

  It wasn’t until his sophomore year of high school that Jack finally began to find his way as a student. Appropriately enough his breakthrough came from connections he made with two of his teachers, one in biology and the other in history. Jack credits the profound impact they exerted on his life to the fact that they “stopped looking at my spelling and started looking at the content of what I was writing. There was a revolution in my brain because they helped me see that I had good ideas—I just couldn’t spell them right. And when I finally realized that those were two different things, that was huge for me. It still took me forever to finish things, but for these two teachers I would have done anything. Between the two of them, in one semester they turned me around: they just opened up the door, and I went through it and started running. It was tremendously exciting. My life, and the turns that it has taken, is very much due to their influence.”

  While Jack considered careers in both history and biology, he realized, “If I went the history route I’d have to read a lot more and write a lot more, but with biology I could run around outside and listen to birds.”

  Jack’s choice of biology—and his life’s vision for his work—was finally (and fittingly) crystallized on a school trip when his class hiked the John Muir Trail. “On that trip I started fantasizing about a perfect field guide that would have full-color pictures of everything I was seeing.”

  For years the production of that field guide would remain Jack’s cherished goal and the subject of countless daydreams. “I could visualize whole sections of the book and what the pages would look like and how I would organize it.”

  The next few years were a time of tremendous growth for Jack. “At the end of high school and going into college I was getting the idea that there were different things I could do to compensate for the things I struggled with. Once you realize that you’ve got something really good inside you to share, then dyslexia becomes a much smaller obstacle, and you learn to compensate and deal with it.” Recorded books and a word processor with spell-check were especially helpful in allowing Jack to succeed in school. “Not being afraid of technology and embracing what can help you is crucial. I still can’t spell and I still don’t know my multiplication tables, and I’ve never read a book from cover to cover without books on tape, but hey—it’s okay! I’m doing just fine.” “Just fine” for Jack includes a bachelor’s degree in conservation and resource studies from the University of California–Berkeley, a master’s in wildlife biology from the University of Montana, and a degree in scientific illustration from the University of California–Santa Cruz.

  After completing this training, “I picked up my backpack and headed up to the Sierra Nevada and started painting wildflowers and animals. I didn’t stop for the next six years.”

  We mentioned to Jack that the marvelous empathy for his subjects that he conveys in his field guides reminds us of the remarkable ability to “get inside” the minds of animals that we’ve seen many children with dyslexia display. “It’s funny you should say that,” he responded. “My connection with nature is not just an intellectual one. It’s deeply spiritual, and empathic. . . . ” When I give lectures about natural history, all these animals in my head are not just balls of factoids about this species or that species, but they’re characters, they have personalities, I give them voices. Some people are very careful not to anthropomorphize the species that they see—and of course it’s not scientifically correct to project a human perspective on all the things around you; but while I recognize that my human perspective is different than the world that’s perceived by a wolverine, I still find myself constantly speaking for the wolverine or the pika and essentially trying to put myself in their shoes and give commentary about things from their perspective.

  “I sometimes get this vision: I’ll sit in a place, and I’ll lean my back against a tree, and I’ll look at something, and I’ll think, ‘How does that relate to something else that’s here?’” Then I’ll imagine a sort of colored line of energy going between those two things. Then I’ll look at another thing and see how that relates to it, and I start trying to actually picture in my head the web in front of me of relationships between things: a three-dimensional web. And I start thinking to myself, ‘This is just some of the stuff that I’ve experienced or studied about,’ and there are so many more that I don’t know about or understand.

  “John Muir said when you try to pick out any one thing by itself, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe. And the more we dig around as scientists and biologists, the more we see that that is absolutely true. You can’t just look at anything in isolation. I don’t know if seeing connections is easier for me, but sometimes I can actually visualize them. I just imagine the dense web of networks floating in front of me, and it’s very clear to me that I’m a part of that web, as well: those lines are connecting to me, and I’m connecting to those lines.”

  Interconnected Reasoning: A Web of Meaning


  Jack Laws is an outstanding example of an individual with impressive I-strengths, or Interconnected reasoning. Individuals with prominent I-strengths often have unique ways of looking at things. They tend to be highly creative, perceptive, interdisciplinary, and recombinatory. No matter what they see or hear, it always reminds them of something else. One idea leads on to the next. We often hear from their parents, teachers, spouses, and colleagues things like, “They just see connections that other people miss,” or “She’ll often say things that seem so off topic, then five minutes later I’ll finally get it and see that she jumped right to the key issue.”

  I-strengths create exceptional abilities to spot connections between different objects, concepts, or points of view. They include:• The ability to see how phenomena (like objects, ideas, events, or experiences) are related to each other, either by “likeness” (similarity) or “togetherness” (that is, association, like correlation or cause and effect).

  • The ability to see phenomena from multiple perspectives, using approaches and techniques borrowed from many disciplines.

  • The ability to unite all kinds of information about a particular object of thought into a single global or big-picture view and to determine its gist, or most essential or relevant aspects in particular contexts.

  You may wonder as you view this list how individuals with dyslexia could excel at making complex connections like these when they struggle to form connections that most people make easily—like the connections between sounds and symbols, or between basic math equations and their answers. The answer to this apparent paradox is easy: not all connections are alike.

  In part 1, we saw that M-strengths help to create a 3-D spatial matrix that can be used to understand and manipulate spatial information, and that this spatial matrix is especially useful for understanding global or big-picture spatial relationships. In this part, we’ll see that I-strengths also work to create a multidimensional matrix, but this matrix is conceptual rather than spatial. Like the spatial matrix, this conceptual matrix aids in organizing and manipulating information, and it appears to reflect dyslexic strength in forming large-scale brain circuits that are especially suitable for processing big-picture connections rather than fine details. In the next chapter we’ll examine the three kinds of I-strengths that form the “dimensions” of this conceptual matrix.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Advantages of I-Strengths

  The power of Interconnected reasoning lies in its ability to link all of an individual’s knowledge, ideas, and mental approaches into an integrated conceptual matrix. This integrated matrix is incredibly powerful because it allows objects of thought to be approached from many different angles, levels, and perspectives, so they can be seen in new ways, related to other phenomena, and understood in a larger context. The three core skills, or I-strengths, that help form this conceptual matrix are the abilities to detect relationships between different objects of thought, the ability to shift perspectives or approaches, and the ability to reason using a global or top-down perspective.

  Strength in Perceiving Relationships

  The first I-strength is the ability to detect relationships between phenomena like objects, ideas, events, or experience. These relationships are of two types: relationships of “likeness” (similarity) and “togetherness” (or association, such as correlation or cause and effect).

  Relationships of likeness can link physical objects, ideas, concepts, sensations, emotions, or information of any kind, and the likenesses may range from highly literal to purely figurative. Some individuals with dyslexia excel at detecting only particular types of relationships (for example, those linking visual patterns or those linking verbal concepts), while others show more general strengths.

  Several published research studies support the idea that individuals with dyslexia, as a group, show special talents for finding similarities and likenesses. In a paper published in 1999, English psychologists John Everatt, Ian Smythe, and Beverly Steffert compared the performances of dyslexic college students and their nondyslexic classmates on two tests of visual-spatial creativity. 1 Both tests measured the ability to recognize similarities between different objects or shapes—that is, to see how one thing could represent or replace another. The first was an “alternative uses” task, in which the students were asked to name as many uses as they could think of either for soda cans or for bricks. The second was a “picture production” task, in which the students were asked to form as many different pictures as they could using five different geometric shapes.

  The results were striking. On both tasks the students with dyslexia handily outperformed their nondyslexic peers, imagining 30 percent more possibilities on the alternative uses task and drawing over one-third more pictures on the picture production task. Everatt later reported similar results when he tested younger individuals with dyslexia.2

  We’ve noticed that many of the individuals with dyslexia we see in our clinic show remarkable strengths in detecting similarities among objects, structures, or physical patterns. Many are amazingly skilled at recognizing the works of particular designers, artists, or architects by their characteristic style, often before they’re old enough to read. Many are also prolific inventors, builders, or sculptors. They often show special skill in adapting whatever materials they find at hand to construct their projects, demonstrating an unusual ability to see analogies between these “spare parts” and other objects. On our Dyslexic Advantage website (http://dyslexicadvantage.com) you can see an outstanding example of this ability in the work of Mariel, a talented student with dyslexia who—like Jack Laws—is a gifted naturalist as well as an artist. When she was eleven, Mariel won a highly competitive regional art competition with one of her “junk sculptures” made from bits and pieces of discarded objects.

  Many individuals with dyslexia are also highly skilled in detecting similarities between words and verbal concepts. These connections can include analogies, metaphors, paradoxes, alternate word or concept meanings (especially more distant or “secondary” meanings), sound-based similarities (like homonyms, rhymes, alliterations, or “rhythmically” similar words), and similarities in attributes or categories (like physical appearance, size, weight, composition, and uses and functions).

  We first noticed that individuals with dyslexia often excel in spotting verbal or conceptual connections during our testing sessions, when we observed differences in how individuals with dyslexia understood and employed words and verbal concepts. As we discussed in chapter 4, when processing a word or concept, many individuals with dyslexia activate an unusually broad “field” of possible meanings, rather than a tightly focused one. As a result, they are less likely to respond first with the primary or most common answers, and more likely to give unusual or creative answers, or a range of possible meanings and relationships.

  For certain tasks, this perception of broader conceptual linkages can create an advantage. For example, individuals with dyslexia often show exceptional strength in spotting associations in tasks that require them to connect items conceptually. In one task that’s a part of a common IQ test, examinees are given three sets of pictures, then asked to find one picture from each set that can be linked by a common concept. This task can unleash astonishing creativity among dyslexic examinees. Though we’ve been using the same pictures for many years, we still receive entirely new answers to these questions from our dyslexic examinees.

  Dyslexic examinees are also more likely to detect more distant and unusual connections in verbal similarities tasks. For example, when we ask how blue and gray are similar, most people respond with the “obvious” answer, that both are colors. In contrast, dyslexic examinees sometimes give answers like, “They’re the colors of the uniforms in the Civil War,” or “They’re the colors of the ocean on sunny and stormy days.” Recently, a very bright seven-year-old boy with dyslexia responded to our question “How are a cat and a mouse alike?” by proudly announcing, “They’re the two main characters on a
highly popular children’s television program called Tom and Jerry.”

  We also frequently observe this heightened ability to identify distant and unusual connections when we ask individuals with dyslexia to interpret ambiguous sentences—that is, sentences that can correctly be interpreted in more than one way. Ambiguities in word meanings are common in English because many words have multiple meanings or may be used as different parts of speech (noun, verb, adverb, etc.). In fact, the five hundred most commonly used words in the English language have an average of twenty-three different meanings each in the Oxford English Dictionary.3 Correctly identifying which meaning is intended in a particular sentence requires a processing system that’s capable both of identifying many possible meanings and of choosing the appropriate meaning based on the overall context of the sentence. During our testing, we commonly ask examinees to find two or more meanings for sentences that are intentionally ambiguous, such as:The chickens are too hot to eat.

  I saw her duck.

  Please wait for the hostess to be seated.

  Students hate annoying professors.

  They hit the man with the cane.

  I said I would see you on Tuesday.

  We often find that dyslexic students who’ve struggled with many other fine-detail language tasks are able to correctly interpret these sentences with no difficulty at all, while students who’ve excelled at many of the fine-detail language tasks may struggle. Skill in recognizing alternate meanings is useful for interpreting all kinds of complex messages, like stories, jokes, conversations (especially informal ones), poems, and figurative language of all kinds (like analogies or metaphors). As we discussed in chapter 4, this skill is also highly useful for reading, especially for struggling readers.