The Dyslexic Advantage (10 page)

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

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 ideas 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

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.

M-Strengths in Action

A
s 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”: