The Dyslexic Advantage (16 page)

N-Strengths
Narrative Reasoning

The “N” Strengths in MIND

A
nne was “a consistently poor reader” until well into adulthood. Like many struggling readers, her memories of school are highly negative: “School was torture. School was like being in jail. It was captivity and torment and failure.”
¹
Though she dearly loved stories and spent hours flipping through picture books, her poor reading skills kept her from drawing more than a bare sketch of the “action and incident” described on the page. Instead, it was through books read aloud at school and home, and the radio dramas and movies she enjoyed, that she developed a love for the rhythm and flow of language.

Anne struggled with reading throughout elementary school, but writing grew easier. From fifth grade on, she wrote adventure stories and plays for her classmates. They responded enthusiastically and overlooked her spelling errors. Unfortunately, Anne found no way to turn her writing talent into classroom success.

It wasn't until her freshman year of high school that she finally read well enough to appreciate the actual words in the books she read. “The first novel that I recall truly enjoying and loving for its language as well as its incident was
Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens. . . . The other novel . . . was Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre
. . . . I think it took me a year to consume these two books. It might have taken two years. . . . [I]t was a slow go.”

Despite these challenges, Anne's love of literature and writing continued to grow. When she went off to college, she decided to major in English. Unfortunately, she soon had to abandon this plan because she was still so “severely disabled as a reader” that she couldn't complete the assignments for her classes. Getting through even one of Shakespeare's plays in a week was virtually impossible for her, and the written work was equally difficult: “[I] barely got by . . . because I wasn't considered an effective writer. The one story I submitted to the college literary magazine was rejected. I was told it wasn't a story.” Anne's spelling, too, remained a problem. As she told us, “I can't spell to this day. I don't see the letters of words, I see the shapes and hear them. So I still can't spell. I'm always looking up spelling and making mistakes.”

Anne began looking for another subject where she might find more success. She was passionately interested in the great ideas and beliefs that shaped the modern world and wanted to form a “coherent theory of history.” She considered majoring in philosophy, but here, too, she was hindered by her poor reading. Anne found that she “could only make it through the short stories of Jean-Paul Sartre and some of the works of Albert Camus. Of the great German philosophers who loomed so large in discussion in those days [during the early 1960s], I could not read one page.” Instead, Anne opted for a degree in political science, where she was able to grasp the key concepts almost entirely from lectures. She earned her degree in five years.

After graduation, Anne remained drawn to writing and literature. At age twenty-seven she returned to school to study for a master's degree in English, which she earned in four years. “Even then I read so slowly and poorly that I took my master's orals on three authors, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway, without having read all of their works. I couldn't possibly read all of their works.”

Fortunately, Anne could still write, and shortly after earning her master's degree she began work on a new novel. One of the primary themes of that novel was the experience of being “shut out” from life and the fulfillment of dreams—an experience Anne knew well from being “shut out of book learning.” Three years later that novel was published, and it became a phenomenal bestseller
.
Anne followed that first novel, which she entitled
Interview with the Vampire,
with twenty-seven more. Together they've sold over 100 million copies, making Anne Rice one of the bestselling novelists of all time.

You might think it's extremely unusual for such a talented and successful writer to have trouble with reading and spelling. You would be wrong.

Many highly successful writers have faced dyslexic challenges with reading, writing, and spelling, yet have learned to produce clear and effective prose. Even limiting our selection to contemporary writers whose dyslexic symptoms can be clearly confirmed, the list of successful dyslexic authors is impressive and includes such notables as:

We're not mentioning these outstanding creative writers just to encourage and inspire you with their remarkable achievements. Nor are we merely suggesting that dyslexic processing can be helpful for creative writing, though for reasons we'll discuss shortly we also believe this to be true. Instead, we're focusing on these talented writers because we believe they reveal something important about dyslexic processing
in general
—not just for dyslexic writers, but even for many individuals with dyslexia who never write at all. What these authors illustrate is the profoundly narrative character of reasoning and memory that many individuals with dyslexia possess. This Narrative reasoning is the N-strength in MIND.

While many individuals with dyslexia might not instinctively regard their thinking as “narrative” in style, we'll show you the ways in which the memory and reasoning styles that many individuals with dyslexia display are, in fact, profoundly narrative. We'll also show you the many amazing ways that N-strengths can be employed.

The Advantages of N-Strengths

N
-strengths draw their power from a kind of memory known as episodic or personal memory. To understand how episodic memory supports the N-strengths, it will be helpful to briefly review how the memory system as a whole is structured.

The memory system can be divided into two main branches:
short-term
and
long-term memory
(see figure 1)
.
Short-term memory—which contains both
short-term
and
working memory
—is responsible for “keeping in mind” the information you're using right now. Long-term memory stores information you can retrieve and use later.

FIGURE 1

Long-term memory, which will be our focus in this chapter, also has two branches:
procedural memory
and
declarative memory.
Procedural memory holds the “procedures and rules” that help us remember how to do things. Declarative memory stores “facts about the world.”

Declarative memory can be further divided into
episodic
and
semantic memory.
Episodic memory (also called
personal memory
) contains factual memories in a form that simulates events, episodes, or experiences. Semantic memory stores facts as abstract and impersonal data, stripped of context or experience.

Many facts about the world can be recalled either as episodic or semantic memories. For example, the fact that “tears taste salty” can be recalled as an episode you've experienced or as a fact you simply know without remembering anything about the episode in which you learned it. We'll focus on episodic memory because it underlies N-strengths and it is the preferred way of storing factual knowledge for many individuals with dyslexia.

Episodic memory is the repertory theater of the mind. Episodic memories aren't stored as intact recordings in a single part of the brain—like old movies in a film vault. Instead, the visual, auditory, spatial, linguistic, tactile, and emotional components of episodic memories are disassembled, then stored in their respective processing areas throughout the brain—like stage props in a warehouse. Later, when an episodic memory is recalled, these “props” are retrieved from storage and reassembled into a form that closely resembles (or “restages”) the original experience.

Like most dramas, episodic memories depict things that happen or are experienced, like events, episodes, or observations. They also contain traditional story elements like characters, plot, and setting. This gives them their narrative or storylike character.

This process of restaging mental “scenes” from fragments of past personal experience is an extremely powerful way of recalling facts about the world. We can get a glimpse of this power by inspecting the recollections of an individual with an extremely rich episodic memory, novelist Anne Rice. One of the most remarkable things about Anne's autobiography,
Called Out of Darkness
, is the vividness and clarity of her memories from childhood, as shown in this description of a walk she often took with her mother:

This description is so clear—so rich in atmosphere and sensory detail—that it draws the reader right to Anne's side as she makes that journey. Yet when she wrote it, Anne was describing walks she'd taken nearly sixty years earlier.

As powerful as this “restaging” function is, recalling the past is only one of episodic memory's many functions. As the White Queen in Lewis Carroll's
Through the Looking-Glass
quite rightly observed, “It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Episodic memory escapes this criticism because it not only helps us recall the past, but it also helps us understand the present, predict and envision the future, mentally simulate planned actions or inventions, imagine events we haven't witnessed or that are fictitious, solve problems, navigate, and create narratives that can persuade or enlighten others.

To help explain the many functions of episodic memory, we spoke with Dr. Demis Hassabis, a neuroscientist who's played a key role in this still new and rapidly advancing field.
¹
In 2007, Dr. Hassabis coauthored a groundbreaking paper with his colleague Dr. Eleanor Maguire that described the remarkable versatility of the episodic memory system.
²
Their paper, which was voted one of the ten most important scientific papers of the year by the prestigious journal
Science
, introduced the term
scene construction
to describe the core process by which episodic memory works to perform its many functions.

When we spoke with Dr. Hassabis from his office in London, he explained this process of
episodic construction
in the following way. “Episodic memory reconstructs things you've previously experienced from the remembered elements you've acquired through your experiences in life. For example, say you walk through a beautiful garden or park, and you see a beautiful rose, and you smell the rose: all those elements of experience become components in your memory. Later, when you want to recall what you've experienced, you reassemble those components in a way that looks familiar. You may get some of the details wrong because memory is often inaccurate, but to the extent that you're right, that's an accurate reconstruction of an episodic memory.”

We then asked Dr. Hassabis to explain some of the additional functions of episodic memory. He responded, “Recently we've found that using scene construction to recall the past is just one small part of a much bigger system, which we call the
episodic simulation
system. Episodic simulation is very powerful because it allows memory to be used
creatively
. With creativity you assemble the same kinds of memory elements that you use to recall the past, but rather than reconstructing something you've experienced before, you combine the elements in
new ways
to construct a whole that's entirely novel because it contains unprecedented connections between the elements. In other words, creativity uses the same construction process that you use to reconstruct memories, but the construction is creative because it results in something you've never experienced before. The process is similar, but the outcome is entirely new.”