The Dyslexic Advantage (19 page)

Let's close by looking at a remarkable young writer with dyslexia who's still at the beginning of her career. This eleven-year-old girl came to see us from England. When we asked if we could share her work, she agreed but asked to be called by the nom de plume Penny Swiftan. The following is taken from a story she wrote shortly before visiting us:

Notice the wonderful richness of the sensory details, the analogies, and the wonderful animistic imagery in this passage. Notice also the remarkable clarity of the simple subject-verb-object structure of both the main and the relative clauses. When individuals with dyslexia learn to write well, this clear, direct, image-rich style quite often characterizes their work. The structural similarity with Anne Rice's highly lucid writing is apparent, as is Penny's remarkable literary potential.

FIGURE 2

If you're like most people—including many teachers—you might wonder how a child with significant dyslexic challenges could have written this passage. Part of the answer is that it was written using a word processor with a spell-checking function. To show you how essential this technology is for Penny (and for many other children with dyslexia), let's compare the above passage with the sample of her spontaneous handwriting, as shown in figure 2. In this passage, Penny was writing about her favorite game. Notice that she's chosen to write it entirely in capital letters to eliminate reversal errors. Since parts of her writing can be difficult to read, we'll “translate” the passage here for you, with spelling errors retained:

It's hard for most teachers when faced with such handwriting to perceive the impressive literary talent lying underneath. But it really is important to look, because N-strengths are very common in students with dyslexia, and in our experience there are many more Pennys and Anne Rices and Blake Charltons out there than anyone suspects. With appropriate support, strategies, and the necessary accommodations, it is now more possible than ever for dyslexic individuals with powerful N-strengths to reach their full potential, whether as writers or in any of the many other fields where they can make use of their remarkable strengths in Narrative reasoning.

D-Strengths
Dynamic Reasoning

The “D” Strengths in MIND

W
hen she was a child struggling in school, Sarah Andrews's mother called her “my little underachiever.” As you'll see, it's been a long time since anyone has called Sarah an underachiever.

Like many individuals with dyslexia, Sarah was a so-called late bloomer. And like many dyslexic individuals, Sarah's “blooming” was less like the gradual unfolding of a bud into a blossom than the astonishing transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly.

Sarah was born into an academically accomplished family of teacher parents and honor student siblings, but right from the start she struggled with many academic skills, including spelling, math calculations and procedures (especially “showing her work”), and rote memory of all kinds. But her biggest challenge was learning to read. Sarah described for us some of her early reading problems: “The letters and print vibrated on the page. I saw the fibers in the wood pulp in the paper. I put my head so close to the page that my chin was right on it, and my teacher put a ruler under my chin to keep my head off the page.”

Because of her difficulties, Sarah was unable to get through a first-grade reader until third or fourth grade. (To this day her reading remains agonizingly slow.) She had to read each sentence several times to understand it, and she had difficulty keeping her mind from wandering because each word “set off cascades of ideas and associations” that she felt she must “test and integrate.”
¹

As Sarah recalls of her early years of school, “I was taking in tremendous amounts of information and starting to group it and sort it and arrange it, but there wasn't anything coming out—there wasn't a product.” Sarah's mother—who also happened to be the English teacher at the small private school Sarah attended—was determined to remedy this lack of output, so she drilled Sarah on writing, particularly on writing essays. To the delight of both, Sarah found (like Anne Rice) that it was “easier to code than to decode.”

Unfortunately, reading remained a problem. When Sarah reached high school she still “couldn't read a lick,” and it finally caught up with her on the SAT. Although she'd received “decent” grades in school, her performance on the SAT was so poor that it astonished her teachers.
²
As Sarah recalls, “Someone finally asked if I finished the test . . . I said, ‘I got about halfway through.'” The riddle of her poor performance was solved—almost.

Sarah was packed off to the remedial reading lab. Because she could pass all the phonics tests but just couldn't read fluently or retain what she'd read, the reading teacher improperly stated, “You don't have dyslexia. You're just lazy.” Despite this misdiagnosis Sarah practiced diligently, and she improved her reading speed enough so that when she retook the SAT, she not only finished but doubled her score. Even with this improvement, though, Sarah still hadn't reached grade-level reading proficiency. She was, in her own words, “a bright high school senior now reading at the eighth-grade level.”

After graduation, Sarah turned down admission to two top art schools and enrolled at Colorado College. She wasn't sure at first what she wanted to study, and like many college students with dyslexia, she struggled in the courses she was required to take during the first two years. She took a course in poetry to meet her English requirement—primarily because she thought it wouldn't require much reading—and received the first and only F of her career. To make up for those credits, Sarah took a course in creative writing. To her delight and surprise, she found that she not only enjoyed writing fiction but actually had a knack for storytelling. Although she couldn't “sustain the activity” of her stories for more than three or four pages, her teacher praised her stories as outstanding miniatures. Sarah didn't realize it then, but this newfound skill would play an important role in her life.

Another life-changing discovery came when Sarah took her required science course. She selected geology, almost on a whim, because the only scientist in her family, her aunt Lysbeth, was a geologist and, like Sarah, she was dyslexic.
³

Sarah soon realized that in geology she'd discovered “the right playground for my mind. . . . I at last found teachers who perceived my talents, and I could learn from maps and illustrations rather than insurmountable texts. For the first time I was around a concentration of people who thought like I did, and I wasn't being snubbed as a weirdo.”

Even among these like minds, Sarah was delighted to find that some of her talents were exceptional. “I was the best map interpreter—I was really quick at taking in graphical information holistically, seeing the patterns, understanding their meaning, and making interpretations from them. Being the best at something in class was a new experience for me, so I stuck with it.” As she did, the self-doubt produced by the earlier labels of “lazy” and “underachiever” began to fade away. “By the time I noticed that I was not in fact lazy, I had earned both a B.A. and M.S. in geology.”

For her first job as a geologist, Sarah went to work as a research scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey. She was assigned to study modern sand dunes in order to determine how gases and fluids could be removed from rocks that had been formed in prehistoric times from similar dunes. During this work, Sarah found that she was especially good at visualizing physical bodies in three dimensions and at imagining how processes would act on those bodies over time. These skills made her especially good at detecting analogies between modern dunes and ancient rocks and at predicting the structure and behavior of buried rock formations.

After leaving the USGS, Sarah went to work as an exploitation geologist (i.e., a geologist who specializes in finding ways to remove known oil deposits from the ground) for several oil and gas companies. Sarah's role with these companies was to improve oil and gas extraction from drilled wells by predicting how these substances would move through the surrounding rocks. Here, too, her spatial imagery and pattern-reading abilities proved invaluable. Sarah found that she was especially good at reading the “wire line log”—an immensely helpful but almost bafflingly complex visual readout of the physical characteristics of the rocks and fluids surrounding a well shaft. Sarah quickly learned how these “squiggles on a page” (which resemble the EEGs neurologists use to analyze brain activity) could predict the properties of surrounding fluids and rocks. Sarah found that she could transform these abstract squiggles into mental 3-D images: “I could visualize in time and space how the oil was going to move through the rock, even when it was fragmented and shattered.”

Clearly, Sarah found a profession that seemed tailor-made to fit her mind. Geology drew heavily upon her strengths, placed little strain upon her weaknesses, and provided her with an endless string of fascinating puzzles to captivate her intellect.

The question we'll examine in the chapters ahead is, What
are
the strengths that so powerfully equipped Sarah for work in geology?

Sarah's “geological reasoning” abilities no doubt are due in part to her outstanding M-strengths. Sarah's powerful 3-D imagery system allows her to mentally visualize and manipulate full-color, lifelike imagery, which she finds incredibly useful for tasks like map reading, navigation, and remembering 3-D environments.

Yet if we look closely at the full range of the reasoning skills Sarah uses as a geologist, we can see that they're not entirely spatial. Geological reasoning requires more than simply visualizing and manipulating spatial images on spatial principles alone. It also requires the ability to
imagine
or
predict
how those images will change in response to
processes
that aren't entirely spatial in character, like erosion, earthquakes, sedimentation, and glaciation. These processes involve complex, dynamic, and variable blends of factors and are themselves often subject to larger processes, like climate variation or plate tectonics.

We call the reasoning skills that are needed to think well about such complex, variable, and dynamic systems Dynamic reasoning, or the D-strengths in MIND
.

From one perspective, D-strengths can be seen as a subset of N-strengths: they're based primarily on episodic simulation, which is a component of N-strengths. Yet D-strengths are important enough, complex enough, and distinctive enough in their applications that we believe they deserve their own listing within the MIND strengths.

The key difference between N-strengths and D-strengths is the distinction between
creativity
in general and
creative prediction.
As we described in chapter 16, N-strengths include all the functions of the episodic construction system, each of which works by combining elements of past experience to construct lifelike narratives or “scenes.” These scenes may “restage” actual past experience—in which case we call them
episodic memories—
or they may recombine elements of past personal experience in entirely new ways to form
creative simulations
or
works of imagination.
It's only when these creative constructions aim at predicting future events, reconstructing past events we didn't witness, or solving new problems, that we say they involve D-strengths. When the episodic simulation system is used to recombine elements of memory to entertain, persuade, paint an arresting picture, or form a compelling vision—but not to predict or reconstruct actual events or conditions—we refer to those actions as N-strengths but not D-strengths.