The Dyslexic Advantage (8 page)

Nondyslexic brains often excel at applying rules and procedures in an expert and efficient manner. Dyslexic brains often excel at finding “best fits” or at ad hoc problem solving.

Nondyslexic brains often excel at finding primary meanings and correct answers. Dyslexic brains often excel at spotting interesting associations and relationships.

Nondyslexic brains often excel at spotting the differences and distinctions between things. Dyslexic brains often excel at recognizing the similarities.

Nondyslexic brains display the order, stability, and efficiency of train tracks, well-organized filing cabinets, sequential narratives, or logical chains of reasoning. Dyslexic brains store information like murals or stained glass, connect ideas like spiderwebs or hyperlinks, and move from one thought to another like ripples spreading over a pond.

In short, dyslexic brains function differently from nondyslexic ones not because they're defective but because they're organized to display different kinds of strengths. These strengths are achieved at the cost of relative weaknesses in certain kinds of fine-detail processing.

If you know anything about the conventional view of dyslexia, you know what the dyslexic mind looks like when it struggles with fine-detail tasks. In the following chapters, we'll show you what the dyslexic mind looks like when it opens its wings and begins to soar.

M-Strengths
Material Reasoning

The “M” Strengths in MIND

Y
ou may not know Lance Heywood's name, but if you've ever caught a chairlift at a major American ski resort, ridden on a monorail anywhere between the Hilton Waikoloa Village in Hawaii and the Bronx Zoo in New York, or shuttled around Las Vegas on a people mover, you've probably encountered his work. Lance is one of the leading designers and producers of the electrical systems that control transportation units at entertainment venues all across the United States. It's a challenging job and one that requires constant innovation and on-the-spot problem solving. To do it as well as Lance you need a special kind of mind: creative, to meet the demands of different clients and their endlessly varied projects, and fully competent, to design products that are safe and reliable. Lance has these qualities in abundance, but there was little sign of this creative talent in his early schoolwork.

Lance grew up in what's now Silicon Valley, and from his earliest years he found reading and writing incredibly difficult. In fact, he needed constant tutoring all the way through middle school just to get by—even in math, where he eventually excelled.

In contrast, outside of school Lance found no shortage of fascinating things to captivate his mind. He was a “constant tinkerer” and especially loved working on projects with his father, who was an interior designer, gifted self-taught mechanic, and enthusiastic model-train hobbyist. Together they built radios, phones, and recording devices from kits and spare parts.

When Lance finally reached high school he began to enjoy the more challenging math and science classes that became available, and in those classes his grades improved. While he struggled to memorize formulas and equations, he found that by mastering the principles behind them he could generally derive them himself. And even though reading and writing remained tough, he found that by zeroing in on the ideas and opinions that his teachers thought were important he could earn decent grades.

Lance's strong performance in math and science eventually earned him admission to several competitive colleges, and he initially enrolled as a freshman at UCLA. However, Lance felt “lost” in a place that he found too enormous and impersonal, so he moved home and enrolled at Santa Clara University, where he thrived in the smaller environment. Lance shied away from courses that required much reading or writing, but through hard work and discipline he did well in his engineering courses and eventually earned his degree.

Lance then went to work for a contracting firm that designed electrical systems for high-rises in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although he enjoyed design work, he missed hands-on work with electronics. Hoping to combine his love of challenging projects with his love of skiing and the mountains, Lance went to work for a company that made ski lifts.

Eventually Lance grew tired of working for someone else, so in 1993 he set up shop on his own, and he's never regretted it. You can sense the enjoyment he still finds in his work when he describes how he tackles each project. He begins each new job from scratch rather than modifying previous projects, and he remains involved through every step of the manufacture, installation, testing, and fine-tuning of the electronic panels he creates.

Lance credits much of his design skill to his ability to mentally envision his projects in fully constructed form. As he reads his clients' proposals he envisions all the components he'll need coming together to form a three-dimensional blueprint in his mind, and he can manipulate these components at will. He told us that one of the things he most enjoys about his work is when he nears the completion of a project and he can finally see in the real world the creation he first envisioned in his mind.

Lance also credits his success to the fact that his slow reading and poor procedural memory always forced him to adopt a hands-on rather than book- or rule-focused approach. Although by age thirty Lance's reading had improved to the point where he could read for pleasure, he still reads slowly enough that he prefers to learn about new electronic parts and devices by interacting with them, rather than reading a manual or prospectus. As a result, he'll often find new uses for the equipment that are better than the task they were designed for.

We've shared Lance's story with you because, as you'll soon see, Lance is a perfect example of a dyslexic individual who excels in Material reasoning, the M-strengths in MIND.

M-strengths consist primarily of abilities in areas that can be termed
spatial reasoning
, which has often been recognized as an area of special talent for many individuals with dyslexia. However, as we'll show in the next few chapters, dyslexic individuals with prominent M-strengths typically possess outstanding abilities in some areas of spatial reasoning but not others. In particular, the kind of spatial reasoning at which they excel involves the creation of a connected series of mental perspectives that are three-dimensional in nature—like a virtual 3-D environment in the mind.

This type of “real-world” spatial ability can be phenomenally valuable for the individuals who possess it. While M-strengths receive little emphasis or nurturing in most school curricula, they play an essential role in many adult occupations. Designers, mechanics, engineers, surgeons, radiologists, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, builders, skilled artisans, dentists, orthodontists, architects, chemists, physicists, astronomers, drivers of trucks, buses, and taxis, and computer specialists (especially in areas like networking, program and systems architecture, and graphics) all rely on M-strengths for much of what they do.

In the coming chapters, we'll look in detail at the nature and advantages of M-strengths and at the key mental processes underlying them.

The Advantages of M-Strengths

L
et's begin our examination of M-strengths by looking at two studies that compare the performance of individuals with and without dyslexia on various spatial tasks. In the first study British psychologist Elizabeth Attree and her colleagues compared dyslexic and nondyslexic adolescents on three different visual and spatial tasks. The first two tasks assessed two-dimensional spatial skills.
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For the first task, the subjects were shown printed 2-D patterns, then they were asked to reproduce them using colored blocks. For the second task, the subjects were shown abstract line drawings for five seconds, then they were asked to draw them from memory. The third task was designed to assess the kind of three-dimensional spatial skills needed to perform well in a real-world spatial environment. For this task, the subjects were seated before a computer screen and asked to “search” through a virtual 3-D house to find a toy hidden in one of the rooms. After they'd searched the four “rooms,” the computer was turned off and they were asked to reconstruct the house's floor plan from memory using cardboard shapes.

The dyslexic and nondyslexic groups performed very differently on the 2-D and 3-D tasks. While individuals with dyslexia did slightly worse than nondyslexics on the 2-D tasks (which stressed simple “snapshot” visual memory), they did much better on the virtual reality task, where they had to construct a seamless interconnected “world” from the views they'd absorbed during their explorations.

Notice how well this dyslexic strength/weakness profile fits our discussion in part 2: strength in the big-picture reasoning needed to combine multiple perspectives into a complex, global, interconnected, 3-D model of a virtual house, but relative weakness in fine-detail processing and memory. This is just the pattern of trade-offs we described.

These results have important implications for how we assess spatial ability on standardized testing. Many of the visual-spatial tasks commonly used on IQ and other cognitive batteries (such as block design and visual memory tasks) assess 2-D spatial abilities and fail to measure the kinds of real-world 3-D spatial strengths that individuals with dyslexia possess. When evaluating individuals with dyslexia for spatial skills, it's important to use tests that measure real-world 3-D reasoning skills.

A second study, this one by psychologist Catya von Károlyi, also supports the existence of a dyslexic 3-D/2-D trade-off.
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Károlyi compared the abilities of dyslexic and nondyslexic high school students on two visual-spatial tasks. For the first task, subjects were asked to find an identical match for a complex 2-D Celtic knot pattern from among a group of four closely related patterns. This task required great accuracy in processing visual fine details. For the second task, subjects were asked to determine whether several drawings represented “potentially real” figures that could exist in 3-D space or “impossible” figures that couldn't. Success on this latter task required the ability to perceive how different parts of a figure related to each other in forming a larger whole—thus, big-picture or global (rather than fine-detail) processing.

The results of these studies perfectly mirrored Dr. Attree's in showing that dyslexic subjects displayed an advantage on tasks that required them to process multiperspective 3-D information, while showing a relative disadvantage on a “simpler” 2-D task. On the impossible figures task that stressed big-picture processing, Dr. Károlyi found that individuals with dyslexia answered significantly more quickly and just as accurately as the nondyslexic group. In contrast, on the Celtic knot task that stressed fine-detail processing, individuals with dyslexia were significantly less accurate than their non-dyslexic peers.

At first glance, this skill in detecting impossible figures may seem rather far removed from real-world value, but we found an excellent example of its practical significance when speaking with a highly successful building contractor. This contractor, who is himself dyslexic, told us he prefers hiring dyslexic workers for his building crews because they excel at spotting flaws in blueprints that create “impossible figures” just like those in Dr. Károlyi's study. These kinds of 3-D spatial abilities are actually extremely valuable in many real-world occupations, and we can begin to understand the extent of this value when we examine how individuals with dyslexia put these skills to use at various stages throughout their lives.

Early in life, many dyslexic children with prominent M-strengths seem naturally drawn to engage in highly spatial tasks. In a survey of children from our practice (ages seven to fifteen), we found that children with dyslexia engaged in building projects—everything from LEGOs and K'NEX to small models to massive outdoor landscaping and construction projects—at nearly twice the rate of their nondyslexic peers. Even when these children engaged in 2-D art projects like drawing, their art tended to have a more multidimensional and dynamic quality, featuring elements like foreshortening and perspective, moving figures, arrows indicating action or process, and schematic elements like cutaway sections or multiangle or multiperspective blueprints. Dr. Jean Symmes, a research psychologist at the National Institutes of Health, similarly documented an unusually high interest and ability in building or visual classification tasks among the children with dyslexia she studied.
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While it's sometimes claimed that children with dyslexia gravitate toward high M-strength activities (and later occupations) because their reading and writing challenges make other activities too difficult, the preceding observations suggest that for most spatially talented dyslexic individuals, spatial interests and abilities are inborn rather than developed as compensations. Former Harvard neurologist Dr. Norman Geschwind—one of the most esteemed figures in the history of dyslexia research—noted that in his experience many dyslexic children display a passion and skill for spatial activities (like drawing, doing mechanical puzzles, or building models) well before they begin to struggle with reading.
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Another link between dyslexia and M-strengths is that children with dyslexia have parents who work in high M-strength occupations far more commonly than would be expected by chance.
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In our own clinic we recently examined the employment and education histories of the parents of thirty dyslexic children. For twenty-two children, we were able to find one parent who either had personally shown dyslexic features or who had another first-degree relative (besides the child) with dyslexia; for another five children both parents showed such signs. Remarkably, nearly half of the thirty-two “dyslexia-linked” parents worked in high M-strengths jobs. This talented group included six engineers, three builders (construction, contracting, or development), two architects, two biochemists, two dental hygienists, and one inventor. The high frequency of engineers and architects among this group is particularly impressive. Together these two professions account for less than 6 percent of the college degrees awarded in the United States, but they accounted for 25 percent of the parents in our survey.