Seidman’s impressive I-strengths—his abilities to detect relationships between concepts and events, to see the benefits of adopting different perspectives, and to look behind what’s immediately apparent to see the deeper and broader significance—have all been crucial to his success. Seidman has been named one of the “Top 60 Global Thinkers of the Last Decade” by the Economic Times and “the hottest advisor on the corporate virtue circuit” by Fortune magazine, and his company has helped more than 10 million people in more than five hundred companies worldwide. That’s the power of Interconnected reasoning.
PART V
N-Strengths Narrative Reasoning
CHAPTER 15
The “N” Strengths in MIND
Anne 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.
Narrative Reasoning: The Structure of Experience
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:• Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist (Independence Day) Richard Ford
• Bestselling novelist (The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany) and Academy Award–winning screenwriter (The Cider House Rules) John Irving
• Two-time Academy Award–winning screenwriter (Kramer vs. Kramer, Places in the Heart) Robert Benton
• Bestselling thriller writer Vince Flynn, whose novels have sold over 15 million copies in the last decade
• Bestselling mystery writer, screenwriter (Prime Suspect), and Edgar Award winner Lynda La Plante
• Bestselling novelist Sherrilyn Kenyon (who also writes under the name Kinley MacGregor), whose novels have sold over 30 million copies2
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.
N-strengths are the ability to construct a connected series of “mental scenes” from fragments of past personal experience (that is, from episodic or personal memory) that can be used to recall the past, explain the present, simulate potential future or imaginary scenarios, and grasp and test important concepts.
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.
CHAPTER 16
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 eve
nts, 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.
Understanding Episodic Memory
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:We left our house . . . and walked up the avenue, under the oaks, and almost always to the slow roar of the passing streetcars, and rumble of traffic, then crossed over into the Garden District. . . . This was an immediate plunge into a form of quiet. . . . I remember the pavements as clearly as I remember the cicadas singing in the trees; some were herringbone brick, very dark, uneven, and often trimmed in velvet green moss. . . . Even the rare stretches of raw cement were interesting because the cement had broken and buckled in so many places over the roots of the giant magnolias and the oaks.
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.”
This creative recombination system can be used as a kind of mental laboratory to simulate what might happen given certain starting conditions or circumstances. According to Dr. Hassabis, “This episodic simulation function is very valuable in a lot of fields, including things like financial forecasting, or designing computer games and imagining how players will play them, or thinking about a film scene and how it might play out.”
Given the many uses of this episodic simulation system, the bias for episodic rather than semantic memory, which many individuals with dyslexia show, has implications that go beyond memory to reach the very heart of the reasoning process. Dyslexic individuals with prominent N-strengths often reason by mentally simulating potential events or actions, then “observing” how these simulations “play out,” rather than reasoning abstractly using definitions or formulas stripped of context. These simulations are based on information they’ve gathered from real experience rather than on abstract principles.
Scene-Based versus Abstract, Noncontextual Knowledge
We’ve found that a large majority of individuals with dyslexia show this preference for episodic over semantic memory for most tasks, and it shows up in various ways in both clinical settings and real life. One way that it presents is as a tendency to store conceptual and verbal knowledge as scene-based depictions or examples rather than abstract verbal definitions.
Often as a part of our testing sessions we’ll ask individuals to define terms or concepts. While most individuals respond with abstract dictionary-type definitions, individuals with dyslexia often respond with examples, illustrations, anecdotes, or descriptions of uses or physical features. For example, when we ask individuals with dyslexia to define the word bicycle, they’re more likely than nondyslexics to respond with an analogy (e.g., “It’s like a motorcycle, but you make it go yourself”) or a description (e.g., “It’s a thing with a seat, two wheels, handlebars, and pedals that you make go by pushing the pedals with your feet”), as opposed to an abstract definition (e.g., “It’s a human-powered, two-wheeled, transportation device”). The same is true when we ask individuals with dyslexia to define a concept that’s inherently abstract, like “fairness.” Individuals with dyslexia are more likely to respond with an example (“It’s like when you’re playing a game and you wouldn’t want to make someone else do something you wouldn’t want to do yourself”) than an abstract definition (e.g., “It means everyone should be treated the same” or “It means you get what you deserve”). This reliance on scene-based depictions of facts rather than abstract or noncontextual definitions reflects a greater reliance on episodic rather than semantic memory, and many of the older dyslexic individuals with whom we’ve spoken confirm that this patte
rn is characteristic of their thought.
When we ask these older individuals with dyslexia to tell us more about their thinking style, they often also describe another feature that relates to episodic memory. When thinking of a fact or concept, they typically find that the concept is not represented in their mind by a single generalized depiction of that concept, but rather by a series of distinct examples through which they can mentally “scroll.” The concept is understood as the complete collection of all these examples, and while it centers around the most common or representative examples, it also includes the outliers. Jack Laws gave us an especially good description of this conceptual style. When we spoke with him, he mentioned that he’d found he could much more easily distinguish between different animals of the same species than most people—for example, between different crows or robins. So we asked him what popped into his head when we mentioned the concept “robin”: just one idealized robin or a whole series of different robins? He answered without hesitation, “Different robins, definitely. My mind starts jumping to robins that I’ve experienced, rather than a single generalized robin, or the Platonic ideal of the robin.” When he drew a robin for his field guide, he drew the single robin that best represented the features of the whole group—but it was a particular robin rather than an idealized generalization. In other words, he drew from an episodic rather than a semantic memory.
The Dyslexic Advantage Page 12