When we mentioned these dyslexic memory preferences to Dr. Hassabis, he responded, “That’s very interesting because it relates to an important trade-off between episodic memory and semantic memory that people in the memory field have been thinking about.” Both of these types of memory are critically dependent upon the hippocampus [which, as we mentioned before, plays critical roles in memory formation and recall]. But the interesting thing is—and this is really not written anywhere, but it’s the sort of thing people at the cutting edge are thinking about at the moment—if you want to be very good at episodic memory, you want your hippocampus to engage in a process called pattern separation. What pattern separation involves is this: Suppose you experience something new, and even though it’s quite similar to something else you’ve experienced, you want to remember it as a distinct event—for example, what I did for lunch yesterday as opposed to three days ago, even though maybe I had lunch with the same people, and in the same place, and lots of the elements were in common. One of the functions the hippocampus performs is to keep those similar memories separate. It actually makes them more divergent than you would expect—and that’s exactly what you’d want if you wish to have a good episodic memory.
“In contrast, if you want to be good at learning semantic facts that generalize and are true across multiple experiences—for example, the fact that Paris is the capital of France—then you don’t really care about the specific episode you learned that in.” What you care about is basically just the ‘fact nugget.’ The surrounding context in which you learned that fact simply isn’t relevant to that piece of information. In that case you want something else the hippocampus does, which is called pattern completion. Pattern completion is a process that unites divergent things. So, let’s say you heard a particular fact in several different lessons. What’s actually important is that fact and not the different contexts in which you encountered that fact. So pattern completion solidifies your memory of the fact that was heard on each occasion but eliminates any record of the differences in the way you experienced it.
“Now, if the hippocampus is responsible for doing both of those things, then perhaps what you’re seeing with these dyslexics is that some of the same brain wiring differences that cause them to be dyslexic also predispose them to favor pattern separation over pattern completion. That would make them very good at remembering things that have happened to them and at episodic memory. This greater diversity of separated patterns might also make them better at spotting unusual connections between facts that people who are not dyslexic wouldn’t make.”
This last observation is very important because it relates to our discussion of I-strengths in part 4. There we suggested that creativity may be enhanced in individuals with dyslexia because they are predisposed to making broader neural circuits that both create a greater breadth, diversity, and novelty of connections and enhance the perception of gist and context. Pattern separation also empowers the dyslexic mind because it “stocks” the mind with a greater number of separated patterns that may be used to make novel connections. In short, individuals with dyslexia may have a double helping of cognitive features that enhance their ability to make diverse and more creative connections.
These features are ideal for producing minds with powerful narrative abilities. What could be more helpful for a storyteller than a mind stocked with an endless array of different characters and experiences and scenarios; disposed to spot new connections, associations, patterns, and nuances between them; and wired with the ability to unite it all into a single great narrative by seeking a higher-order context or gist?
Thinking in Stories: A Common Dyslexic Strength
This highly creative narrative thinking style often displays itself in a tendency to think and convey information in story form. We first noticed this tendency during our testing sessions when we asked individuals to describe a picture called “Cookie Thief.”3 It shows a woman standing in the foreground, at the front plane of the picture, drying a dish with a towel and looking out rather vacantly toward the viewer. Behind and to her left, water is overflowing from a sink where the tap has been left on, and it’s beginning to collect in a puddle on the floor. To her right—and clearly unbeknownst to her—a young boy is standing on a stool, reaching high into a cabinet for a cookie jar that sits on the top shelf. Next to the stool, a girl is reaching up eagerly to receive a cookie. Neither seems aware that the stool is tipping and the boy is about to fall.
Most viewers find the events in this scene rather trivial and implausible—especially the actions of the woman, who seems bizarrely detached from the chaos around her—so they make little effort to reconcile the various events into a single coherent story. Instead, they simply describe the most obvious features of the picture. Over time, however, we found that a small number of viewers would propose additional details in an effort to reconcile the picture’s seemingly irreconcilable elements. Most often the additional detail would involve a person or an object “in front” of the plane of the picture (like the father or a TV) that was distracting the woman’s attention and causing her to ignore the sink and the children. Remarkably, nearly all the individuals who proposed these extra elements were dyslexic, and the solutions they proposed were clearly aimed at identifying the gist to provide a coherent explanation for the action in the picture.
We also found that the individuals with dyslexia were more likely to use conventional storytelling techniques to describe the picture. At younger ages these include formulaic openings like, “One day while she was washing the dishes . . . ,” or “Once upon a time . . . ,” but even the older individuals with dyslexia were more likely to give the characters names, lines of dialogue, distinctive personality traits, senses of humor, motivations, and personal and family histories. We’ve found that many individuals with dyslexia use these kinds of narrative, personal, or episodic elements in all sorts of descriptive tasks, and that their descriptions often contain elements like analogies, metaphors, personalizations or anthropomorphizations, and vivid sensory imagery.
This bias for Narrative reasoning can also be seen in the professional lives of many individuals with dyslexia, who use their N-strengths in all sorts of ways. The following are several examples of dyslexic individuals in fields other than creative writing who have flourished using narrative skills.
Duane Smith is professor of speech and director of the public speaking team at Los Angeles Valley College—a school he once failed out of as a student due to his dyslexia-related challenges. As he told us, “My whole life has been about stories, and telling stories, and I stress the importance in my public speaking class about telling stories. Half of what we do in forensics competitions is to perform stories, but for me literally everything is about stories.” Prior to becoming a professor, Duane had a successful career in sales, where he also found his narrative skills to be invaluable.
When we described “episodic memory” to Duane, he laughed in recognition. “If I hear a song, or smell something, or see an article of clothing or a car from a particular year, I can immediately imagine a scene on a particular day, or event. It drives my wife crazy because we’ll be listening to the radio, and I’ll talk about how it takes me back to 1985 when I was standing with a group of buddies at In-N-Out Burger on a Saturday night listening to that song, and what we were talking about, and she’ll say, ‘Can’t you ever just listen to the song?’” By contrast, Duane told us that he remembers almost nothing in abstract, noncontextual form: “The only things I remember are experiences and examples and illustrations.”
Law professor David Schoenbrod recalls that when he was a junior in high school, his English teacher told his parents, “David is literate in no language.” That’s a problem he’s long since overcome, as readers of his four highly regarded books on environmental law will attest. To what does David attribute his success as a litigator? As he told us, “It seems to me that my strength as a lawyer was being able to tell a story. I had a colleague early in my career who told
me that the way you win a case is by telling a story in a way that makes the judge want to decide your way. And I’ve always felt that I was good at that. . . . I like storytelling, and it came readily to me.”
Entrepreneur and cognitive psychologist Douglas Merrill attributes his survival in school and his mastery of math techniques primarily to his use of narrative strategies. “I always think in stories. . . . I spent most of my time [as an adolescent] reading or telling stories, or playing fantasy games around stories like Dungeons and Dragons. ”
“I ended up at Charles Schwab, and Charles—who goes by Chuck—is dyslexic; and he sits in meetings with his eyes closed, listening to people talk, and he never reads the handouts in advance, and it’s pretty clear that all he’s doing is listening and thinking. And he tells these great stories about what customers are going to want. I found that incredibly freeing because for the first time I thought, ‘This stuff I do well at is valuable, as opposed to the stuff I do badly at, which seems to be what everyone else thinks matters.’”
After leaving Google, Douglas worked briefly as president of New Music at EMI Recorded Music. “I thought one of the problems that industry had was that it didn’t know anything about itself. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what’s actually happening in the music industry. The most direct way to do that is with math, and I suck at math, so instead I would read economic articles and surveys, and I would make notes on yellow stickies, then stick them on the wall. Then once a week I’d skim those stickies and move them around, and what I ended up with was a story.”
In short, N-strengths can be useful in any job or task where past personal experiences can be used to solve problems, explain, persuade, negotiate, counsel, or in some way form or shape the perspectives of oneself or others.
CHAPTER 17
Trade-offs with N-Strengths
In addition to the many abilities, N-strengths can also bring trade-offs. The most important—and most common—trade-off is reflected in the following comment: “Sammy never remembers anything from school. He forgets what’s been taught, and whether there’s an assignment or a test. And when we ask him to do something at home, it’s always in one ear and out the other. His memory is horrible! Only, the strange thing is, Sammy’s also our family historian. He can remember what we’ve done on every vacation, and who gave what present at his brother’s birthday party five years ago, and what kind of pet every kid in his class has. So why can he remember all those kinds of things but he can’t remember his times tables or the names of the state capitals?”
This classic, but seemingly paradoxical, description of the “family historian with the poor memory” is one we hear from countless families. It becomes easier to understand when you remember the different types of memory we described at the start of the previous chapter.
All individuals, whether dyslexic or not, show a distinctive blend of strengths and weaknesses in episodic, semantic, and procedural memory, and this blend greatly affects their learning and memory styles. Like Sammy, many individuals with dyslexia have a much stronger episodic than semantic memory and a relative weakness in procedural memory (as discussed in chapter 3). Dyslexic individuals with this memory style are typically very good at remembering things they’ve done or experienced, and often also at remembering stories that they’ve heard or information that’s been embedded in a narrative context. However, they’re much weaker at remembering “bare semantic facts”—or facts that are abstract, impersonal, and devoid of context.
Anne Rice is a perfect example of an individual with this memory pattern. As we mentioned earlier, Anne has a phenomenally good memory for episodic and personal details—that is, for things she’s experienced; yet Anne also has a poor memory for abstract, impersonal facts. As she told us, “I don’t think abstractly at all. Everything is image and narrative with me. I can’t remember numbers at all and make huge errors, sometimes doubling prices or amounts as my memory of them gets hazy.”
It’s critical to identify students with dyslexia who show a primarily narrative processing and episodic memory style, because their N-strengths can provide the key to unlocking their learning potential. This is true both for the ways they take in and the ways they express information.
When taking in new information, students with dyslexia who show a strong episodic memory bias and narrative processing style will typically learn much better if general or abstract definitions are supported by scene-based examples or depictions. When information is embedded in a context that the student finds meaningful and familiar, and which incorporates experiences, cases, examples, stories, or personal experiences (including humor, participation, novelty, “strangeness”), many students with dyslexia will learn it more quickly and retain it more durably.
These points are reinforced by the following experience, shared by the mother of a dyslexic child. She told us that as a student she’d always excelled at remembering facts, definitions, and formulas, while her dyslexic husband had always struggled in these areas. She’d been the honors student while her husband had barely made it through school. So she naturally assumed she’d be a better tutor for their dyslexic son. She was surprised, then, to discover that her husband was a much more effective teacher, especially for concept-rich subjects like history, social studies, and science. Eventually she realized this was because her husband taught almost entirely using examples, cases, and analogies, while she tried to “trim the fat” from her lessons and present only the bare minimum of “simple facts” so their son would have less to memorize. However, it wasn’t the quantity of information that their son struggled with but the form. He could hold on to facts that were embedded in a meaningful story or context but quickly forgot facts that lacked context or significance. This is a common experience for students with dyslexia.
Dyslexic students with Narrative reasoning styles also face important challenges when trying to express their ideas. Since their conceptual knowledge is often stored in cases, images, or narratives rather than in abstract principles or definitions, when asked to answer questions on exams or assignments or even orally in class by stating the relevant abstract or general principles, they may respond instead with stories or examples. As a result, their answers may appear loose and unstructured. They may seem to “talk around” their answer and appear to have difficulty “getting to the point.” Douglas Merrill shared one example of how this happened to him.
“When I took my qualifying exams in graduate school, I was asked a question about the development of cognition; and I was supposed to start with Piaget, then go to Erikson, then go to modern cognitive problem solving. I understood all the important concepts, but I hadn’t really been able to memorize all the little details, so instead I wrote a story about the different developmental paths of two people. I covered all the right concepts, but they failed me on that question because I didn’t give them all the specific details that they wanted.”
As we mentioned earlier, this dyslexic tendency to think in examples or stories rather than in abstract definitions can also result in the loss of points on standardized tests, including (and perhaps especially) the vocabulary portion of IQ tests.
Schools and exams often treat abstract facts and principles as if they were the only forms of knowledge that really “count”; they assume that if students can’t memorize and regurgitate facts in their “purest” and most noncontextual form, then they don’t really know them. While abstract definitions are important and useful, we must not undervalue knowledge that is embedded in experiences, stories, cases, or examples. Such case-based knowledge is highly valuable in its own right, and it is more easily mastered than abstract information by many students with dyslexia.
It’s also important to recognize that individuals with a largely narrative or case-based reasoning style will often show a very different trajectory of cognitive development from individuals with a more abstract or semantic reasoning style. This is particularly true of the growth of their conceptual knowledge. At younger age
s, individuals who store concepts as cases and examples can appear concrete because they have few cases and experiences to reason with, so they may seem “stuck on” overly specific cases when asked to think about a broad concept. Early on, such children often have more difficulty generalizing their knowledge than their peers. Fortunately, as their experience increases, so will the fluidity of their thinking. In fact, once they have accumulated a broader set of experiences, they will often be less concrete than others because their concepts include a wide range of cases rather than a single generalized principle. This also makes them less likely to mistake an abstraction or generalization for a full description of reality.
Finally, because narratives speak so powerfully to individuals with dyslexia who possess prominent N-strengths, it’s crucial that the narratives we tell them about dyslexia are both accurate and appropriately hopeful. One of our chief goals in writing this book is to correct the common and deeply misleading narrative that dyslexic differences are primarily, or even entirely, dysfunctions. The “story” we should read in the lives of the individuals with dyslexia isn’t a tragedy; it’s an exciting story filled with hope, opportunity, and promise for the future.
CHAPTER 18
N-Strengths in Action
Let’s look in detail at the many uses to which one highly talented individual with dyslexia has put his N-strengths.
Blake Charlton was diagnosed with dyslexia midway through first grade. Despite being passionately fond of hearing and telling stories, Blake made little progress with reading and writing, and he struggled with basic math.
The Dyslexic Advantage Page 13