The Dyslexic Advantage

  Blake spent two years in a special ed class, where he began to make progress. He enjoyed feeling like the “smart kid” in class and was pleased when he could finally start putting stories down on paper.

  By fourth grade Blake had progressed enough to be mainstreamed back into the regular education class. His sense of accomplishment quickly vanished as he went from being the “smart kid” to the “class failure.” Only his skills in sports and drama—which earned the admiration of his classmates—allowed him to keep a positive self-image and respond to his classroom setbacks with a determination to improve.

  In middle school this resolve helped Blake boost both his reading speed—largely by consuming the fantasy novels that gripped his imagination—and his pace of work. However, Blake continued to make “silly” mistakes in writing and math, and they chipped away at his grades.

  Blake finally experienced a breakthrough when he was allowed to use a calculator and spell-checker for his work. His grades shot up, and so did his self-esteem. “Suddenly, I was a geek again!” Blake enjoyed being recognized for his intelligence, and he began to apply himself with even greater determination. With accommodations in place for his College Board exams, Blake did well. So well, in fact, that he was admitted to Yale University.

  Though Blake retains fond memories of Yale, he also remembers college as a time of terror. He was so concerned that his remaining dyslexic difficulties would defeat him that he compensated by spending “every waking moment of the day” on his studies. Fortunately, Blake received invaluable assistance from Yale’s Resource Office on Disabilities. The staff helped him obtain classroom accommodations such as a keyboard for in-class work, extra time on tests, and out-of-class assistance with proofing papers, planning, and scheduling.

  Because he’d long dreamed of becoming a doctor, Blake began to take science courses, and he discovered that he had a special knack for chemistry. Blake particularly excelled in organic chemistry, with its heavy emphasis on three-dimensional spatial reasoning, and he actually earned the top grade in this very difficult and competitive class. Blake also did well in inorganic chemistry, because even though his rote memory was weak, he was still able to remember an astonishing number of facts about the chemical elements in the periodic table by creating fanciful stories about them. He gave the elements personalities, past histories, motivations, and goals, and these narrative details helped him remember their “behaviors” and their positions in the rows and columns of the table. Blake used similar narrative-based memory strategies in his other courses, too. As a result of these successes, Blake told us that for the first time in his life he felt truly “intellectually talented.”

  Blake might have been happy as a chemistry major had his love of stories not been so strong. Instead, he majored in English, and with persistent effort his writing skills began to blossom. In fact, he won two writing awards while at Yale.

  Following his graduation in 2002, Blake took a job as an English teacher, learning disabilities counselor, and football coach, then returned home to care for his father, who was battling cancer. In the few spare moments he somehow managed to find, Blake wrote stories about the imaginary worlds he’d dreamed of all his life, while continuing to dream about becoming a doctor.

  In 2007 Blake finally entered Stanford Medical School. At the same time he also signed a three-book deal with a publisher specializing in fantasy fiction. Blake’s first novel, Spellwright, was published in 2010. Fittingly, Spellwright is the story of a magician-in-training with dyslexia who must solve the riddle of his own “cacography”—or inability to handle text-based spells without “corrupting” them—to prevent the triumph of evil over good. It’s an absolutely thrilling read, and the elaborate system of magic Blake creates is astonishing in its inventiveness.

  When we spoke with Blake, he was taking time off between his second and third years of medical school to teach creative writing to first-year medical students (as a way of encouraging their use of Narrative reasoning in clinical medicine) and to publish an analysis of literary narratives related to medicine (such as Tolstoy’s story The Death of Ivan Ilyich). During our conversation, Blake told us how useful he’d found narrative-based memory strategies for dealing with the overwhelming amounts of memorization he’d faced in his first two years of medical school. He even shared several of the stories he’d developed to help remember the branches of arteries and nerves. Narrative reasoning is clearly still a dominant theme in his life.

  Oh, and in his “spare time” Blake was also completing the second novel in his planned trilogy, Spellbound. Like his first, it combines elements of Blake’s experiences with dyslexia and the remarkable system of magic he created. Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that someone who can transform himself from a special education student to a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale knows a thing or two about magic.

  CHAPTER 19

  Key Points about N-Strengths

  Narrative reasoning plays a key role in the thinking of many individuals with dyslexia. Key points to remember about N-strengths include:• Many individuals with dyslexia show a profound difference between their powerful episodic (or personal) memories for events and experiences and their much weaker semantic (abstract or impersonal facts) and procedural memories.

  • Episodic memory has a highly narrative or “scene-based” format in which concepts and ideas are conceived or recalled as experiences, examples, or enactments rather than as abstract, noncontextual definitions.

  • The episodic construction system can use fragments of stored experience not only to reconstruct and remember the past but also to imagine the future, solve problems, test the fitness of proposed inventions or plans, or create imaginary scenarios and stories.

  • Episodic construction and creativity can be closely linked.

  • Individuals who rely on episodic or narrative concepts rather than abstract, noncontextual facts will typically reason, remember, and learn better using examples and illustrations rather than abstract concepts or definitions.

  • Many individuals with dyslexia will learn and remember better by transforming abstract information into narrative or case-based information through the use of memory strategies or stories.

  • Many individuals with dyslexia enjoy (and are skilled in) creative writing even though they may have difficulty with formal academic writing or reading; so teachers should look carefully for signs of narrative ability in students with dyslexia, and they should help talented individuals with dyslexia further their abilities through the use of appropriate tutoring and accommodations.

  • Narrative approaches can be useful for all sorts of occupational and educational tasks, not just creative writing.

  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:For a moment the stars blazed bright, and Lady stared in amazement and wonder at the sight before her. The glade was ringed by foxgloves, oak trees and birches. The foxgloves stood like slight maidens, with crowns of fair purple blossoms and long arms reaching for the star-strewn sky. The oaks were kings and the foxgloves their daughters.

  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 i
t 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:. . . FAMOUS LEGENARY TOTUOUS [ed. “tortoise”]. IN THE BATTLE AND ON THE CAMPAIN MAP YOU HAVE GENERALS, MEMBERS OF YOU FAMILY FACTION. IF YOU GENERAL FALLS IN BATTLE, YOU TROOP MORAL WILL PLUMIT, SO IT IS NECESSARY TO AT LEAST TRY TO KEEP THE SAFE AND HEALTHY. FAMILY MENBERS CAN . . .

  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.

  PART VI

  D-Strengths Dynamic Reasoning

  CHAPTER 20

  The “D” Strengths in MIND

  When 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 up
on 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?

  Dynamic Reasoning: The Power of Prediction

  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.

  D-strengths create the ability to accurately predict past or future states using episodic simulation. D-strengths are especially valuable for thinking about past or future states whose components are variable, incompletely known, or ambiguous, and for making practical, or “best-fit,” predictions or working hypotheses in settings where precise answers aren’t possible.