The Dyslexic Advantage

  Vince graduated from high school with a C+ average, then enrolled at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. There his lack of reading and writing skills immediately began to cause problems. After his first semester he was placed on academic probation. He took two English classes and got a C− in both. He barely scraped by until his junior year, when two things happened that changed his life forever. The first was an event that Vince told us he still recalls as one of the most humiliating of his life.

  “I was taking a class pass/fail, and I handed in a paper to the teacher, but I wasn’t there the next class to pick it up. So I had a so-called friend pick up the paper, and later that day I went to meet him for lunch, and there was my paper sitting right in the middle of the table with eight guys gathered grinning around it. And at the top of the page there’s a big red ‘F,’ and toward the bottom the professor had written, ‘I don’t know how you ever got into college, and I don’t know how you’re ever going to graduate, but this is the worst paper I have ever read in all my years of teaching.’ I was so embarrassed that I said to myself, ‘This is it, I can’t keep going like this. I’ve got to face this head-on.’”

  “Right after that, Al McGuire [the Hall of Fame college basketball coach and TV commentator] came through St. Thomas on a speaking tour, and I was thunderstruck by what he had to say.” He talked about how he had grown up dyslexic, and he didn’t know how to read or write; but he was a standout basketball player, and he b.s.’d his way through high school and college with never better than a C average. After playing in the NBA for a few years, he began coaching the Marquette Warriors, and in his last season there they made it to the NCAA championship game. About fifteen minutes before tipoff the scorekeeper came up and handed McGuire the scorebook and said, ‘Coach, I need your starting lineup.’ And McGuire broke into a cold sweat because he had no idea how to spell his players’ names. So he panicked and said, ‘I can’t—I have an emergency,’ and he ran back to the locker room and locked himself in a stall, and he started praying, ‘Dear God, if you let me win this game, I’ll go back to night school and learn how to read and write.’ So Marquette won, and Al McGuire retired from coaching and went back to school.

  “Now, what I learned from this story was that the longer I put this off, the worse and more embarrassing it would become. So I really got serious because I wanted to write without being embarrassed and be something more than a functional illiterate.

  “So I went out and bought two books, The Fundamentals of English and How to Spell Five Words a Day, and I started going to the library every day and really working through them. I also started reading everything I could get my hands on, because I knew that was the only way to get better.”

  Vince started by reading Trinity by Leon Uris. Although he struggled during the first hundred pages, he was soon hooked, and he stopped worrying if he couldn’t decipher all the words. He found that his mind could “fill in the blanks.”

  After graduating from college, Vince took several sales jobs while trying to enter Marine aviator school; however, the several concussions he’d suffered playing football disqualified him. He spent several years pursuing a medical waiver that would allow him to fly, but when he hit twenty-seven and was no longer eligible for officer training, he began searching for another direction for his life. “I remember saying to myself there’s no way I’m going to spend the rest of my life sitting in a cubicle,” so he started working on the manuscript that would become his first novel, Term Limits. Soon after, he “burned his boats,” quitting his job and telling his friends and family he was going to make his living as a novelist.

  We asked Vince what convinced him he could make a living as a novelist when only a few years before he’d been told that his writing set new standards for ineptitude? He responded that it was the confidence that came from finding that his mind worked a lot like the novelists he loved. He said that when he read or watched movies, “I always knew what was going to happen next. A lot of times I could tell almost from the first chapter how it was going to end.” That experience made him think that if he could predict the plots of other people’s novels, maybe he could create his own.

  Vince’s suspicions were on solid ground. As we’ve discussed, prediction and narrative are closely related mental skills. However, Vince’s ability to predict plot twists might not have been enough to make him risk his livelihood if he hadn’t also seen other signs that he had special skill in dealing with complex patterns. One was a surprising talent he’d shown as a child: “I was a naturally gifted chess player. It was a weird, weird, weird deal: even though I was failing in school, I could always just see in advance how the game would unfold. So I used to get driven around by my parents and dropped off at the houses of some of the best chess players in the Twin Cities. One year I actually finished fourth place in state. But I never told my friends at school because I was embarrassed about it.”

  Another hint came in college. “While I was struggling in my other classes, I ended up taking macroeconomics, and for the first time in my life I found myself sitting in a classroom being one of the only people who knew what was going on. A lot of the kids who were gifted in English and math were just scratching their heads because it didn’t make sense to them—there were just too many variables—and suddenly I’m the one who’s saying, ‘How do you guys not understand this stuff? This is easy!’ It just made sense to me.”

  Vince’s powers of prediction were clearly revealed in his writing. After his first novel got him a contract with a major publisher, Vince chose for his second a topic that in 1998 most people were still largely unaware of but which struck him as the most important national security issue of the time: Islamic radical fundamentalism. Vince’s next three novels all focused on this threat, and all were published before the tragic events occurred that brought this danger to everyone’s consciousness. “Prior to 9/11 I wondered, ‘Why isn’t anyone else scared about this?’ To me it was just obvious that this was a disaster waiting to happen.”

  Vince’s ability to predict both the headlines and the behind-the-scenes action is so startling that one of his books, Memorial Day, attracted a security review by officials at the Department of Energy because they were certain he must have been fed classified information from an inside source. But Vince says the realism of his stories comes entirely from his ability to predict using freely available information. “I can honestly tell you that I’ve never had an active-duty person with the CIA or the Secret Service or NSA or FBI or armed services—or anywhere—give me classified information. I just take the information that’s available in the public domain, and then I fill in the blanks. I have a way of connecting those dots.”

  People outside the government have also noticed Vince’s predictive powers, and some of them are so impressed that they’re ready to stake money on them. “I was recently asked to go on the board of directors for a hedge fund. These guys said, ‘We think that you have a good way of strategic thinking,’ and they don’t know why, and they don’t know a thing about dyslexia, but they said, ‘We’d really like to get you on this board so you can do some strategic thinking for us.’”

  Vince has also tried to convince others of the predictive power he believes many individuals with dyslexia possess. “I have a friend who’s on the boards of several charitable foundations, and I’m always telling him, ‘You know, every one of those associations needs at least one dyslexic on the board.’ When he asks me why, I tell him, ‘We just see patterns in advance. We could do you a lot of good.’”

  Vince attributes this dyslexic predictive power to both nature and nurture. “Dyslexics are wired a little differently, and that probably makes us a little more creative innately, but there’s also the impact of experience. School’s like a wall, and for everybody else there’s a ladder there, and they just get up on that ladder and climb over the wall. But for whatever reason, dyslexics don’t know how to climb that ladder, so we’ve got to figure out another way to get past that wall. We�
��ve got to dig a hole under it, or find a rope to build a rope ladder, or find some other way around it. So we’re constantly trying to solve a problem, and I think that’s one reason why so many dyslexics become inventors and creators—because they’re constantly looking for ways to beat that system, or improve that system, or change it so it makes sense to them. This develops their skills in forecasting as well. So many things in life are like an algebra equation where you’re given four ‘knowns’ and three ‘unknowns,’ and you’ve got to solve that problem. Dyslexics are forced to do that so much in their everyday lives that it helps us become really good at solving complex problems.”

  After listening to Vince list all the benefits he sees to being dyslexic, we ventured to ask him, “So you really don’t find it surprising that we’ve titled our book The Dyslexic Advantage, do you?”

  Vince responded with a hearty laugh. “Hear, hear! You’re correct. I most certainly don’t!”

  PART VII

  Putting the Dyslexic Advantage to Use

  CHAPTER 25

  Reading

  So far, in considering the many advantages that can accompany a dyslexic processing style, we’ve seen that:• Dyslexia isn’t simply a reading impairment but a reflection of a different pattern of brain organization and information processing that creates strengths as well as challenges.

  • Dyslexia-associated strengths and challenges are inextricably connected, like home runs and strikeouts in baseball, and dyslexic challenges are best understood as trade-offs made in pursuit of other, larger cognitive gains.

  • Individuals with dyslexia often show strengths in big-picture, holistic, or top-down processing, though they may struggle with fine-detail processing.

  • Many individuals with dyslexia show strengths in Material reasoning, or the ability to mentally create and manipulate an interconnected series of three-dimensional spatial perspectives.

  • Many individuals with dyslexia show strengths in Interconnected reasoning, or the ability to perceive more distant or unusual connections, to reason using interdisciplinary approaches, or to detect context and gist.

  • Many individuals with dyslexia excel in Narrative reasoning, or the ability to perceive information as mental “scenes” that they construct from fragments of past personal experience (episodic memory).

  • Many individuals with dyslexia show strengths in Dynamic reasoning, or the ability to accurately reconstruct past events that they didn’t witness or to predict future states, often using insight-based reasoning and “episodic simulation,” particularly in conditions that are changing, ambiguous, or incompletely known, and where “qualitative” practical solutions are required.

  These findings have important implications for how we understand, educate, and employ individuals with dyslexia. In these final chapters, we’ll explore these implications. Let’s begin by looking at the learning function most closely associated with dyslexia: reading.

  Becoming a Skilled Reader

  Skilled reading requires three abilities: the ability to sound out words (i.e., decoding); the ability to read quickly and accurately (i.e., fluency); and the ability to understand what you read (i.e., comprehension). While individuals with dyslexia can struggle with any or all of these skills, their dyslexic advantages can also help them master these abilities.

  Decoding Words

  Decoding or “sounding out” unfamiliar written words depends on two key abilities:• Accurately identifying all the component sounds in words

  • Mastering the rules of phonics that describe how letters can be used to represent these component sounds

  As we discussed in chapter 3, these abilities rely on the brain’s phonological processing and procedural (or rule-based) learning systems. The phonological processing system works by first splitting incoming words into their component sounds (a process known as sound segmentation), then distinguishing (or discriminating) these sounds from one another. Most individuals with dyslexia struggle with one or both of these processes.

  Problems with these processes can show up in a variety of tasks besides decoding. Individuals with dyslexia who have difficulty with sound segmentation will also often struggle to identify the component sounds in words. For example, they may have difficulty determining that “cup” has three sounds (c-u-p) rather than two (cu-p). They may also struggle to perform sound-switching tasks like Pig Latin (e.g., ig-pay atin-lay), or changing the b in bat to h to see what word is formed. With regard to sound discrimination, individuals with dyslexia who have difficulty distinguishing word sounds will often mispronounce, mishear, or misspell words. They may substitute or mistake similar-sounding words or make subtle soundalike mistakes in word pronunciations or spelling (e.g., substituting t/d, m/n, p/b, a/o, or i/e, or omitting word sounds like pah-corn).

  Skills like sound segmentation and discrimination (which are referred to as phonemic awareness skills) aren’t entirely inborn but must be learned. This learning takes place largely during the first two years of life and depends heavily on both fine-detail processing and implicit learning (that is, learning through observation and imitation, rather than explicitly learning the rules, as described in chapter 3). As we’ve mentioned, many individuals with dyslexia struggle with both fine-detail processing and implicit learning, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they often have difficulty learning to accurately distinguish the full range of word sounds.

  The good news is that the brain’s sound processing system isn’t fixed but highly reprogrammable. Brains with weak segmenting or discriminating skills can often be retrained with phonics instruction based on the Orton-Gillingham method. Individuals with especially severe sound discrimination difficulties should usually begin with an instructional technique that specifically improves the ability to distinguish word sounds, like Lindamood-Bell’s LiPS, or computer-based auditory training programs such as Earobics or Fast ForWord. For all other individuals with dyslexia, an approach to phonics training should be chosen based on the individual’s personal strengths, weaknesses, and interests, because these will together determine what kinds of information he or she remembers best.

  While each individual is unique, the common dyslexic brain characteristics we’ve discussed in earlier chapters can also provide important clues about the kind of instruction that most dyslexic individuals will find beneficial. For example, since most individuals with dyslexia favor episodic over semantic memory, most will remember information about things they’ve experienced (or imagined as scene-based experiences) better than abstract or noncontextual facts. Individuals with dyslexia will also remember information better if they find it interesting and if they can place it into a larger framework of knowledge or understand its big-picture function or purpose.

  An individual’s MIND strengths can also help predict which training methods they will find the most effective. For example, individuals with prominent M-strengths usually benefit from methods that engage their strengths in spatial imagery. These typically involve various forms of visual, positional, or movement-based imagery. Finding a method that stresses the particular form of spatial imagery that an individual excels in (e.g., kinesthetic, visual) can greatly increase the likelihood of success.1

  Individuals with impressive I-strengths typically learn well using methods that engage their ability to see interconnections. Such instruction often builds associations or analogies between new information and subjects they already know or are interested in.2 These learners also tend to enjoy multisensory or multiframework approaches that present the same information in different ways. They frequently enjoy discussing how the approaches they’re using work, as this engages their strengths in gist, cause and effect, and contextual thinking.

  Students with especially strong N- or D-strengths often benefit from approaches that stress examples and cases, rather than just rules and definitions. Approaches that embed information in stories or events are also more memorable for these students, as are interactive approaches where learning takes place
through conversation or interaction with an instructor (e.g., using discussion, dramatization, or game play).

  In short, by carefully considering the dyslexic individual’s particular strengths, interests, and challenges, you can more effectively match dyslexic students with an appropriate method of instruction. A complete discussion of the available methods is beyond our scope in this chapter, but additional information is provided on our Dyslexic Advantage website and in our book The Mislabeled Child.3

  It’s important to recognize that most students with significant dyslexic challenges will require additional reading instruction outside of school. Training should begin as soon as challenges are recognized, though it’s never too late to start. For children with a strong family history of dyslexia, phonics instruction should begin as soon as they show an interest in learning to read, especially if they show any difficulties like slow speech acquisition, poor sound perception, misspeaking or mishearing, mispronouncing rhymes, or slowness learning the alphabet or letter sounds. With early attention, mild reading problems may be avoided altogether, and more significant challenges can be lessened in severity.

  Families that are sufficiently dedicated can sometimes provide phonics training on their own, using commercially available materials; but in many cases getting help from a certified reading instructor, speech-language pathologist, or reading instructional center is a good idea. If a tutor is desired, the state branches of the International Dyslexia Association keep helpful lists of providers who are well trained in Orton-Gillingham approaches.