The Dyslexic Advantage (14 page)

While the ability to see broad fields of meaning is useful for detecting relationships of similarity, or “likeness,” the tendency to identify more “distant” or secondary relationships rather than to fix immediately on primary connections can also worsen performance in certain settings. It's especially likely to cause problems in settings where speed, accuracy, reliability, and precision are more valued than creativity, novelty, or insight.

One such setting is standardized tests, including the IQ tests we described before. For example, in tasks like linking picture concepts or identifying verbal similarities (which we described in the last chapter), many individuals with dyslexia are so extravagantly good at coming up with insightful but nonprimary connections that we often find their test scores—which are based entirely on the number of “right” or primary answers they give—misleading.

This dyslexic talent for finding unusual connections can also lead to difficulties in the classroom. Most of the tasks students are asked to perform in school—like reading fairly literal texts, responding to simple questions, or acting on straightforward instructions—are easier for minds that routinely fix on primary meanings. Students who call up more distant meanings can appear confused or “off target,” especially if they don't “get” the simple answers that everyone else does or if they become confused by ambiguities that no one else detects.

This broader pattern of associations can also worsen speed, precision, accuracy, and reliability on tasks that are best approached in a straightforward and literal matter. A classic example is the multiple-choice exam. Cynics might be forgiven for suspecting that multiple-choice exams—with their terse, dense, noncontextual sentences—were designed specifically to trip up individuals with dyslexia who excel in detecting secondary meanings or distant word relationships. These examinees will often pore over a multiple-choice exam like a lawyer vetting a contract, finding loopholes, ambiguities, and potential exceptions where none are intended. While their classmates evaluate questions with a “reasonable doubt” standard, they search for “proof beyond the shadow of a doubt.” As a result, even a hint of uncertainty leads them to reject answers that most students would identify as correct. If their reading is also somewhat dodgy, the multiple-choice exam usually becomes a nightmare. But even dyslexic students who read longer passages or whole books with excellent comprehension may struggle with multiple-choice exams.

For some individuals with dyslexia, each word or concept may be surrounded by such a rich network of associations that these associations can become overwhelming and give rise to unintended substitutions. Sometimes these substitutions involve “near-miss” or similar-sounding words,
¹
like
adverse/averse
,
anecdote/antidote
,
persecute/prosecute
,
conscious/conscience
,
interred/interned
,
imminent/eminent
,
emulate/immolate
. While such errors are usually attributed to problems with sound processing (that is, difficulty with phonological awareness), a careful examination of dyslexic word substitutions suggests that factors other than impaired word sound processing are often also involved. Consider Mark, whom we saw in our clinic. Mark is a highly creative boy with a great fund of knowledge and a lively imagination. Yet he often struggles to say what he means. Sometimes his verbal substitutions involve words with similar sound structures, such as:

At other times, though, Mark substitutes words that bear only a slight structural similarity to the intended word (e.g., sounds, length, “rhythm”) yet share some relationship of meaning:

At still other times, Mark substitutes words with almost no structural similarity, so that the relationships are purely conceptual:

Conceptual substitutions like these are referred to as
paralexic
or
paraphasic
errors; and when made during reading they're sometimes called
deep substitutions.
While they are less common than sound-based errors, in our experience more individuals with dyslexia make them (at least occasionally) than is generally supposed.

In her autobiography,
Reversals
, dyslexic author Eileen Simpson vividly describes her frequent paralexic substitutions
.
One example she cites is her unintentional substitution of the word
leaf
for
feather
—a conceptual rather than sound-based substitution. Over time, Simpson learned to cover such slips (when they were pointed out to her) by pretending that they were intentional puns or jokes.
²

We believe this tendency to substitute related items is the flip side of dyslexic strengths in perceiving distant conceptual relationships. In support of this idea, we've found that the individuals who make these substitutions the most often excel on tests that require the ability to spot distant connections, like ambiguities or similarities.

Special strength in recognizing relationships of “togetherness” also comes at a cost. That's because skill at detecting correlations or causal relationships has been shown to be enhanced if your attention system is a little bit distractible. Many studies have found that individuals with dyslexia experience difficulty screening out irrelevant environmental stimuli, like noises, movements, visual patterns, or other sensations. This sensitivity to environmental distractions is one of the main reasons dyslexic students often need special accommodations for testing and other work that takes focused concentration: they're just not that good at automatically screening out irrelevant environmental stimuli. These distractions invade their conscious awareness and steal working memory resources.

At the other end of the distractibility scale, the ability to quickly and subconsciously distinguish relevant and irrelevant stimuli so you can ignore those that are irrelevant is called
latent inhibition
. Latent inhibition sounds like an unmixed blessing, and it's definitely useful in circumstances requiring tight attentional focus—like tests or silent work time at school. In fact, latent inhibition makes you the kind of student most teachers dream of having. However, before you conclude that students who test high in latent inhibition and low in distractibility are the lucky ones, you should know that there's an
inverse
correlation between latent inhibition (or freedom from distraction) and creativity. What this means is that the highest creative achievers tend to score lower on tests of latent inhibition and to be somewhat distractible. In fact, one study looking at Harvard students showed that nearly 90 percent of those who showed unusually high creative achievement scored
below average
in latent inhibition—just like individuals with dyslexia.
³
This is a critical fact to keep in mind when evaluating the balance between focus and distractibility in individuals with dyslexia.

The second I-strength—the ability to shift between perspectives—is also remarkably useful, so long as you recognize when the shifts are taking place and they're under your control. However, we often find that individuals who can shift perspectives easily are subject, especially when younger, to switching perspectives without realizing it, and this can complicate certain tasks. For example, on a biology paper dealing with animal behavior, a student may begin by describing behaviors, then shift (appropriately) to a discussion of the neurological sources of that behavior, then veer off topic to consider other points of neuroscience that don't relate to the central topic. The student may also bring in elements of personal experience or opinion where they don't really belong and forget that he's writing a scientific treatise rather than an autobiography or opinion piece. Often such students' papers will have an air of free association that can be fascinating but takes them far from where they need to go. For students with strong perspective-shifting abilities, learning to control the team of horses that's tied to their mental chariot often takes great effort and prolonged and explicit training.

This ability to shift perspectives and to see things in interdisciplinary ways can create problems with organization as well. For example, high I-strength individuals with dyslexia are often horrific filers of papers. This is not, as is often supposed, simply because they have trouble alphabetizing but because they can think of too many places to file each paper and are more likely to lose papers that have been filed neatly away in distinct folders. As an alternative, they frequently prefer to keep papers in stacks where they can more easily find them. There are some wonderful pictures of Einstein's office at Princeton that beautifully illustrate this dyslexic “filing system.” (They can be found online by searching “Einstein's office.”) Fortunately, hyperlinked computer files and search capabilities have helped to reduce this problem.

The primary trade-off with strength in global or big-picture thinking is that it can create a greater dependence upon context and background information. Global thinkers have a top-down reasoning style that works best when a big-picture overview is already in place, so that new chunks of information can be added to conceptual frameworks that have already been built. That's why big-picture thinkers often learn best when they have at least a general understanding of the goals or ends at which they're aiming.

Big-picture, top-down learners are often a poor fit for the typical classroom, where bottom-up teaching approaches predominate. Schools often ask students to memorize new bits of information before explaining their meaning or significance. This approach doesn't really work for top-down learners because they can remember only things that make sense to them and new information that can be related to other things they already know. If they can't see the point of something they're asked to learn, it just won't stick. Without a big-picture framework to hang their knowledge on, the information is simply incomprehensible.

This dependence upon context is why “stripping down” instruction to the bare minimum to avoid overloading individuals with dyslexia often results in failure. Individuals with dyslexia who have a top-down, big-picture learning style typically learn better from approaches that convey information with greater conceptual depth, rather than from more superficial or survey-type approaches.

Individuals with this style also show several other characteristic patterns. For example, it's common to find dyslexic global thinkers at the upper levels of schooling still feeling lost far into the term, then suddenly finding that things become clear when enough of the big pieces are finally available to reveal the whole picture. Students with this pattern are often also more aware of (and bothered by) the gaps and deficiencies in the things they've been taught because they're more aware that parts of the picture are still missing. Students with this pattern typically do better the longer they stay in school: upperdivision college courses are generally easier for them than entry-level ones, and graduate school and postdoctoral work go even better than college.

For individuals with dyslexia who have this highly interconnected learning and conceptual style, a few simple steps can help them learn more effectively and enjoyably. For longer reading assignments, providing them with an overview (gist and context) of assigned passages beforehand can improve their reading speed, accuracy, and comprehension. If any new or special vocabulary will be included, giving them a list of key words in advance can be very helpful. Previewing the practical relevance and applicability of the information they'll be asked to master will improve retention and motivation. Tying in new information with things they've already learned also improves memory and comprehension. And beginning each new course or unit by previewing the major points that will be asserted, and the route that will be taken to demonstrate them, can keep dyslexic students better oriented, more confident, and better able to learn.

To demonstrate how I-strengths and the challenges that go with them can appear at various stages of development, let's look in the next chapter at an individual with dyslexia who excels in Interconnected reasoning. His name is Douglas Merrill.

I-Strengths in Action

W
hen Douglas Merrill was young, he struggled to make basic academic connections. As he told us, “Reading was—and is—challenging, so getting through assignments meant using a bunch of tricks.” With writing, “every other letter was backward.” And with math: “Every summer my mother was reteaching me to add, subtract, multiply, and divide all the way up till I was in college. . . . Math never clicked for me. Even when I was in high school I failed algebra.”