The Dyslexic Advantage (36 page)

3
S. Dehaene,
Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention
(New York: Viking, 2009), and M. Wolf,
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2007).

4
The other major branch of learning and memory is called
declarative
, and it involves learning the facts about something. We discuss declarative memory in detail in chapter 16.

1
Widely read examples include Daniel Pink,
A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
(New York: Riverhead, 2005), and Betty Edwards,
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
(New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1989).

2
For those interested in a good general discussion of these differences, we recommend R. Ornstein,
The Right Mind: Making Sense of the Hemispheres
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997).

3
T. G. West,
In the Mind's Eye: Creative Visual Thinkers, Gifted Dyslexics, and the Rise of Visual Technologies
(Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2009).

4
Tufts University professor Dr. Maryanne Wolf also comments on this apparent dyslexia/right hemisphere connection in her fascinating survey of reading and reading challenges,
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2007).

5
S. Shaywitz et al., Functional disruption in the organization of the brain for reading in dyslexia.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
,
USA
95 (1998): 2636–51. This pattern has also been confirmed by many other researchers. For a detailed discussion of this reading circuit, see M. Wolf,
Proust and the Squid
, 165–97, or S. Dehaene,
Reading in the Brain
, 235–61.

6
M. Wolf,
Proust and the Squid
, 186.

7
P. Turkeltaub, L. Gareau, L. Flowers, T. Zeffiro, and G. Eden, Development of neural mechanisms for reading.
Nature Neuroscience
6 (2003): 767–73.

8
In R. Ornstein,
The Right Mind
, 174.

9
M. Jung-Beeman, Bilateral brain processes for comprehending natural language.
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences
9 (2005): 512–18.

10
The actual experiment by which Beeman demonstrated this is described in the
TRENDS
paper cited above and runs as follows. First, individuals were “primed” by being shown three different words (in this example
foot
,
glass
, and
pain
) that are each distantly related to a particular word (in this case
cut
). Second, the word
cut
was shown either to the left or the right hemisphere of the brain (by displaying it exclusively to either the right or the left half of the visual field). When this was done, only the right hemisphere responded more strongly than it did when the “prime” was not given, because only its broader semantic field created a “cumulative priming effect” through which the activation of each related word added additional force. In contrast, when a word more closely related to
cut
—like
scissors
—was used to “prime” subjects prior to viewing cut, it was now the left hemisphere that showed a greater priming effect. In short, the right hemisphere recognizes secondary or more distant semantic relationships that help capture overall meaning or gist, while the left hemisphere recognizes almost exclusively the “tight” primary meanings that help maintain precision.

11
A useful summary of this work is provided in E. L. Williams and M. Casanova, Autism and dyslexia: A spectrum of cognitive styles as defined by minicolumnar morphometry.
Medical Hypotheses
74 (2010): 59–62.

12
That is, autistic individuals tend to interpret messages based on a very narrow, literal, or “concrete” understanding of the words used, relying almost entirely on the primary word meanings.

13
Although many of the cognitive features associated with the bias toward long connections are similar to the features associated with increased “right-brain” processing that we described above, one advantage that Dr. Casanova's minicolumnar theory of dyslexia has over the right-brain-predominant theory that we discussed above is that it does a better job of explaining why individuals with dyslexia typically retain a “right-brain flavor” to their processing style even when brain scans show that their circuitry has become increasingly left-sided through practice. For example, we often find that individuals with dyslexia who've become relatively skilled readers still process stories in a highly gist-dependent, top-down fashion, just like many less-skilled dyslexic readers. We'll explain this finding in more detail in our section on I-strengths, but the basic point is that certain aspects of the dyslexic processing style are unlikely to completely vanish even with extensive training, as we might have predicted with the hemispheric theory, because the difference in minicolumnar orientation and bias toward long connections means that the
left
hemisphere of an individual with dyslexia will in some ways function with a rather
right
hemispheric flavor.

1
E. A. Attree, M. J. Turner, N. Cowell, A virtual reality test identifies the visuospatial strengths of adolescents with dyslexia.
Cyberpsychology and Behavior
12 (2009): 163–68.

2
C. von Károlyi, Visual-spatial strength in dyslexia: Rapid discrimination of impossible figures.
Journal of Learning Disabilities
34 (2001): 380–91.

3
J. S. Symmes, Deficit models, spatial visualization, and reading disability.
Annals of Dyslexia
22 (1971): 54–68.

4
N. Geschwind, Why Orton was right.
Annals of Dyslexia
32 (1982): 13–30.

5
Psychologist Alexander Bannatyne noted that in his experience “parents in highly spatial occupations, such as surgeons, mechanics, dentists, architects, engineers and farmers, tend to have more dyslexic children than do those in other occupations.” A. Bannatyne,
Language, Reading and Learning Disabilities: Psychology, Neuropsychology, Diagnosis and Remediation
(Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1971).

6
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=155324§ioncode=26
;
http://www.hhc.rca.ac.uk/resources/publications/CaseStudies/id4307.pdf
.

7
B. Steffert, Visual spatial ability and dyslexia. In V
isual Spatial Ability and Dyslexia
, ed. I. Padgett (London: Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, 1999).

8
ddig.lboro.ac.uk/2004_conference/documents/sarah_parsons_notes.doc
.

9
U. Wolff and I. Lundberg, The prevalence of dyslexia among art students.
Dyslexia
8 (2002): 34–42.

10
T. G. West,
Thinking Like Einstein: Returning to Our Visual Roots with the Emerging Revolution in Computer Information Visualization
(Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2004).

11
M. Wolf,
Proust and the Squid
.

12
www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2714
:dys lexia--icon-013--june-2004.

13
N. Geschwind, Why Orton was right.

14
M. Critchley and E. A. Critchley,
Dyslexia Defined
(Chichester, England: R. J. Acford, 1978).

15
The hippocampus plays an important role in many aspects of memory. In this case, it's our memory for where things are. As we'll see later in the book, the hippocampus also plays an important role in the kind of episodic memory abilities that Kristen so prominently displayed, and which play a major role in the reasoning skills of many individuals with dyslexia.

16
C. F. Doeller, C. Barry, and N. Burgess, Evidence for grid cells in a human memory network.
Nature
463 (2010): 657—61.

17
MX's story appears in
Discover
online:
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/mar/23-the-brain-look-deep-into-mind.s-eye
.

18
J. Hadamard,
The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field
(Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1954).

19
K. M. Jansons, A personal view of dyslexia and of thought without language. In
Thought without Language
, ed. L. Weiskrantz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

20
Ibid. Einstein similarly described some of his mental imagery as being of a “muscular type.” In J. Hadamard,
The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field
.

1
S. Dehaene,
Reading in the Brain
(see chap. 3, n. 3).

2
N. A. Badian, Does a visual-orthographic deficit contribute to reading disability?
Annals of Dyslexia
55 (2005): 28–52.

3
www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2714
:dys lexia--icon-013--june-2004.

4
R. Fink,
Why Jane and John Couldn't Read—and How They Learned: A New Look at Striving Readers
(Newark: International Reading Association, 2006).

5
R. I. Nicolson and A. Fawcett,
Dyslexia, Learning and the Brain
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

6
Persistent generation of mirror-image symbols—which results from the preservation of bilateral brain processing pathways—appears to be yet another example of how the slower acquisition of “mature” or “expert” processing in many individuals with dyslexia may lead to persistence of less mature and more bilateral (or bihemispheric) brain processing.

7
These brain regions include the planum temporale, supramarginal gyrus, and angular gyrus.

8
J. Hadamard,
The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field
.

9
Two additional studies, one led by Vanderbilt language specialist Dr. Stephen Camarata and the other by Stanford economist Dr. Thomas Sowell, have also shown that severe late-talking is more common in children whose close family members work in “analytic” occupations. Many of these occupations, like engineering, scientific research, and airline piloting, are high M-strength professions. Both studies are discussed in T. Sowell,
The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late
(New York: Basic Books, 2002).

10
A. M. Bacon, S. J. Handley, and E. L. McDonald, Reasoning and dyslexia: A spatial strategy may impede reasoning with visually rich information.
British Journal of Psychology
98 (2007): 79–82.

1
See F. Epstein,
If I Get to Five: What Children Can Teach Us about Courage and Character
(New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2004).

1
J. Everatt, B. Steffert, and I. Smythe, An eye for the unusual: Creative thinking in dyslexics.
Dyslexia
5 (1999): 28–46.

2
J. Everatt, S. Weeks, and P. Brooks, Profiles of strengths and weaknesses in dyslexia and other learning difficulties.
Dyslexia
14 (2007): 16–41.

3
We owe these interesting facts to Jeff Gray at the Gray-Area website (
www.gray-area.org/Research/Ambig/
).

4
These experts include Dr. Maryanne Wolf, Thomas G. West, and Dr. Albert Galaburda.

5
J. Lovelock,
The Revenge of Gaia
(New York: Basic Books, 2006).

6
T. R. Miles, G. Thierry, J. Roberts, and J. Schiffeldrin, Verbatim and gist recall of sentences by dyslexic and non-dyslexic adults.
Dyslexia
12 (2006): 177–194.

7
Remarkably, we even see this kind of “upside surprise” in story comprehension in some of the children diagnosed with Specific Language Impairment, which shares many of the processing features of dyslexia but is associated with more severe difficulties comprehending language. These children typically have difficulties comprehending all but the shortest and most transparent sentences. When given a story with enough context and redundancy, these children often comprehend far better than expected. We've seen children score as much as three standard deviations higher on their oral story comprehension than on their vocabulary and single-sentence comprehension. This is likely due to their strengths in gist detection and top-down context-based processing.

1
Also called
malapropisms
.

2
Thomas G. West has an interesting and insightful discussion of the phenomenon of paralexia in
In the Mind's Eye
, p. 43ff.

3
S. H. Carson, J. B. Peterson, and D. M. Higgins, Decreased latent inhibition is associated with increased creative achievement in high-functioning individuals.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
85 (2003): 499–506.

1
In reading, too, Douglas developed strategies. “When I could no longer get away with manipulating people, I built a bunch of tricks to try to get through reading.... It's mostly just modified skimming methodologies where you just sort of tag stuff as you go by, because there was no way I was going to be able to read things in any detail. But I could skim, and I would mark something like, ‘This might be interesting later,' and then I would skim the thing over and over again, but I'd try not to think of it as reading, because if I thought of it as reading I'd get all worried about failing and how hard it was and I'd work myself into a frenzy, and that was not helpful. But by skimming over and over again and making progressively more organized marks, I could get the key elements out of an article, or a paper, or a chapter.”