I think I have been dyslexic all of
my life. I remember in 1968 having my legs smacked by Miss Serank for
getting my letters the wrong way around. I font think that English
Prep schools figured it out . The key to the solution has ale=ways
been my imagination and my ability to ask “What if?” . Its made
me an avid reader of books, particularly Science fiction and fantasy.
Its made me able to understand James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as well
as William Faulkner and the streams of consciousness approach of
William James,
Its also helped me think
metaphorically and symbolically/ I think in many ways its helped me
think outside of the box. Its made me a rebel and a challenge of
systems and oddly I am very grateful for the gift it has given me,
One of the things that has made me
laugh is that when you are winning an argument on social media then
the last refuge of the narrow minded conservative is to reply about
spelling. What is fascinating is that the more conservative they are
then the worse is their imagination and their creativity. Its rather
like saying I have nothing say, nothing to contribute in originality
and are the most obsessed with the the correctly s pelt words whilst
having the least to say/. Perhaps it is the inability to think
outside the box. Anyway I found this fascinating article from the
Scientific American. It has great resonance with me.
Those who read my posts as I travel
in to work must sometimes wonder exactly what I am saying. I usually
correct it with Word once I get to work but a few things will always
slip through. Spelling is immensely important but too often the
critics of those who are mildly dyslexic are often ise this approacj
a defence mechanism of the critic`s conservatism and imaginative
ability. However these cases are few in number and I take great
pleasyre in pointing this out.
It with my poor sight has given me a
first class memory and an inability unfortunately at times the
inability to deal with ignorance and stupidity. So it gets me into
trouble regularly. Anyway first please read about Leonardo Da Vinci
and then on to the Advantages of Dyslexia
15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519
Inventor, Painter, Designer, Musician
-"Renaissance Man"
Leonardo da Vinci was an
inventor, painter, and sculptor whose broad interests also
included architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering,
literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history,
and cartography.
Art historian Helen Gardner wrote that the
scope and depth of his interests were without precedent in recorded
history, and “his mind and personality seem to us superhuman”.
One remarkable indication that Leonardo was
dyslexic is in his handwriting. Leonardo was constantly sketching out
his ideas for inventions. Most of the time, he wrote his notes in
reverse, mirror image:
Although unusual, this is a trait sometimes shared
by other left-handed dyslexic adults. Most of the time, dyslexic
writers are not even consciously aware that they are writing this
way; it is simply an easier and more natural way for them to write.
Leonardo’s spelling is also considered erratic
and quite strange. He also started many more projects then he ever
finished – a characteristic now often associated with
attention deficit disorder (ADHD).
However, when it came to his drawing and artwork,
Leonardo’s work is detailed and precise.
Leonardo
was intrigued with the concept of human flight, and spent many years
toying with various ideas for flying machines. When he drew his
flying machine, he wrote (backwards, of course): “A small model can
be made of paper with a spring like metal shaft that after having
been released, after having been twisted, causes the screw to spin up
into the air.”
His extraordinary art work and inventive genius
are proof that he truly possessed the gift of dyslexia.
Artwork:
Inventive Designs:
Leonardo’s Robot
(mechanical knight)
Helicopter (Aerial
Screw)
Parachute
Ornithopter
Mechanical Adding
Machine
Diving Suit
Steam Cannon
Machine Gun
Armored Tank
The Advantages of Dyslexia
Impossible "Waterfall" Credit:
"Escher Waterfall". Via Wikipedia
“There are three types of mathematicians, those
who can count and those who can’t.”
Bad joke? You bet. But what makes this amusing is
that the joke is triggered by our perception of a paradox, a
breakdown in mathematical logic that activates regions of the brain
located in the
right
prefrontal cortex. These regions are sensitive to the perception
of causality and alert us to situations that are suspect or fishy —
possible sources of danger where a situation just doesn’t seem to
add up.
Many of the famous etchings by the artist M.C.
Escher activate a similar response because they depict scenes that
violate causality. His famous “
Waterfall”
shows a water wheel powered by water pouring down from a wooden
flume. The water turns the wheel, and is redirected uphill back to
the mouth of the flume, where it can once again pour over the wheel,
in an endless cycle. The drawing shows us a situation that
violates pretty much every law of physics on the books, and our brain
perceives this logical oddity as amusing — a visual joke.
The trick that makes Escher’s drawings
intriguing is a geometric construction psychologists refer to as an
“
impossible
figure,” a line-form suggesting a three-dimensional object that
could never exist in our experience. Psychologists, including a team
led by Catya von Károlyi of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire,
have used such figures to
study
human cognition. When the team asked people to pick out impossible
figures from similarly drawn illustrations that did not violate
causality, they were surprised to discover that some people were
faster at this than others. And most surprising of all, among those
who were the fastest were those with dyslexia.
Dyslexia is often called a “learning
disability.” And it can indeed present learning challenges.
Although its effects vary widely, children with dyslexia read
so
slowly that it would typically take them a half a year to read
the same number of words other children might read in a day.
Therefore, the fact that people who read so slowly were so adept at
picking out the impossible figures was a big surprise to the
researchers. After all, why would people who are slow in reading be
fast at responding to visual representations of causal reasoning?
Though the psychologists may have been surprised,
many of the people with dyslexia I speak with are not. In our
laboratory at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics we have
carried out studies funded by the National Science Foundation to
investigate
talents
for science among those with dyslexia. The dyslexic scientist
Christopher Tonkin described to me his sense of this as a sensitivity
to “things out of place.” He’s easily bothered by the
weeds among the flowers in his garden, and he felt that this
sensitivity for visual anomalies was something he built on in his
career as a professional scientist. Such differences in
sensitivity for causal perception may explain why people like
Carole
Greider and
Baruj
Benacerraf have been able to perform Nobel prize-winning science
despite lifelong challenges with dyslexia.
In one
study,
we tested professional astrophysicists with and without dyslexia for
their abilities to spot the simulated graphical signature in a
spectrum characteristic of a black hole. The scientists with dyslexia
—perhaps sensitive to the weeds among the flowers— were better at
picking out the black holes from the noise, an advantage useful in
their careers. Another
study
in our laboratory compared the abilities of college students with and
without dyslexia for memorizing blurry-looking images resembling
x-rays. Again, those with dyslexia showed an advantage, an advantage
in that can be useful in science or medicine.
Why are there advantages in dyslexia? Is it
something about the brains of people with dyslexia that predisposes
them to causal thinking? Or, is it a form of compensation,
differences in the brain that occur because people with dyslexia read
less? Unfortunately, the answer to these questions is unknown.
One thing we do know for sure is that reading
changes the structure of the brain. An avid reader might read for an
hour or more a day, day in and day out for years on end. This highly
specialized repetitive training, requiring an unnaturally precise,
split-second control over eye movements, can quickly restructure the
visual system so as to make some pathways more efficient than the
others.
When illiterate adults were taught to read, an
imaging
study
led by Stanislas Dehaene in France showed that changes occurred in
the brain as reading was acquired. But, as these adults developed
skills for reading, they also lost their former abilities to process
certain types of visual information, such as the ability to determine
when an object is the
mirror
image of another. Learning to read therefore comes at a cost,
and the ability to carry out certain types of visual processing are
lost when people learn to read. This would suggest that the visual
strengths in dyslexia are simply an artifact of differences in
reading experience, a trade-off that occurs as a consequence of poor
reading in dyslexia.
My colleagues and I
suggested
that one reason people with dyslexia may exhibit visual talents is
that they have difficulty managing visual attention. It may at
first seem ironic that a difficulty can lead to an advantage, but it
makes sense when you realize that what we call “advantages” and
“disadvantages” have meaning only in the context of the task that
needs to be performed.
For example, imagine you’re looking to hire a
talented security guard. This person’s job will be to spot things
that look odd and out of place, and call the police when something
suspicious —say, an unexpected footprint in a flowerbed— is
spotted. If this is the person’s task, would you rather hire a
person who is an excellent reader, who has the ability to focus
deeply and get lost in the text, or would you rather hire a person
who is sensitive to changes in their visual environment, who is less
apt to focus and block out the world?
Tasks such as reading require an ability to focus
your attention on the words as your eyes scan a sentence, to quickly
and accurately shift your attention in sequence from one word to the
next. But, to be a good security guard you need an opposite
skill; you need to be able to be alert to everything all at once, and
though this isn’t helpful for reading, this can lead to talents in
other areas. If the task is to find the logical flaw in an impossible
figure, then this can be done more quickly if you can distribute your
attention everywhere on the figure all at once. If you tend to focus
on the visual detail, to examine every piece of the figure in
sequence, it could take you longer to determine whether these parts
add up to the whole, and you would be at a disadvantage.
A series of
studies
by an Italian team led by Andrea Facoetti have shown that
children with dyslexia often exhibit impairments in visual attention.
In one
study,
Facoetti’s team measured visual attention in 82 preschool children
who had not yet been taught to read. The researchers then waited a
few years until these children finished second grade, and then
examined how well each child had learned reading. They found that
those who had difficulty focusing their visual attention in preschool
had more difficulty learning to read.
These studies raise the possibility that visual
attention deficits, present from a very early age, are responsible
for the reading challenges that are characteristic of dyslexia. If
this theory is upheld, it would also suggest that the observed
advantages are not an incidental byproduct of experience with
reading, but are instead the result of differences in the brain that
were likely present from birth.
If this is indeed the case, given that attention
affects perception in very general ways, any number of advantages
should emerge. While people with dyslexia may tend to miss
details in their environment that require an attentional focus, they
would be expected to be better at noticing things that are
distributed more broadly. To put this another way, while
typical readers may tend to miss the forest because it’s view is
blocked by all the trees, people with dyslexia may see things more
holistically, and miss the trees, but see the forest.
Among other advantages observed, Gadi Geiger and
his colleagues at MIT
found
that people with dyslexia can distribute their attention far more
broadly than do typical readers, successfully identifying letters
flashed simultaneously in the center and the periphery for spacings
that were much further apart. They also
showed
that such advantages are not just for things that are visual, but
that they apply to sounds as well. In one study, simulating the
sounds of a cocktail party, they found that people with dyslexia were
able to pick out more words spoken by voices widely-distributed in
the room, compared with people who were proficient readers.
Whether or not observations of such advantages
—measured in the laboratory— have applications to talents in real
life remains an open question. But, whatever the reason, a clear
trend is beginning to emerge: People with dyslexia may exhibit
strengths for seeing the big picture (both literally and
figuratively) others tend to miss. Thomas G. West has
long
argued that out-of-the-box thinking is historically part and
parcel of dyslexia, and more recently physicians
Brock
and Fernette Eide have advanced similar arguments. Sociologists,
such as Julie Logan of the Cass Business School in London agree.
Long ago I
found
that dyslexia is relatively common among business entrepreneurs;
people who tend to think differently and see the big picture in
thinking creatively about a business.
Whatever the mechanism, one thing is clear:
dyslexia is associated with differences in visual abilities, and
these differences can be an advantage in many circumstances, such as
those that occur in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
In physics we know that an engine is capable of productive work only
when there are differences in temperature, hot versus cold. It’s
only when everything is all the same that nothing productive can get
done. Neurological differences similarly drive the engine of society,
to create the contrasts between hot and cold that lead to productive
work. Impairments in one area can lead to advantages in others, and
it is these differences that drive progress in many fields, including
science and math. After all, there are probably many more than three
kinds of mathematicians, and society needs them all.
Are you a scientist who specializes in
neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a
recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please
send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth
Cook. Gareth, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, is the series
editor of Best American Infographics
and can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or
Twitter @garethideas.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Matthew H. Schneps is an
astrophysicist with dyslexia who founded the Laboratory for Visual
Learning to investigate the consequences of cognitive diversity on
learning. He is a professor of computer science at UMass Boston, and
conducts research in dyslexia at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education. Currently, Schneps is writing a book on how the emergence
of e-reading technologies is redefining dyslexia.
