The Dyslexic Advantage (13 page)

For certain tasks, this perception of broader conceptual linkages can create an advantage. For example, individuals with dyslexia often show exceptional strength in spotting associations in tasks that require them to connect items conceptually. In one task that's a part of a common IQ test, examinees are given three sets of pictures, then asked to find one picture from each set that can be linked by a common concept. This task can unleash astonishing creativity among dyslexic examinees. Though we've been using the same pictures for many years, we still receive entirely new answers to these questions from our dyslexic examinees.

Dyslexic examinees are also more likely to detect more distant and unusual connections in verbal similarities tasks. For example, when we ask how
blue
and
gray
are similar, most people respond with the “obvious” answer, that both are colors. In contrast, dyslexic examinees sometimes give answers like, “They're the colors of the uniforms in the Civil War,” or “They're the colors of the ocean on sunny and stormy days.” Recently, a very bright seven-year-old boy with dyslexia responded to our question “How are a cat and a mouse alike?” by proudly announcing, “They're the two main characters on a highly popular children's television program called
Tom and Jerry
.”

We also frequently observe this heightened ability to identify distant and unusual connections when we ask individuals with dyslexia to interpret ambiguous sentences—that is, sentences that can correctly be interpreted in more than one way. Ambiguities in word meanings are common in English because many words have multiple meanings or may be used as different parts of speech (noun, verb, adverb, etc.). In fact, the five hundred most commonly used words in the English language have an average of twenty-three different meanings
each
in the
Oxford English Dictionary
.
³
Correctly identifying which meaning is intended in a particular sentence requires a processing system that's capable both of identifying many possible meanings and of choosing the appropriate meaning based on the overall context of the sentence. During our testing, we commonly ask examinees to find two or more meanings for sentences that are intentionally ambiguous, such as:

We often find that dyslexic students who've struggled with many other fine-detail language tasks are able to correctly interpret these sentences with no difficulty at all, while students who've excelled at many of the fine-detail language tasks may struggle. Skill in recognizing alternate meanings is useful for interpreting all kinds of complex messages, like stories, jokes, conversations (especially informal ones), poems, and figurative language of all kinds (like analogies or metaphors). As we discussed in chapter 4, this skill is also highly useful for reading, especially for struggling readers.

Individuals with dyslexia who possess prominent I-strengths also frequently show an impressive ability to spot relationships of
togetherness
—that is, correlation or cause and effect
—
between things, ideas, or experiences
.
This ability is sometimes referred to as
pattern detection
, and pattern detection has often been noted by experts on dyslexia to be a special dyslexic strength.
⁴
Strength in detecting relationships of correlation or cause and effect is a useful skill in many fields, including science, business, economics, investment, design, psychology, leadership, and human relationships of all kinds. Jack Laws expressed his awareness of the pervasiveness of cause-and-effect relationships in nature in his description of the “three-dimensional web [of] relationships between things” that he often sees, and in his recognition that “things are as they are because of their relationships with everything else.”

Another dyslexic scientist who has demonstrated an acute perception of the interconnectedness of nature is Dr. James Lovelock. Lovelock is best known as the formulator of the Gaia hypothesis, which states that the climatic and chemical components of the earth's crust and atmosphere interact to form a complex system that maintains the earth in “a comfortable state for life.”
⁵
Lovelock was first led to posit such connections when he noticed subtle correlations in the variations of the chemical composition of earth's atmosphere and oceans. While other scientists before Lovelock had recognized that the earth's atmosphere was almost perfectly suited for biological life, none had realized that this special balance was maintained by the interactions of a tightly linked network of chemical processes: they'd observed the same parts but had missed the interconnections that form the whole system.

The second I-strength is the ability to see connections between different perspectives, approaches, or points of view. This I-strength helps its possessors see that a particular problem, idea, or phenomenon can be studied using different approaches and techniques, borrowed from different disciplines or professions.

Individuals with this I-strength prefer interdisciplinary rather than specialized approaches when taking on new problems or projects. They typically reject traditional ways of categorizing knowledge into “watertight” fields or disciplines and are dissatisfied with narrow and highly reductive approaches. Instead, they try to use as many different approaches as they can to solve problems and further their understanding, and they often borrow and adapt techniques from many different sources, applying them in new ways.

This way of viewing information often leads individuals with dyslexia to become “multiple specialists” who are knowledgeable in several fields rather than highly specialized in a single one. As a result of this interdisciplinary mind-set, they often find new and creative ways to apply approaches from one field to others where they're not usually used. Sometimes their recognition that interesting questions require new approaches leads them to seek broader training. For example, James Lovelock already had a Ph.D. in physiology when his growing interests in environmental science and climatology led him to pursue a second doctorate in biophysics. Ultimately, it was this blending of professional perspectives that suggested to him that the earth's biosphere might be understood and studied as if it were a physiological system.

In the past, many individuals with especially severe dyslexic challenges, unable to complete their professional training through traditional academic routes, were forced to acquire their skills through work experience or self-education. For example, John “Jack” Horner always knew he wanted to become a paleontologist, but after dyslexic difficulties caused him to flunk out of college seven times, he was forced to abandon conventional schooling. Eventually Horner worked his way up from an entry-level post as a museum technician and became one of the world's foremost paleontologists. Today he's both a full professor at Montana State University and curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies.

The special combination of strengths and challenges that many individuals with dyslexia possess often causes them to have unusually varied life histories and careers. We've often thought that if the life stories of many of these individuals were placed on a series of “story tiles,” it would be impossible to assemble the tiles in the correct sequence. However, in retrospect, the twists and turns their lives take usually make sense—they just couldn't be predicted in advance. The logic of Interconnected reasoning that directs their life journeys is so completely different from traditional logic that unless it's viewed carefully it may seem to be no logic at all.

The third and final I-strength is the ability to combine different types of information into a single unified big-picture or global view. This I-strength reflects the ability to perceive the “whole” that can be made by combining different “parts” and to identify its central essence. This critical skill is one of the chief components of the dyslexic advantage, and as we discussed in chapter 4, it results from a fundamental variation in the way that dyslexic brains are organized and structured to form larger circuits, which unite multiple processing centers. We can better understand this big-picture reasoning strength by examining one of its key components:
gist.

Gist is the main point, essence, or overall meaning of a thing, idea, concept, or experience. It's the “rough,” coarse, or bird's-eye view, rather than the fine-detail view: the forest rather than the trees. Gist deals with overall shape or contour, or the core meaning. Gist detection helps us recognize the overall context or setting, so we stand a better chance of being able to fill in any information we find ambiguous or unclear and to determine what's relevant and what's not. For example, when a telephone or radio message is garbled by static, we use gist detection to determine the context of the message as a whole, then we use this knowledge of context to fill in the details we've missed.

All verbal messages have a gist, but this gist can't be determined by simply “adding up” all the primary meanings of each of the words in the message, then “computing” the global meaning like a sum. Instead, the gist or overall meaning of the message must be distilled by carefully considering all the possible meanings of all the words and phrases, then determining the essence of the message as a whole. Through this search for gist, clues about the source's meaning and intent can be identified, as can the source's mood and style. These clues reveal whether the source is trustworthy, flippant, alarmed, emphatic, etc. Ultimately, these gist-determining skills lie very close to the core of what we mean by “understanding,” and they're essential for determining the meanings of all but the simplest verbal messages and especially for complex messages like stories, plays, poems, jokes, or social interactions.

Gist also lends power to the other I-strengths. Gist detection allows us to determine the fitness of analogies and metaphors. It also helps us decide which perspectives, viewpoints, or approaches we should use to best understand some object of thought. In these ways, gist can be thought of as the ability to detect the relevant context or broader background of an object, idea, or message.

Researchers have shown that individuals with dyslexia tend to rely more heavily on gist detection than do nondyslexics for comprehending verbal information. T. R. Miles and colleagues at the University of Bangor in Wales presented both dyslexic and nondyslexic college students with four sentences of increasing complexity and measured how long it took each student to master the verbatim repetition of the sentences. While none of the twenty-four nondyslexics needed over eight repetitions to master the fine details, the dyslexic students averaged considerably more trials and some required as many as twenty-five. Despite these difficulties in mastering the fine details, the dyslexic students performed just as well as the nondyslexics in retaining the gist of the sentences.
⁶

Many dyslexic readers are particularly dependent upon background clues and context to home in on gist. That's why many dyslexic readers show better comprehension for longer rather than shorter passages—
especially if the extra passages contain helpful contextual clues
. We often listen as dyslexic students misread every second or third word of a complex passage and wonder how they'll ever understand what they're reading. Yet when the passages provide helpful background context, we often find that the comprehension of even severely slow and inaccurate readers is surprisingly strong and in some cases outstanding. This kind of “upside surprise” is due largely to their ability to use contextual clues to grasp the gist of the passage, which allows them to correctly guess at the identities of the individual words.
⁷
In contrast, when passages contain few contextual clues, comprehension usually worsens as the passages grow longer.

This beneficial effect of extra context is why many dyslexic readers enjoy books that are part of a series. Series books contain many of the same characters, settings, and activities and often use similar words. A similar improvement in comprehension can be seen when individuals with dyslexia are pre-equipped with a summary of the passage they'll be reading, shown a film version, or supplied with a list of key words.

This skill in gist detection is also very helpful in areas besides reading. Many individuals with dyslexia and prominent I-strengths develop a settled habit of searching carefully for gist and context in all areas of life. As a result, they often look for deeper and deeper layers of meaning and context beneath the obvious meanings. This pattern of continually “peeling back the onion” to find the deeper significance of an idea or thing or occupation is one we've seen repeatedly in the individuals with dyslexia we've studied. Often it plays a key role in their success, leading them to question things and ideas that have long been taken for granted, and allowing them to find secrets that have been “hidden in plain sight,” in a way that often makes others ask, “Why didn't I notice that?” We'll illustrate the value of this gist-detection skill in a later chapter, when we discuss the work of a highly successful individual with dyslexia.

Trade-offs with I-Strengths

J
ust like the rest of the MIND strengths, I-strengths are often accompanied by cognitive trade-offs. In fact, each of the I-strengths we've discussed so far comes with its own set of “flip-side” challenges.