The Dyslexic Advantage (17 page)

This creative recombination system can be used as a kind of mental laboratory to simulate what might happen given certain starting conditions or circumstances. According to Dr. Hassabis, “This episodic simulation function is very valuable in a lot of fields, including things like financial forecasting, or designing computer games and imagining how players will play them, or thinking about a film scene and how it might play out.”

Given the many uses of this episodic simulation system, the bias for
episodic
rather than
semantic
memory, which many individuals with dyslexia show, has implications that go beyond memory to reach the very heart of the reasoning process. Dyslexic individuals with prominent N-strengths often reason by mentally simulating potential events or actions, then “observing” how these simulations “play out,” rather than reasoning abstractly using definitions or formulas stripped of context. These simulations are based on information they've gathered from real experience rather than on abstract principles.

We've found that a large majority of individuals with dyslexia show this preference for episodic over semantic memory for most tasks, and it shows up in various ways in both clinical settings and real life. One way that it presents is as a tendency to store conceptual and verbal knowledge as
scene-based depictions or examples
rather than
abstract verbal definitions.

Often as a part of our testing sessions we'll ask individuals to define terms or concepts. While most individuals respond with abstract dictionary-type definitions, individuals with dyslexia often respond with examples, illustrations, anecdotes, or descriptions of uses or physical features. For example, when we ask individuals with dyslexia to define the word
bicycle
, they're more likely than nondyslexics to respond with an analogy (e.g., “It's like a motorcycle, but you make it go yourself”) or a description (e.g., “It's a thing with a seat, two wheels, handlebars, and pedals that you make go by pushing the pedals with your feet”), as opposed to an abstract definition (e.g., “It's a human-powered, two-wheeled, transportation device”). The same is true when we ask individuals with dyslexia to define a concept that's inherently abstract, like “fairness.” Individuals with dyslexia are more likely to respond with an example (“It's like when you're playing a game and you wouldn't want to make someone else do something you wouldn't want to do yourself”) than an abstract definition (e.g., “It means everyone should be treated the same” or “It means you get what you deserve”). This reliance on scene-based
depictions
of facts rather than abstract or noncontextual
definitions
reflects a greater reliance on episodic rather than semantic memory, and many of the older dyslexic individuals with whom we've spoken confirm that this pattern is characteristic of their thought.

When we ask these older individuals with dyslexia to tell us more about their thinking style, they often also describe another feature that relates to episodic memory. When thinking of a fact or concept, they typically find that the concept is not represented in their mind by a single generalized depiction of that concept, but rather by a series of distinct examples through which they can mentally “scroll.” The concept is understood as the complete collection of all these examples, and while it centers around the most common or representative examples, it also includes the outliers. Jack Laws gave us an especially good description of this conceptual style. When we spoke with him, he mentioned that he'd found he could much more easily distinguish between different animals of the same species than most people—for example, between different crows or robins. So we asked him what popped into his head when we mentioned the concept “robin”: just one idealized robin or a whole series of different robins? He answered without hesitation, “Different robins, definitely. My mind starts jumping to robins that I've experienced, rather than a single generalized robin, or the Platonic ideal of the robin.” When he drew a robin for his field guide, he drew the single robin that best represented the features of the whole group—but it was a
particular
robin rather than an idealized generalization. In other words, he drew from an episodic rather than a semantic memory.

When we mentioned these dyslexic memory preferences to Dr. Hassabis, he responded, “That's very interesting because it relates to an important trade-off between episodic memory and semantic memory that people in the memory field have been thinking about.” Both of these types of memory are critically dependent upon the hippocampus [which, as we mentioned before, plays critical roles in memory formation and recall]. But the interesting thing is—and this is really not written anywhere, but it's the sort of thing people at the cutting edge are thinking about at the moment—if you want to be very good at episodic memory, you want your hippocampus to engage in a process called
pattern separation.
What pattern separation involves is this: Suppose you experience something new, and even though it's quite similar to something else you've experienced, you want to remember it as a distinct event—for example, what I did for lunch yesterday as opposed to three days ago, even though maybe I had lunch with the same people, and in the same place, and lots of the elements were in common. One of the functions the hippocampus performs is to keep those similar memories separate. It actually makes them more divergent than you would expect—and that's exactly what you'd want if you wish to have a good episodic memory.

“In contrast, if you want to be good at learning semantic facts that generalize and are true across multiple experiences—for example, the fact that Paris is the capital of France—then you don't really care about the specific episode you learned that in.” What you care about is basically just the ‘fact nugget.' The surrounding context in which you learned that fact simply isn't relevant to that piece of information. In that case you want something else the hippocampus does, which is called
pattern completion.
Pattern completion is a process that unites divergent things. So, let's say you heard a particular fact in several different lessons. What's actually important is
that fact
and not the different contexts in which you encountered that fact. So pattern completion solidifies your memory of the fact that was heard on each occasion but eliminates any record of the differences in the way you experienced it.

“Now, if the hippocampus is responsible for doing both of those things, then perhaps what you're seeing with these dyslexics is that some of the same brain wiring differences that cause them to be dyslexic also predispose them to favor pattern separation over pattern completion. That would make them very good at remembering things that have happened to them and at episodic memory. This greater diversity of separated patterns might also make them better at spotting unusual connections between facts that people who are not dyslexic wouldn't make.”

This last observation is very important because it relates to our discussion of I-strengths in part 4. There we suggested that creativity may be enhanced in individuals with dyslexia because they are predisposed to making broader neural circuits that both create a greater breadth, diversity, and novelty of connections and enhance the perception of gist and context. Pattern separation also empowers the dyslexic mind because it “stocks” the mind with a greater number of separated patterns that may be used to make novel connections. In short, individuals with dyslexia may have a double helping of cognitive features that enhance their ability to make diverse and more creative connections.

These features are ideal for producing minds with powerful narrative abilities. What could be more helpful for a storyteller than a mind stocked with an endless array of different characters and experiences and scenarios; disposed to spot new connections, associations, patterns, and nuances between them; and wired with the ability to unite it all into a single great narrative by seeking a higher-order context or gist?

This highly creative narrative thinking style often displays itself in a tendency to think and convey information in story form. We first noticed this tendency during our testing sessions when we asked individuals to describe a picture called “Cookie Thief.”
³
It shows a woman standing in the foreground, at the front plane of the picture, drying a dish with a towel and looking out rather vacantly toward the viewer. Behind and to her left, water is overflowing from a sink where the tap has been left on, and it's beginning to collect in a puddle on the floor. To her right—and clearly unbeknownst to her—a young boy is standing on a stool, reaching high into a cabinet for a cookie jar that sits on the top shelf. Next to the stool, a girl is reaching up eagerly to receive a cookie. Neither seems aware that the stool is tipping and the boy is about to fall.

Most viewers find the events in this scene rather trivial and implausible—especially the actions of the woman, who seems bizarrely detached from the chaos around her—so they make little effort to reconcile the various events into a single coherent story. Instead, they simply describe the most obvious features of the picture. Over time, however, we found that a small number of viewers would propose additional details in an effort to reconcile the picture's seemingly irreconcilable elements. Most often the additional detail would involve a person or an object “in front” of the plane of the picture (like the father or a TV) that was distracting the woman's attention and causing her to ignore the sink and the children. Remarkably, nearly all the individuals who proposed these extra elements were dyslexic, and the solutions they proposed were clearly aimed at identifying the gist to provide a coherent explanation for the action in the picture.

We also found that the individuals with dyslexia were more likely to use conventional storytelling techniques to describe the picture. At younger ages these include formulaic openings like, “One day while she was washing the dishes . . . ,” or “Once upon a time . . . ,” but even the older individuals with dyslexia were more likely to give the characters names, lines of dialogue, distinctive personality traits, senses of humor, motivations, and personal and family histories. We've found that many individuals with dyslexia use these kinds of narrative, personal, or episodic elements in all sorts of descriptive tasks, and that their descriptions often contain elements like analogies, metaphors, personalizations or anthropomorphizations, and vivid sensory imagery.

This bias for Narrative reasoning can also be seen in the professional lives of many individuals with dyslexia, who use their N-strengths in all sorts of ways. The following are several examples of dyslexic individuals in fields other than creative writing who have flourished using narrative skills.

Duane Smith is professor of speech and director of the public speaking team at Los Angeles Valley College—a school he once failed out of as a student due to his dyslexia-related challenges. As he told us, “My whole life has been about stories, and telling stories, and I stress the importance in my public speaking class about telling stories. Half of what we do in forensics competitions is to perform stories, but for me literally everything is about stories.” Prior to becoming a professor, Duane had a successful career in sales, where he also found his narrative skills to be invaluable.

When we described “episodic memory” to Duane, he laughed in recognition. “If I hear a song, or smell something, or see an article of clothing or a car from a particular year, I can immediately imagine a scene on a particular day, or event. It drives my wife crazy because we'll be listening to the radio, and I'll talk about how it takes me back to 1985 when I was standing with a group of buddies at In-N-Out Burger on a Saturday night listening to that song, and what we were talking about, and she'll say, ‘Can't you ever just listen to the song?'” By contrast, Duane told us that he remembers almost nothing in abstract, noncontextual form: “The only things I remember are experiences and examples and illustrations.”

Law professor David Schoenbrod recalls that when he was a junior in high school, his English teacher told his parents, “David is literate in no language.” That's a problem he's long since overcome, as readers of his four highly regarded books on environmental law will attest. To what does David attribute his success as a litigator? As he told us, “It seems to me that my strength as a lawyer was being able to tell a story. I had a colleague early in my career who told me that the way you win a case is by telling a story in a way that makes the judge want to decide your way. And I've always felt that I was good at that. . . . I like storytelling, and it came readily to me.”

Entrepreneur and cognitive psychologist Douglas Merrill attributes his survival in school and his mastery of math techniques primarily to his use of narrative strategies. “I always think in stories. . . . I spent most of my time [as an adolescent] reading or telling stories, or playing fantasy games around stories like Dungeons and Dragons. ”

“I ended up at Charles Schwab, and Charles—who goes by Chuck—is dyslexic; and he sits in meetings with his eyes closed, listening to people talk, and he never reads the handouts in advance, and it's pretty clear that all he's doing is listening and thinking. And he tells these great stories about what customers are going to want. I found that incredibly freeing because for the first time I thought, ‘This stuff I do well at is valuable, as opposed to the stuff I do badly at, which seems to be what everyone else thinks matters.'”

After leaving Google, Douglas worked briefly as president of New Music at EMI Recorded Music. “I thought one of the problems that industry had was that it didn't know anything about itself. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what's actually happening in the music industry. The most direct way to do that is with math, and I suck at math, so instead I would read economic articles and surveys, and I would make notes on yellow stickies, then stick them on the wall. Then once a week I'd skim those stickies and move them around, and what I ended up with was a story.”