The Upside of Dyslexia

This article from Sunday’s NYTimes, is I think, a continuation of a fascinating argument as to whether the learning disability called dyslexia is also a learning style that has built-in skills and attributes.

I’ve heard many times over, some well-argued points against this notion that dyslexia carries its own set of built in, hard-wired talents. Richard Wanderman, founder of this site and my good friend, can always be counted on to dismiss the notion and point out that people develop talents based on how much they work at it. I may be oversimplifying his and others’ similar points of view on this, but I think it’s close. Proponents argue that such things as “three-dimensional thinking’ for example, are often skill-sets that people with dyslexia possess.

Others claim this is nonsense; that there’s no way to categorize all dyslexics as having a consistent set of benefits or associated neurologically-based strengths.

For me, as is my nature, I think the truth lies more towards the middle. While it’s true that not all people with dyslexia have the same profile of weaknesses, there are general things we know about what’s hard for them, and can see them both operationally (in the real world), and neurologically (through testing and brain imagery). By the same token, while we can’t claim that all dyslexics are “holistic thinkers” or artists, or creative, etc.; if I had a dime for every dyslexic kid who I test or work with, that was a phenomenal “Lego” kid or builder of some kind, I’d be a rich guy. The persistence of the conversation that dyslexics have certain visual skills does not in itself mean that it’s likely to be true, but research such as discussed in this NY Times article, is finally specifying specific attributes that may in fact be true.

Intriguing evidence that those with dyslexia process information from the visual periphery more quickly also comes from the study of “impossible figures,” like those sketched by the artist M. C. Escher. A focus on just one element of his complicated drawings can lead the viewer to believe that the picture represents a plausible physical arrangement.

Of course, all styles of information processing have, hopefully, by their very nature, strengths that are very real. But, having inherent strengths that we may be born with, doesn’t mean the old axiom “use it or lose it. isn’t true.” It also doesn’t mean that you can’t develop skills that you just weren’t born with. I sometimes describe myself a mechanical dyslexic in presentations, to make a certain humorous point, but that doesn’t mean that with enough focus, and enough persevering through mistakes, aka the learning curve, that I didn’t put together a very tough outdoor basketball stand and hoop when my kids were going up.

Genetic tendencies, potential talents and weaknesses, all need fertile and supportive environments to gain traction, and bloom, or become somehow less impactful, in the case of weaknesses. Being sleuths or detectives for strengths in children is as important as being clear about their problems.

In the second study, Mr. Schneps deliberately blurred a set of photographs, reducing high-frequency detail in a manner that made them resemble astronomical images. He then presented these pictures to groups of dyslexic and nondyslexic undergraduates. The students with dyslexia were able to learn and make use of the information in the images, while the typical readers failed to catch on.

Know any photographers who are dyslexic?

Dr. Gordon Sherman on Brain Research and Reading

This is the transcript of an interview Gordon F. Sherman, Ph.D. did with Schwab Learning that although a few years old, is an good summary of the neurological basis of dyslexia. Dr. Sherman is the Executive Director of The Newgrange School in New Jersey. He was previously Director of the Dyslexia Research Laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and is a former president of the International Dyslexia Association.

There’s been a recent study released that should lead to more kids getting more resources and services and hope. Unfortunately there are some headlines that insinuate the opposite, that dyslexia isn’t real.

Here’s the reality. In a recent study from Stanford University, scientists have zeroed in on the brain activation patterns of poor readers. They have found that such brain activation maps are similar in those with higher and lower IQs.

In other words, dyslexia doesn’t mean your dumb. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean that just because you’re dyslexic, you’re automatically brilliant. The article’s title is even,”Brain imaging study shows physiological basis of dyslexia.”

According to Stanford’s School of Medicine, “…in the wake of recent behavioral studies showing that phonological deficits — that is, difficulties in processing the sound system of language, which often leads to difficulties in connecting the sounds of language to letters — are similar in poor readers regardless of IQ.”

This is further evidence that, as Sally Shaywitz has argued previously, IQ and reading skills are not as coupled as many previously thought. While on the one hand this means that if you struggle with reading and spelling due to core phonological deficits in decoding and recoding of phonemics, it doesn’t reflect your capacity to be smart and successful, it also means that people who test out in the below average range of IQ can also be dyslexic. As some responsible folks have noted (including those from MIT and Stanford), these findings should lead to the opening up of resources for a broader range of students.

Instead, and here’s where I get angry, there are articles with the following headlines, “Doubts raised over dyslexia diagnoses” with the subheading: “Dyslexia could be just a label, according to scientists, after a study of brain scans found there is little difference between the way children with the condition think while trying to read and those who simply have a low IQ.”

Again, direct from Stanford (who did the study):

“Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have used an imaging technique to show that the brain activation patterns in children with poor reading skills and a low IQ are similar to those in poor readers with a typical IQ. The work provides more definitive evidence about poor readers having similar kinds of difficulties regardless of their general cognitive ability.”

Is it just me, or does this upset anyone else?

I occasionally use this software when I’m writing reports, and when I do I’m very satisfied. I’ve been tracking this speech recognition software (turning human speech into text on a screen) for a long time. Dragon is by most accounts the best there is and I’m glad it’s recently become available for Mac OS.

I still don’t recommend it for the under high school aged student unless they’re very good readers with the ability to slow down and enunciate a bit more clearly than most kids speak.

Go ahead and read this review. He teases it apart really well.

[via Richard Wanderman

This is great stuff, well-worth looking over.

Forgotten Letters, a collection of essays and articles by writers with dyslexia, aims to show that the condition makes one different, not ‘less’.

From a recent interview via Gtalk, anthology editor Naomi Folb said: “I think that people assume you have a really hard time and that you find everything very difficult, whereas I don’t see dyslexia in this way. For me it is just a way of thinking.”

Folb is currently a Ph.D student in Denmark who is researching dyslexia. She says, “For my degree, I have interviewed writers and journalists, and also mathematicians and engineers because I want to know how dyslexia is ‘used’ in different professions and how dyslexics perceive dyslexia…”

Here is a recent article in its entirety, as well as a link to the Publishing Company, which is dedicated to promoting and publishing writers who are dyslexic.

Fantastic.

[via Richard Wanderman]Laurie Fais and Malia Bateson

.

Emma Jefferies, is an award winning researcher, designer, educator, writer and more recently, a filmmaker. She also has dyslexia. In a series of videos, she speaks about the challenges and processes she went through while earning her Ph.D (in Design).

Watch this first of a few videos posted on the Innovation Investment Journal website. At about the 1 min: 24 second point, she begins to talk about her non-linear processing, for what non dyslexics is a simple “getting from point A to point B.” The way she understands her variant way of delving into a subject or idea recognizes the positive aspects as well as the challenges.

Later on she talk about certain “attributes” or attitudes she’s developed as a result of challenges her dyslexia presents. Included in these attitudes is “taking responsibility for my own problems or challenges and that they’re not someone else’s to accommodate” (words to that effect). She considers reflectiveness about one’s own processes (such as writing) as being another key ingredient.

I loved watching her bit about not going directly “from A to B.” I noticed years ago that certain students who really struggled with the sequential nature of spelling words (theirs were rife with getting the right letters but in the wrong order), could much more quickly unscramble word jumbles like those in the daily newspapers.

I used to teach a class of 5th graders and I’d put a word jumble on the board for fun. Consistently, this one girl, the most severe dyslexic and the worst speller, was the quickest at unscrambling. I’ve always said that folks who are less encumbered with reliance (or ability) on sequencing may have interesting and creative solutions to problems because they are less stuck in A to B.

Sequencing is vital but in designing a creative solution sometimes comes afterwards, when you need to write it down so others can reproduce the solution.

The study, from MIT, theorized that the language processing parts of dyslexia might interfere with recognizing the individual phonetic patterns that make one individual voice slightly different from another’s voice, even when speaking the same words and in the same language.

Difficulties with phonology interfere with reading and spelling. This is another study that bolsters the prevailing theory that dyslexia, an unexpected difficulty with reading, is other than a visual processing difficulty.

Seeing dyslexia primarily as a visual processing disorder (seeing “was” for “saw”) was the prevailing explanation in the 80′s). While it’s clear that dyslexia isn’t just one thing with one explanation, most experts agree that a central component of dyslexia is phonological processing, which involves the perception and play of discrete sounds and aspects of sounds within words (syllables, vowel patterns and sequencing). This is why dyslexia leads to spelling problems and not just reading.

The findings help to shed some additional light on how to engage a dyslexic learner during verbal instruction. Reducing background noise/competing voices, adding visual and graphic cues are two obvious applications of the findings.

Articles on this study can be found here, at the MIT NEWS and here, at US NEWS and WORLD REPORT

I get angry when I hear stories like this. Waiting until a kid fails for long enough before getting some possible relief and services is an atrocious model and one that flies in the face of early intervention best practices.

“… I was told that the school did not want to jump to any fixed conclusions. They said that David , then six, was too young to be diagnosed with dyslexia, which I have since discovered is rubbish. They said he was one of the youngest in the class and that it could be developmental and that he might naturally catch up.“

Richard Wanderman, founder of LD Resources, is among other things, dyslexic and probably not the fastest most accurate reader of all time. He’s also a wonderful photographer and an excellent and thoughtful writer.

A few weeks back Richard reminded me that sometimes the best thing to do while reading is to slow down.

You see, he was teaching me something about a technical aspect of running this wordpress site. While he was talking over the phone to me and I was reading something related to our “technical” discussion, I made some error in connecting what I’d read to what I was supposed to do next. I remember sort of apologizing to Rich for my technical slowness.

Richard said “It’s Ok, Sandy. Slow down and take your time.”

Hmm.

I took a breath, slowed down my reading, everything became clearer and I settled down to finish whatever it was we were working on.

Kids with reading disabilities, dyslexic or otherwise and especially the ones who get good instruction and improve their rate and accuracy, get sucked in to a common myth, namely that reading quickly=reading well.

Don’t get me wrong, being able to read fluently is a great and important thing.

But not all the time.

I often advise some of the older kids I work with, to slow their reading down. They’re surprised because they’re so delighted to finally be able to read more quickly than ever, they get carried away with too much of a good thing.

It’s a great reminder Richard (I don’t think he knew that he was doing this). Sometimes reading slowly is the name of the game.

Thanks for the reading lesson Richard.

It makes the case that kids are losing out by not being taught cursive writing. Since the increase in what’s known as “teaching to the tests”, there’s little time for cursive writing instruction. Plus, with the reality of word processing and touch typing becoming so ubiquitous, “script” is fast becoming “a lost art.”

Occupational therapists point to lost opportunities to hone fine motor skills.

I see how cursive letter instruction can be so very good for some students with learning disabilities. Learning cursive even at young ages can:
1. Improve one’s sense of self-mastery and self-esteem. Like it or not, society gets a little judgemental on those whose grapho-motor weaknesses make their printing look like chicken-scratch (through no lack of effort).

2. Good cursive letter instruction (Slingerland approach or “Handwriting without Tears” for example) can really help increase flow and connections and reduce letter reversals. B’s and D’s don’t look much alike and the forms substantially reduce confusion of where the strokes begin (all lower case letters begin in the same place for example).

3. Most importantly however, cursive writing can be an effective and important part of good multi sensory reading and spelling instruction. When you teach a student a linguistic pattern, “tion” for example, the cursive writing of it, in the air, in sand or on paper, gives kinesthetic feedback that can be an important component of creating muscle memory and integration with the overall language (decoding and encoding) training.

Warning: I love the content of the NY Times dot com, but they now have a limit to how many articles you can access free per month (20).

[via Richard Wanderman]

I’ve always thought that for some kids the typical high school day is backwards, they need to exercise before academics to get their blood chemistry and brains in the right groove for thinking.

Many children want to read books on digital devices and would read for fun more frequently if they could obtain e-books. But even if they had that access, two-thirds of them would not want to give up their traditional print books.

Until you can dog ear and draw on an iBooks or Kindle page, what good are they? [grin]