Ep 245: The Dyslexic Advantage
Andy Earle
Hey, it's Andy from talking to teens, it would mean the world to us. If you could leave us a five star review. reviews on Apple and Spotify help other parents find the show. And that helps us keep the lights on. Thanks for being a listener. And here's the show. You're listening to talking to teens, where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle.
A, we're here today with Brock and Fernette. Talking about dyslexia. They are leading experts in the field of dyslexia and co founders of the nonprofit dyslexic advantage and the social purpose corporation, neuro learning.com. They've served as consultants to the President's Council on Bioethics. And as visiting lecturers at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. The first edition of their book, the Dyslexic advantage was an international bestseller. And the revised and updated second edition is out now. Really excited to speak with Brock and Fernette, about dyslexia and about learning disabilities. In general, we are going to see that many of the things that we consider to be problems in the way that kids learn are actually hidden advantages. We might think about things like dyslexia, and ADHD as learning disabilities, or things that need to be treated or figured out. But actually, Brock and fernet go into some research in this book showing that people with dyslexia actually surpassed people without dyslexia, and a number of key areas. And the answer might not be that we need to fix our kids or treat their dyslexia. But maybe we just need to help them understand the way that their brains work differently. We're gonna get into all that, and a whole lot more on the show today. With Brock, and Fernette, authors of the Dyslexic advantage.
Thank you so much for coming on talking to teens. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks. Wow, really big book that you've got here on a huge topic, this lexicon advantage. It's called unlocking the hidden potential of the Dyslexic brain. So interesting. Talk to me a little about where this came from, or why a book on dyslexia, and what was kind of the lead up to this coming out?
Brock Eide
Well, it was really sort of bound up in our personal history. So Fernette and I are both doctors. And we were both working together at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, when we started to have children, and our children started out learning challenges. And that eventually led the two of us to leaving academia and setting up our own practice working with children and dance students with learning differences, because we found from our own experience as parents that even though we had a fair amount of training in medicine, things like that, we were taught very little about learning challenges. Our colleagues were taught very little about learning challenges. When we begin to make the rounds and look for specialists to help with our children. We found a lot of people that had little slices of a very big pie, but nobody that seemed to be responsible for the whole pie. And so we really wanted to try to bring our background in neuroscience, and it was a neurologist and our abilities in medicine to bear on the whole question of learning differences. And that's what got us started out. So since the early 2000s, we've been working on learning issues exclusively. And over the course of the first 10 years or so we began to focus more and more on dyslexia, because what fascinated us about Dyslexic individuals and families was that they don't only came with the same challenges, but they came with repeating patterns of strengths. And noticing those strengths was what led us to writing the first edition of this book, dyslexic advantage. 2011
Andy Earle
I love that. I think that's such a powerful thing that you do in this book, and we talked about learning disabilities, but what you really point out a lot is the ways that the Dyslexic brain has advantages. So it has strengths and you break down these four categories of ways that the Dyslexic brain is has a jumpstart, or advantages in a lot of areas, which really, that was really cool. You point out kind of early in the book, a relationship between dyslexia and talent. And I think that's interesting because it's so much of it, we associate with it. I struggle. You know, I think of dyslexia, I think of Oh, hard to read having trouble, you know, slower learning things in school and stuff like that. Yeah,
Brock Eide
it's, you know, but it's very much the sort of situation that, you know, a super tall basketball player finds himself in where they have a disadvantage in the right seats, the
Fernette Eide
high school.
Andy Earle
Yeah, I don't bet these little chairs working for me, yeah,
Brock Eide
we're in our getting into a car, whenever big you have your advantage comes on the court. And it's the same way with dyslexia that we think it's much more accurate to view, the Dyslexic mind has specialized, rather than active, so it's oriented for a different set of strengths. Those strengths make some things really easy, but they make other things that some people do easily, more difficult. So it's just a different rebalancing of strengths and challenges. And early
Fernette Eide
school, you know, traditional, say, public school education may focus on just those skills that may be dyslexic students weaknesses. Exactly,
Andy Earle
yeah, it's like we're shining the spotlight on these certain things as the measure of how smart you are, or how good you are, and at learning, or whatever. And they happen to be just a small slice. Yeah,
Fernette Eide
a person can feel like they're a failure, and they're in the third grade, and they haven't had a chance to discover their strengths and their gifts, you know, and, and that aspect of it. If anything, when researchers just let that studies decide to children, they're more sensitive emotionally, you know, and not. And as a result, it's the perfect storm of putting them in situations where they can't find who they are and find their positive cells, and also setting them up for failure. At that age set it you know, you should just be exploring, and finding out, you know, learning and finding out kind of who you are. So, you know, exactly right, what you've mentioned there.
Andy Earle
What is the relationship between talent and dyslexia? Well,
Brock Eide
the nature of the specialization is becoming, I think, more clear over time, when we wrote the book, in 2011. Initially, it was pretty obvious from an empirical standpoint is looking at dyslexic people that they have the strengths and the different categories. But it was a little bit mysterious, how they all connected and how they connected with the challenges. There were some research that suggested that the way the brain cells themselves in the cortex were organized, could advantage sort of big picture, large scale processing, making distant connections, remote connections, and tying things together. And at the same time, disadvantaged, fine detail processing. So that was kind of one hint at that time. over the intervening 12 years, since the first book came out, there's been a lot of research that's been done, mostly outside of the dyslexia, fielding fields like creativity, research, or memory research, that has really gone to show that it looks like the difference relates to a specializations for memory that formed on the basis of experience versus memory that's formed on the basis of things like drill and practice and doing things over and over repetitively. So you have this setting where dyslexic people tend to devote a lot of their cognitive space, to picking things up from going through the world from doing things from observing things, even things that are not, at the time thought to be important, but just picking things up through experienced, but they tend to learn less well from practicing things over and over again, becoming automatic with things. So this different specialization makes, for example, things like creativity, we're coming up with a new way of doing something easier. But at the same time, it makes doing something repetitive, quickly, repeatedly, accurately, the same way every time more difficult. And so that's where the strength weakness profile comes in.
Andy Earle
I thought that was so interesting. And you talk in the book about the transition from right brain to left brain, or as we're learning skills, how the actual, the more that we practice something, the way that it actually is showing up in our brain is different or that it's getting processed is that kind of moves more and more from the more general areas of the brain to the more detailed kind of or something like that. And then interesting to think of that as being almost one of the characteristics of Dyslexia as that part process is slowed down, or it's not as efficient or something like that. Yeah, it
Brock Eide
really is like people with dyslexia maintain kind of fresher, more naive outlook on things. And so this is why we often see people with dyslexia go into environments. And rather than sort of learn tasks, the way they're performed in the environment, whether that's an office or a school or whatever, they'll come up with their own way of doing things, l devisor. A new way of doing it. So a lot of the innovation that takes place in old environments, takes place from people with dyslexia, and a lot of ADHD people share the same trait, where they'll kind of reconceptualize how to do things, you know, that the, when you look simply at the level of words, automation, and automaton, you know, robotic, really are the kind of the same route in, it's great to be able to automate skills from the standpoint of not having to use a bunch of cognitive space to do things over and over again. But the downside of it is very apparent as well, once you turn something into an automatic function, you no longer have cognitive access to it, and you're not paying attention to what you're doing anymore. You are literally an automaton you're a robot, you're just doing it on thinking way. And so the chances for innovation don't in that way
Fernette Eide
they put in the neuroscience perspective, there's, you know, there's kind of a rule that you, as you get older, you see what you expect to see. And the downside is when things are slightly different, you know, and there's an experiment where they showed pictures of cats to elderly people, in pictures of cats to children. And they changed the capsular, litchis photographs a little bit, they changed cats a little bit. And older people were much more likely to say I see a cat, I see white cat, have you seen it before? Yes, I've seen it before. But the children were noticing all the differences. Now that cat was a little bit different than the other cat. In that aspect of it, you know, you can see on one side of things, it can be efficient in terms of determining cat. But in terms of recognizing slightly different scenarios, slightly different situations, how a problem might be different, how you're observing something new, that you're going to go for kind of the younger person. But the Dyslexic approach, because it doesn't automatize, things like that, it's more likely to notice these differences, the subtle differences in a result, you know, if you've got a really difficult problem, it's great to have a dyslexic person on the team, because they'll see things in a slightly different way, which is a value when you've got a difficult problem to work on.
Andy Earle
You also talk in the book about working memory a lot. And specifically, you talk about working memory overload. Why is that an important concept to understand, when thinking about dyslexia,
Brock Eide
it's kind of a double dose of challenge in some ways, because people with dyslexia tend as a group to have a narrower working memory span. So working memory, is the kind of space where you store things that you're doing right now. So things that they are actively engaged in are things that you just encountered, that you're trying to encode into a longer term memory. So it's all the active stuff, it's, you know, it's like the keyboard memory on the computer, as opposed to the heart desk. And when that's narrow, then you have to break down complex tasks into bits, so that you're only doing well a little bit at a time rather than trying to do a whole bunch at once. The other problem with working memory is that for people with dyslexia, because as we mentioned before, they don't automate things as well, they're often having to think their way through things that have not become automatic yet. And that syncing takes place in working memory. So you may as a dyslexic person, often find yourself when you're encountering a new task, and especially a complex task or a task you haven't mastered yet, with kind of a double challenge, you're having to think your way through a lot of the steps because they haven't become automatic. But you also have kind of a narrower kind of pool of memory to hold all that thinking in. So you may overload on those tap us can make simple mistakes, you know, it's where you reverse the sign on the math problem, or put the decimal in the wrong place or things like that, just not because you didn't know how to do it. But because you just kind of got overloaded on things. The flip side of having a neural or working memory, though, is interesting. And this is something that's just been found within the last decade or two. researchers in the field of creativity, have found that people with narrow working memory spans tend to make more creative connections between things. They're a little bit less tied in to going step by step and they're casting out a little further For things in the hope of hitting something that works in the process of it, they make more connections. So people with narrower working memory spans tend to score higher on all sorts of measurements of creativity, both in terms of laboratory creative creativity, but also in terms of real world accomplishment. And, you know, even studies where they looked at relatively accomplished people like graduates from Harvard University, the you know, there was one study that looked at basically at every function cert correlated with working memory. And they found that the low working memory people tended, in the course of their life to have much higher creative accomplishment, they have more patents, more copyright, and they feed already more businesses did more interesting, creative things, the people that had very strong working memory, and were really organized, were very successful, but they tended to be successful in very conventional ways. And to be or, you know, achieved high posts and organizations, and things like that, but they didn't go out and start their own business. So there's a
Fernette Eide
difference between working memory and also long term memory because you know, that it's not as if you know, it's a person with you know, can't store anything, can't remember anything the information goes in, because, but actually, it's stored in the brain is like a little light tie, so that it can be associated with something later on and brought out later. And that's the key. A lot of times when you see people on this profile, this glow familiar to me, have a personally, we used to be with a profile, it's, they say, Oh, I've got terrible, a terrible memory or something like that I can't, you know, too much comes in at once I you know, it's just overwhelming overloaded, things like that. However, they seem to know a lot, it seems that a lot of it, they have little factoids a little bit LEDs. And they put things together in interesting ways. And that's because there's a difference between this short working memory and this long term memory, and the fact that there might be some more flexibility with moving regretted bits of information and grouping it this way, or grouping it that way, making an analogy or something like that. And that can lead to creativity, and other lines of evidence to show that there's some need for the brain to take in information and forget it, there's a benefit to doing some of the forgetting, when you're trying to just remember that little trace of what was interesting about it, as opposed to all the details. And that might be one aspect, too, if it's an efficient memory that actually knows what to forget. Yeah,
Andy Earle
yeah, that doesn't get like too focused on the details, or get lost in the weeds and lose track of really the big picture, because it strikes me that a lot of what your guys are talking about in this book is that a lot of the advantages with the Dyslexic brain come from those situations, almost where it's hard to look at the big picture, or the more kind of complex or moving parts or the large system that the situation gets that we're trying to think through or understand, the more, it's actually impossible to, like, understand all the details. And the more you have to kind of look at it from the big picture perspective. Like for instance, there's some interesting research in the book on 2d versus 3d skills. So how is that related to what we're talking about with dyslexia and processing?
Brock Eide
Yeah, it's a pretty fascinating area. And there is, you know, maybe in some quarters and ethology about dyslexic spatial ability that, you know, dyslexic people are just good at spatial things sort of, in general. And it's important to recognize they're better at some things and not as good at other things. And it really sort of breaks down in one way on this kind of 2d versus 3d, kind of axis or comparison. So two dimensional skills, telling the orientation of something in space, comparing there been studies, for example, to compare it ability to distinguish or differentiate between two different complex Celtic knots that were presented just in a 2d picture. dyslexic people are a little bit slower at that task and have a little harder time with it, because oftentimes, they can sort of flip it into mirror image and kind of manipulate it around the same way with some of the spatial tests that show up on IQ tests. For example, people have done the IQ test the block design patterns where you get a little picture and then you have these blocks, and you'd have to replicate the 2d pattern with these blocks. dyslexic people as a group actually score a little bit lower than the general population on that kind of task. But when you get into three dimensional tasks, dyslexic people do better. We had that we talked about some study that's been replicated out three different times looking at impossible figures. So the kind of figures that that Escher Drew, for example, dyslexic people are much quicker at differentiating between items that you could actually create in the real world versus items that you couldn't because they're impossible in that way. And, you know, that kind of thing can translate into real world abilities. We've had builders that tell us, for example, you know, I really like to hire dyslexic workers because they can look at plans, and figure out right away whether or not the architect made a mistake on their before they start building and, you know, prove by spending, you know, $50,000 on a construction site, that it's impossible to do with the architects. And so, the ability to kind of translate 2d into 3d is a dyslexic skill. But comparing 2d with Judy, for example, you know, is difficult, I implemented dyslexia.
Andy Earle
It also strikes me that it's not a skill that is so common or rewarded in our school system. And there's an interesting section in the book here on page 107, talking about creative potential, and how children with dyslexia often display their creative potential quite clearly outside of the classroom, and their desires to build, experiment, draw and create. And a toy is never just a toy, nor a drawing, just a doodle, these activities provide a window into their future, and also a call to action that really, it can be really detrimental to not recognize these things, as parents or guardians to children who are displaying these types of talents. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, or, you know, especially if you have a child who's struggling in school, but you do see some evidence of really, you know, creativity and activities outside of the classroom? Well, how would you handle that or respond to that,
Fernette Eide
it comes up all the time. And currently, it's about three out of four students estimated that are dyslexic that are not identified. So it's currently, you know, a mess in many schools, because an identified, they might, you know, they're, you know, some of the ones who are gifted and also dyslexic. They're not feeling enough to get intervention, but they're not successful enough to get into gifted classes. And they're stuck in this kind of limbo zone, where they are getting really the appropriate education for their strengths as well as their weaknesses. It's a huge problem. And there is a mismatch with traditional schooling and many dyslexic students. So the more that parents can learn about this, the better because often, we like comprehensive testing, wherever possible that this screening is very important, of course, but also, if you have a suspicion that dyslexia is a play, if you can get it testing, it identifies often, some of their strengths, and we not all of them, but some of their strengths. And also parents should be aware, that glimmer of insights, their abilities that they notice at home, were, you know, outside the classroom, those are likely very real, and they may need to be nurtured, you know, and may point the way to their success in life. But the school might be in an oppressive environment, if it's not a good match between the teacher and the student. There are some wonderful teachers in school, and also more that are learning more about dyslexia. But it can be a difficult, very difficult time. And so recognizing these stripes, often advocating for a student to be in a classroom where they have adequate intellectual challenge, for instance, and have accommodations and may still be able to get interventions, that's what needs to happen. If they have a free and appropriate education, you've got to look at their strengths. And so sometimes we have students in gifted classrooms with accommodations. And they have, they might have pull outs, or they might have tutoring after school or something like that. And you're trying to look at the whole child, what's the best fit that gives them, they can look forward to going to school they have, they can learn new things at school, and they also can get support where they need support. Yeah,
Brock Eide
and one thing I would add to is that it's really helpful to familiarize yourself with the kinds of careers and things that we talked about in the book as being sort of dyslexia rich careers, in terms of that areas where a lot of people with dyslexia go because a lot of the things that people do in those careers are things that are not kind of part of the central academic curriculum and, you know, second, third, fourth grade, and recognizing how a child's future strengths might show up as a seven or eight or nine year old can take a lot of insight. It takes a lot of thinking about what what adults do all day. So for example, people that are in sales people that are in counseling, people that that run podcasts or you know, or journalists or whatever, talking to people all day The seven or eight year old who's having a hard time staying quiet in class, because they want to keep asking other people what their experiences with the test question or whatever else very well may grow up to have a super successful career by talking all day. And that's one of the we hear all the time. And, you know, the same with the kids who just want to, you know, sketch on their papers, build drawings and stuff, rather than just answer the questions and words, they may become designers or architects or whatever. And it's just, the strengths can show up between the cracks, because we're not giving them places to express those talents and abilities.
Andy Earle
We're here with Brock and Fernette, authors of the Dyslexic advantage, talking about learning disabilities in teens, and some ways that learning disabilities can actually be helpful to our kids. And we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.
Brock Eide
You recognize that a lot of times the dysfunction that you see, and the mismatches that you see in environments like elementary school and middle school and high school can be interpreted not simply as problems with the thinkers, but is dysfunctional environments that that are creating dysfunction. You know, if the shoe is giving the foot blisters, it's not a fault in the foot, it's the fault of the shoe read out yet, you know, the school is like the shoe, we're putting these kids in a shoe that doesn't fit them, and they're getting blisters, and we're blaming their feet, it's not a good way of thinking about the problem. In the process of learning from experience, you know, learning from the world, basically, everything starts out as kind of a tracing of experience. So that's your first form of memory as an experience based memory, people that are good at automating things over time, they begin to collect things that are similar to each other, and then combine those into sort of aggregate abstract memories. You know, instead of thinking about this cat, that cat, the other cat, you think about cats in general, all the common features of m. So that's kind of the transition between episodic memory and semantic memory or memory for concepts or definitions. There was
Fernette Eide
a large scale study as well, that showed when they followed children who were given stimulants for ADHD, that it was more than half, two to three years later, who were no longer on medication. So they did as slow will be. And as a child got bigger, they didn't increase the medications, and then they eventually tapered off. And so, you know, there's clearly some families and some students have told us it was really helping me in the pinch, where I felt like I wasn't able to get my math facts or was able to get my writing under control, things like that. And you know, and then later on, sometimes they went off, or sometimes they would go back on during college where there's this intense at a demand for things. You know, I think, younger children, especially, I think, is a little more worrisome when the nervous systems really actively developing. I think there's a lot of different ways to go that are appropriate for different families, peoples in doctors, you know, I mean, there's, there's it's complicated issue, and a lot of people don't know how things will be until they're on it.
Brock Eide
Some researchers took two groups of students, one group were dyslexic students, the other non dyslexic students, and had them navigate through an architectural 3d rendering on a computer. And they told him that they wanted them to look for an orange truck. And then after the simulation was over, they asked to the students two things, neither of which was something they told them that they were going to be responsible for doing the task was fine. The orange truck. The question now was, where was the blue mouse? And also, can you take architectural blocks and rebuild the environment that you walk through in three dimensions, and the dyslexic students had better both of those tasks? They notice things that nobody told them that they were responsible for learning.
Andy Earle
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