dysTalk Dyslexia Disability Or Gift - Talks - dysTalk

About the speaker: Richard Whitehead directs Davis Learning Foundation, a non-profit organization providing information and training in the methods of Ronald Davis, author of The Gift of Dyslexia'. He is also a practising Davis Dyslexia Facilitator and is the author of 'Why 'Tyrannosaurus' But Not If?', a free online mentoring course for teachers of struggling learners. He regularly gives lectures and workshops around the UK and worldwide.

Further information about this Talk

For more information about Davis Learning Foundation please click here.
For Richard's free course, “Why 'Tyrannosaurus' But Not 'If'?”, please click here.

Talk Transcript:

Dyslexia - Disability or Gift?

Dyslexic Spelling Problems Give Us A Big Clue As To What Dyslexia Is

About a year and a half ago, I conducted a telephone consultation with a lady in her forties who had received a diagnosis of dyslexia and was ringing me to discuss some problems she had with reading and writing. During the conversation she gave me a fascinating piece of information that blew out of the water the traditional idea of dyslexia as a neurological impairment or lifelong disability.

What exactly she told me, I'll come to in a minute. Most likely, this lady would never have given me this crucial piece of information if I hadn't been curious about how she thought. There are many different theories about the origins and factors involved in a dyslexic learning difficulty, but rarely does one find a research paper or educational approach that expresses genuine interest in how a dyslexic person thinks.

Why is that? Dyslexics are thought to make up around 10% of the population. They find certain tasks extremely difficult that most people find easy. But many also find some other tasks easy that most people find difficult. Research published by the BBC 6 years ago as part of their “Mind of a Millionaire” series suggests that 40% of British millionaires could be dyslexic - that's four times higher than the incidence of dyslexia in the general population. More recently, a study published by the Cass Business School in London in December 2007 established a 35% correlation between dyslexia and entrepreneurism in the United States, where if you are dyslexic, it turns out you are twice as likely to own two or more businesses than if you are not dyslexic. Individual examples abound of excellence among dyslexics in many different walks of life.

As a term, dyslexia was coined by the medical profession many decades before educationalists started becoming interested in it. Hats off to the medics for being so much quicker off the mark than us educationalists. However, as a result, dyslexia became “clinicised” as I put it, or framed by medical assumptions about its origins which have actually never been proven. So it is that you get a diagnosis of dyslexia, just as you would get a diagnosis of arthritis or diabetes, although nobody gets “diagnosed”, for example, as having difficulty learning foreign languages, or as being musical.

If we're completely honest with ourselves, 150 years of medical interest and research into dyslexia have contributed little towards alleviating the actual problems of dyslexic learners. To this day, there is not even a unanimously agreed medical definition of what dyslexia is, or of what causes it. And yet the basic medical assumption - that dyslexia is a lifelong disability of neurological origin - is rarely questioned.

Which brings me back to the lady I was speaking to over the 'phone - you'll remember I said she told me something that challenged some basic assumptions about dyslexia.

Well, during our conversation I asked her a number of questions about how she thought. In a nutshell, this is what she told me.

“I'm a picture thinker”, she said. “I think mainly in visual images. And I'm very good at maths.” (Not every dyslexic person is good at maths, but this lady was.) “And I'm also very good at remembering telephone numbers.”

So I asked her how she remembers them.

“Well,” she said, when I need to dial a number, it's like it comes up on a screen in front of me in my mind, and I just dial what I am seeing.”

But then I asked her whether the same thing happens for her with spelling.

“Oh, no,” she said - and she became thoughtful. “Actually, that's really strange - I can see numbers in my mind, but not letters.”

Now let's think about the implications of what this lady said. Traditionally, dyslexia is thought to originate from a neurological impairment or structural disability in the brain. I have seen prominent experts on dyslexia speak publicly about dyslexia as stemming, for example, from missing skill in areas such as left-to-right tracking ability, short-term memory or auditory processing issues.

Yet this lady gives us a completely different picture. You aren't impaired or structurally dysfunctional if you can visualise 6-2-5-9-4-7 but not f-r-i-e-n-d. It simply does not fit.

I and my colleagues have worked with or spoken in depth to hundreds of dyslexic people. Though many do not share this lady's abilities with telephone numbers, around 80% - 85% would describe themselves - if asked - as visual thinkers. I have spoken to dyslexic carpenters who can “see” in their mind how they are going to put a kitchen together before they start. But they can't see how to put a word together. There are graphic designers who can visualise the layout of a webpage, but cannot visualise the layout of a five-letter word.

Very often, a dyslexic person is an imaginative visual thinker who can “see” with crystal clarity of anything and everything in their mind - except letters and words. Most dyslexics fit the pattern of the “visual-spatial learner” as described by Dr. Linda Silverman in her excellent book, “Upside-Down Brilliance”. To understand why their visual-spatial thinking fails them when it comes to the layout of a word, we have to dig much, much deeper than the traditional theories around dyslexia can take us.

Let's think back to the lady who could remember 'phone numbers but not spellings. Only one possible explanation seems to fit what was going on here. It is that, for this lady, letters did something to her mind that numbers didn't. When visualizing numerals, probably because of her comfort with maths, she was able to retain clarity of thought. But when visualizing letters, something about them blanked or blurred out her thinking process, so she could no longer think or visualize clearly.

Think about what you commonly observe when you see a moderately dyslexic person read. For the first few words, the person may read fairly smoothly. But then there comes a stumble or trip-point - the person frowns, hesitates, perhaps makes a mistake, and after that, mistakes seem to come thick and fast. By line 5, the person may be making mistakes on words that they got right in line 1.

Everything we observe about dyslexic reactions and behaviour when undertaking challenging tasks suggests that we are NOT looking at a structural problem or neurological impairment, but rather at a series of automated or semi-automated reactions to certain stimuli, such as printed text, that rob a person of their mental clarity to varying degrees while the stimulus is present.

So what are the implications of this?

First, that we can give back to dyslexics the dignity that we took away from them when we told them that an aspect of the way they think is a lifelong disability.

Secondly, that once we free ourselves from the limitations imposed by medical assumptions about the causes of dyslexia, we can start to find answers just by asking dyslexic people about their way of thinking and their reactions. We don't need to be the people with the answers; just the people with the right questions. With the right questions, all the information we need about a person's dyslexic problems can be obtained from the person themselves.

And thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, we don't have to brand bright dyslexic children as unable to learn, or ourselves as unable to teach. As educators, rather than treating the dyslexic pupil as the special needs child with a learning disability, we can start to see them as our educational litmus test, and use their needs and reactions to hone our teaching approach ever further, for the benefit of all our learners.