Success Music Studio - What is Dyslexia

What Is Dyslexia?

Dyslexia and Giftedness

     What is dyslexia?
     In a 2000 Roper Poll, 63% of Americans confused dyslexia with mental retardation (qtd in Willemin, par. 3). So it is important that we define what dyslexia is.
     Here are just a few of the host of terms that have been used for dyslexia over the decades: Association Deficit Pathology, Central Nervous System Disorder, Congenital Alexia, Dysgraphia, Dyscalculia, Dyslexia, Hyperactivity, Hyperkinetic Behavior Syndrome (an older term for ADHD), Hypoactivity, Learning Disabilities, Maturational Lag, Minimal Brain Damage, Multisensory Disorders, Neurologically Handicapped, Organic Brain Dysfunction, Perceptually Handicapped, Primary Reading Retardation, Psycholinguistic Disabilities, Strephosymbolia, Word Blindness (West, p. 307).
     What all these terms have in common is an emphasis on the problems, the negative aspects, of visual learning. Perhaps this came out of the efforts to deal with teaching students with dyslexia. Neurologists, psychologists, and educators were collecting data and trying their best to make sense of the flood of, sometimes contradictory, information. Educational and psychological models were made, but for decades they focused almost exclusively on the weaknesses of the dyslexic student while taking almost no notice of his strengths - oftentimes with negative side effects on the dyslexic student's self esteem.
     It is only relatively recently, in the last 25 years, that the connection between giftedness and dyslexia had been made. Susan Baum talks about the seeming paradox, "How can a child learn and not learn? Why do some students apply little or no effort to school tasks while they commit considerable time and effort to demanding, creative activities outside of school? These behaviors are typical of some students who are simultaneously gifted and learning disabled. For many people, however, the terms learning disabilities and giftedness are at opposite ends of a learning continuum. In some states, because of funding regulations, a student may be identified and assisted with either learning disabilities or giftedness, but not both.
     "Uneasiness in accepting this seeming contradiction in terms stems primarily from... incomplete understandings. This is not surprising, because the experts in each of these disciplines have difficulty reaching agreement. Some still believe that giftedness is equated with outstanding achievement across all subject areas. Thus, a student who is an expert on bugs at age 8 may automatically be excluded from consideration for a program for gifted students because he cannot read, though he can name and classify a hundred species of insects. Many educators view below-grade-level achievement as a prerequisite to a diagnosis of a learning disability. Thus, an extremely bright student who is struggling to stay on grade level, may slip through the cracks of available services because he or she is not failing" (par. 1).

The Visual Thinker

     While working with gifted students, Dr. Linda K. Silverman developed the idea of the visual-spatial learner. In her words, "Around 1980, I began to notice that some highly gifted children took the top off the IQ test with their phenomenal abilities to solve items presented to them visually or items requiring excellent abilities to visualize. These children were also adept at spatial tasks, such as orientation problems. Soon I discovered that not only were the highest scorers outperforming others on the visual-spatial tasks, but so were the lowest scorers. The main difference between the two groups was that highly gifted children also excelled at the auditory-sequential items, whereas children who were brighter than their IQ scores had marked auditory and sequential weaknesses. It was from these clinical observations and my attempt to understand both the strengths and weaknesses that the concept of the 'visual-spatial learner' was born" (par. 2).

     Auditory-sequential learners think primarily in words and are straight-line logical thinkers; our educational system is geared to teaching this type of student. The general instructional approach is to teach simple concepts first and gradually advance sequentially to harder material, to build the whole picture out of a collection of puzzle pieces. Typically, students will be taught to read first - whether reading phonetic, mathematical, or musical symbols - then later they are taught information and skills through lectures and books. This type of student generally does well on written, timed tests.
     Visual-spatial learners think primarily in pictures and have a tendency to grasp the whole, but miss the parts. This type of student may test poorly on written, timed tests, but will often do well in real-world situations and practical exams. Visual-spatial learners can be as different from each other as they are from verbal-sequential students.
     Silverman studied 750 middleschoolers using the test she developed, called the Visual-Spatial Identifier. The results showed that 33.3% of the students where firmly visual-spatial, and another 30% had a small preference for visual processing, but only 23% where firmly verbal-sequential, which suggests that almost two-thirds of students would benefit, to one degree or another, from multisensory teaching methods.
     Ronald Davis describes visual-spatial learners as "picture thinkers". There are advantages to being a picture thinker. Leonardo da Vinci imagined the helicopter centuries before there was an engine to run it. Einstein had a daydream of himself riding a motorcycle on a beam of light at the speed of light and imagined what it would look like. This thought experiment helped form the theory of relativity. Nikola Tesla, the inventor of alternating current, could perfect the design of his generators in his head by running simulations through his imagination. "Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind" (qtd in West, p. 143). According to Davis, a picture thinker can see his imagination as if it is real. This is the fount of the visual thinker's creativity, but this is also where problems can arise. Tesla would sometimes have difficulties telling what was real and what was his imagination. "In my boyhood... when a word was spoken to me the image of the object would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. These were certainly not hallucinations... for in other respects I was normal and composed" (qtd in West, p. 143).
     Thomas G. West, in his book In The Mind's Eye, also talks about the advantages and disadvantages of being a visual thinker. He speculates that lacking the ability to think visually would be a deficit in the wild, "In the remote past (or in distant, hidden corners of the world today), a genetic makeup that promoted a natural facility with reading, but not, say, with hunting or finding one's way easily in the wilderness, would have been considered a disadvantage... In some circumstances, such a spatial disability might have been so important that many of those with poor spatial sense would, in time, have been selected out of the population, rarely surviving to adulthood and procreation" (p. 83). Back in the hunter/gatherer days, it would have been an advantage for a woodsman to be able to recognize a rock or a tree from many different angles to keep from getting lost in the forest. Likewise, if he were to glimpse just the horns of a deer hidden in the foliage, it would have been useful to be able to extrapolate the rest of the deer in his mind’s eye so as to give him a better target. Using his imagination, the hunter could do two things: 1) recognize an object from an angle he had never seen it from before 2) mentally create an image of a whole object from a glimpse of only a part of the real object. "These are predominantly visual-spatial skills and would have little verbal content. In such a culture, a propensity toward reading skill would be relatively unimportant" (West, p. 83). The ability to mentally construct and manipulate objects in the picture thinker's head, using all his senses, and his ability to recognize patterns is the gift Davis refers to in The Gift Of Dyslexia. Davis calls this multi-dimensional thinking.
     West also talks about the dyslexia aspect that can derive from visual thinking. West discusses how it can be an advantage to be able to recognize three dimensional, real-world objects, but he also illustrates how it can be a disadvantage when it comes to dealing with abstract symbols. It is West's argument that where two dimensional symbols are concerned, the orientation of the symbol becomes crucial to understanding the meaning of the symbol. For example, if someone carved a lower case "p" into a piece of wood, and threw the letter into the air, and let it land on the floor, if you did not know which letter the carver intended, you would not know if the letter on the floor was a "p", "q", "b", or "d". All of these letters are the same shape except for their orientation on the page. If, while reading, the visual thinker's abilities start to kick in, and his visual mind - at the subconscious level - starts flipping around the letters, confusion would be the result. Davis has an example of this for the word cat. It shows forty different ways the word cat can be written with the letters in various positions. I have created an example similar to Davis' on the word map. As you can see, even this small three letter word can be extremely confusing under these conditions. Besides the word map, you can get the words mad, amp, Pam, wad, bam, and dam. Most of the time, of course, this would just yield a confusing hash.