Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - The Strengths of Dyslexia

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

With dyslexia being present in 20% of the population, we have to ask ourselves what the upside is to dyslexia. What do these individuals bring to the table? With such a huge portion of the population having a particular cognitive makeup, it is highly unlikely that dyslexia is to be deemed a corruption of normal pattern—nature is favoring large groups of people to display these traits. This episode dives into the strengths of dyslexic thought processes to hopefully help decrease the negative views surrounding dyslexia.  By listening to this episode, you can earn 1 Psychiatry CME Credits. Link to blog. Link to YouTube video.

Hello and welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. I'm here to talk about getting rid of burnout, increasing job satisfaction, and feeling like an expert in what you do. One thing that created a lot of burnout and angst for me was trying to get continued medical education right at the last minute. So why not join the CME membership and do CMEE while listening to this podcast? Go to Psychiatrypodcast.com, sign up, sign in, take the test, and the certification is email to you in seconds. Hello, welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today with Brock and Fernette Idy. They are dyslexia specialists, and we will be getting into all things dyslexia.

I'm also here with my wife, Lindsay Puter. Dyslexia has been a journey of ours, both and myself and our kids, at least our oldest. So we would be kind of sharing a little bit about our story and also just going through this book. called the dyslexia advantage. That was written by these two wonderful experts on this. I think this is a great episode. I've gotten a lot of recommendations for more child and adolescent psychiatry topics.

And this is as good as it gets because it's a deeper dive than you're gonna get probably in most curriculum. And I think that you will come out of it also, seeing patients with dyslexia as, you know, more than just, you know, people with reading and spelling issues who are young. You know, what are the, what are the giftings of these groups of individuals? And so I was thinking about this and thinking about like how often, you know, there's this kind of like push towards, you know,

seeing the strengths of different people, different personality types. It's a theme that I do in my practice, you know, if you're high conscientiousness, if you're low conscientious. I look for the strengths of both of those. If you're high neuroticism, low neuroticism, high trade agreeableness, low trade agreeableness. So whether it's your personality type or, you know, if you have dyslexia or maybe autism, you know, there's advantages that we can look at and, you know, celebrate with our patients. So it's just kind of like a way of seeing the full person, seeing their strength, strength, seeing their abilities. And so I'm really excited to bring this episode forward and also

other episodes in the future that kind of highlight the human potential and how as a team, as a cohesive group, we can be stronger together. Also, I'd like to thank you guys, my listeners. This has been just very enjoyable this year, corresponding with you guys, whether it's on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, or Or just when you sign it for the resource library, you know, it's often I get like a paragraph kind of introducing yourself and how you found the podcast and what about it has been helpful for you. And those types of interactions are very meaningful.

And then also I've gotten, you know, some listeners to be my coaching clients or patients and I'm really grateful for that sort of experience of interacting with people who, you know, maybe I've been hearing me for a while and then getting to know them. I have one person coming out. It's going to do an intensive with me. It's like they're going to be out in the Orlando area. And they were like, hey, let's get together and do an intensive. And so I was excited about that.

So yeah, just thank you so much for the positivity, the overwhelming positivity. You know, I've had a lot of professionals say, how do you step out into the social media space, the podcasting space and how do you deal with the criticism? And the truth is, is that mostly it's not criticism. You know, if you're critical of me, you probably move on from the podcast pretty quickly. You know, there's so much out there that you can listen to. So I feel like it's a good community that's grown. You know, once in a while I get something that's kind of a stinger. Hopefully I don't get it right before bed. That's the worst. But overall, very positive. I'm looking forward to another year. I'm looking forward to hearing from you guys, you know, what are some episodes you would like?

Sometimes I'm just like, I jump right on it when I hear, oh, we should do an episode on this. I'm like, oh, yeah, that is exactly right. We should do that. Sometimes it's like, I hear from you guys like, oh, we want an episode on this. And I'm like, oh, I have like 20 pages written on that already. I just need to get that executed, you know. So I'm looking forward to this coming year. So thank you guys for your support.

Thank you for your attention. I appreciate it. And I look forward to maybe interacting with you guys more in the future. All right, welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today with Dr. Brock and Fernette Idy. And they are dyslexia specialists who have written a book called The Dyslexic Advantage. and it's one of the foremost books that I could find on the topic. And I think it's a really great book because it emphasizes the advantages of being dyslexic. You know, there's this kind of thought that people with dyslexia aren't good at spelling, they aren't good at reading. And, you know, I like this sort of conceptual understanding that we might not be looking at the full picture, right? You gave this example of if you look at some of the greatest baseball players in history, their home runs are just absolutely phenomenal, but their batting average is actually worse,

right? So if you look at just one facet of like what is their batting average, it's like, oh, they're not great, but their home runs are like amazing, right? So I was thinking we could start out and just you guys could kind of introduce yourself so people can hear your name and hear your voice. and then a little bit about how you came to study this topic? Sure. I'm Brock Idy and...

Frenet. So we started, we didn't start out in medicine to become dyslexia specialists. We actually were academics at the University of Chicago back in the late 90s. And I was actually in medical ethics and sort of general medicine. And Fernette was professor of neurology. And we started having children and they started having challenges that we didn't expect. And it was really the pursuit to try to figure out what was going on with them that led us in this direction. And what we found at that time was that there seemed to be a lot of different specialists who provided different approaches to problems that provided sort of non-overlapping, non-intersecting,

descriptions of the same phenomena. And that really led us back to the primary literature in neuroscience and education and trying to figure out what we could to try to piece things together in a more holistic kind of way. So that was really the start of our interest in learning in general. And then over time, we focused in on dyslexia in particular. And that focus came about because we noticed this duality that you mentioned, that we were seeing a common set of challenges among these people, but we were also seeing a common set of strengths. And it was that conjunction of the two things together

that really got us interested in exploring this area further. That's great. So you guys kind of had that firsthand family experience, and that got you excited about it. Yeah, go ahead, Fernette. I can say also, as a neurologist, too, I could see a limited view, just understanding the brain and learning and memory and how things work, what we know, what we don't know, how there was a gap between, you know, how we were addressing young people and all of what they brought to the table, overly focusing on what they couldn't do and just ignoring really what seemed to me to be, you know, obvious talents and strengths, was just, I think, a gap that we wanted to address in our book.

It was such a glaring thing because we were in a position to kind of know what medical science would offer, that that piece of the story really seemed important. It was certainly important to professionals that helped our children when they were growing up and helped us conceptualize things in a different way. And we found as we worked with more and more families that we could really add on to the story and have our, bring our past and our understanding of science and how the brain works to practical information for parents. That's wonderful. I'm Lindsay, David's wife, and I joined the podcast today as well, just because our journey as parents has included discovering

that our daughter has dyslexia. And that occurred this last summer when she's entering second grade. and we just kind of were sensing that the reading wasn't coming naturally to her. Some of the flipping letters, it was just a really big struggle. And I said to my husband, I said, can we do just some testing to make sure there's not something else going on? And then the testing came back that there was some clear indications that she has dyslexia. And for me as a parent, my first reaction was a little bit of relief, like, oh, this is. this makes some sense here, but then also a bit of, okay, what is dyslexia? And as I mentioned that to

other people, that seems to be a similar question that they have on a very basic level, that most people don't even really know what dyslexia is. So could you guys just give us a very general understanding of what dyslexia is? Yeah, I think the core concept around dyslexia is. I think the core concept around dyslexia. So it's typically identified on the basis of the challenge side. So we'll, we talk a lot about the strengths, but in terms of people being identified, it's usually on the basis of a common set of challenges that they have. And those challenges involve typically decoding and encoding. So making the translation between printed letters and symbols and words and vice versa. And it's, it's not a synonym for reading problems in general. There are

reading problems that go beyond dyslexia or outside dyslexia. For example, problems at the level of comprehending reading. So there are a group of readers that can decode the words okay, but they can't figure out what message is being communicated. That's not dyslexia. That's a disorder of reading comprehension. There are also people that have problems with the decoding and they can't figure out what the words are, but then they also have problems at the language level.

that are significant, so they can't understand the sentences, the meaning of the sentences that are formed by putting those words together. That's not dyslexia either. That's a disorder of language development. And so there's kind of there's two poles that go beyond dyslexia. Dyslexia really refers to the group of readers whose struggles are at the word identification level, usually due to problems, processing words at the subword level. So either correctly identifying all the letter symbols that go to make up the words or understanding how those letters combine to make up whole words. And they just are slow in the process of connecting that visual set of symbols with the linguistic information that go to make up words. There's a lot of difficulty in a practical sense that parents can experience because there are a lot of people operating out in the educational system. and also to some extent in the diagnostic system that have kind of older conceptions of dyslexia.

And the research community has come a long way in the last 20 years from a point at which pretty much everything around dyslexia was focused on the sort of the sound processing system. And there's been a much better recognition that there are linguistic components and there are visual components and attentional components that all go together to make up a mix. So it's not a single gene issue where it's something you either have or you don't have.

It's a multifactorial syndrome type issue. You know, for your audience in medicine, you know, syndrome problems are easily understood. But for a lot of people in education, it's difficult for them to understand. that you can talk about an entity and make sense out of it and yet not be able to point to a single cause or a single gene. And that's really what it is with dyslexia. And we can get into some of the reasons from a brain structural standpoint that all of these different features can come together and combine a little later, if you'd like. One thing I'd like to add on to that too is that often it's an unexpected difficulty because in the definition of dyslexia, it means, you know, that by

how it's defined by the professionals, you have to have an average or even above average intelligence. So it's an unexpected difficulty reading. And then this problem is Brock says at the subword level. So it can be very confusing. You can have a gifted child with this unexpected reading problem. And sometimes they can actually comprehend passage as well. They can memorize words well. And then you might suddenly discover, you can actually read that word.

you guessed it, you know, or or things like that. So it's a difficult thing. The more you know about the details and how it can present different ages and in different children with different compensations, then you actually have a grasp on what Brock's talking to about the syndrome. But I think that complicated aspect where a student may seem very verbally strong, but then, you know, you're just not exactly sure if they're kidding with you or where there's something else going on because, you know, if you point a different words,

they actually may not be able to read that word. Yet it seems like they can repeat back something that you've read with them before and things like that. It's a very confusing picture if you discover it for the first time, if you don't know that there are other family members who have gotten through this and, you know, it's a, it presents with enough challenges that it confuses a lot. I put it that way. Yeah. I, I, I, I, I, here as well, almost like the intelligence can disguise the what's underneath it. Is that what you're saying in some ways? Absolutely. Yeah, we actually came up with a term about 15 years ago now, that was called stealth dyslexia. And it was precisely this notion that children with strong

verbal abilities can actually obscure the dyslexia diagnosis, number one, because they defeat some of the tests. They're good puzzle solvers. And so some of the routine tests that were used diagnostically didn't provide the kinds of answers that typically qualified someone for a dyslexia diagnosis. They would also often read with very strong comprehension. So they might even end up with a comprehension score in the 90th percentile. And yet if you got down to the single word level and you isolated the words and you took away the context that they were using, to guess the meaning, they would really struggle. And they couldn't spell.

They had problems with writing just like a typical dyslexic person would. But they missed diagnosis because they were bright enough to kind of puzzle solve their way through things. And statistically, is it one in four or one in five that are? How much? How often does this occur? Yeah. In the U.S., the most recent numbers are about one in five. You know, if you look, again, we're talking about sort of a curve.

We're talking about a mountain. If we're talking about all the people sort of at the periphery who probably would learn better using the kinds of techniques that are developed to help dyslexic people learn to read and spell, we're probably talking about a third of people. So I actually, like, after my daughter was diagnosed and I'm like reading her, she did this extensive psychological assessment. And I'm like, that's what I had. I had the same exact thing.

I had actually my mother took me to this special reading program. And I remember after it, like, being able to read. I think I was like in third or fourth grade. It was with blocks. They did a lot of block work. Do you know which one I'm talking about? A lot of them used the blocks like that. Did you grow up in California?

Group in California, yeah. The Barton system was very popular out there, and that may have been the block system. It's like, I think there's like an L.A. center for dyslexia. There's a lot. Actually, I think in general, California is pretty ahead of the game in terms of identifying dyslexia for a lot of states, you know. So, yeah, but, but yeah, there are a lot of places. I mean, Linda Bood Bell was big in Southern California. Linda Buh, Bell. That was the method. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. That's been very successful. Very successful. They use a group of different kinds of methods, some of which are more visually oriented, some of which are work to kind of retrain the sound processing system, and then some of more traditional phonics-type approaches. Yeah, so I'm like reading through your book, and I'm like, I'm like thinking of myself, like, you talk about how sometimes speed of math is difficult,

but the hard problems are like understandable. And I remember like being put in remedial math, in like first and second grade. And then in fifth grade, out of the blue, I was chosen to go to this math competition. And it was like these hard, like, problems, like paragraphs, right? And I got first place out of like 50 schools. And I was just like blown away because I had no training.

You know, I'd never been a part of like a math team. And because I felt really, I felt stupid most of my elementary school years because of my, you know, I was always cheating on spelling tests. I was like just really confused with, I would pretend like I was reading when I wasn't reading. And so now we have a daughter who has this problem and we're like, I'm like, oh, I'm dyslexic. How did I, how did I get through school? How did I get through UC Berkeley being dyslexic? And, you know, you've, no one told me that ever, you know? no one was like you have dyslexia well it's it's going to be an empowering thing for your daughter i guarantee

and we've we've we've had so many just wonderful inspiring things about about uh parent kid dyslexia stuff i mean and i would say when we originally had this community started out in i think it was like 2006 a lot of you know we had a lot of people who we'd say like where are you joining and a lot of people would say you know because of my child and things like that. And then our book came out. Then it was like, hey, I'm dyslexic. My kids are dyslexic. And it was just, it was such a freeing thing. You could, you could really tell. And it just, it becomes such an empowering thing for, for young people growing up. It's just, you know, a cool thing that we've really seen over the past decade or two, right? I mean,

it's, it's really a wonderful thing. So understanding that is really neat. The other night, Our daughter has been doing Orton Gillingham tutoring, and it seems to be helping her quite a bit. And she was doing her math homework and reading the word problem, like actually reading it out loud. And we looked at each other with like tears in her eyes of like, she's actually reading it, you know? So it's also encouraging to know that there's systems out there that can help dyslexic processing as well. Yeah. Versus, I don't know if they had that 20 years ago. I think it was unusual.

My mom was actually a teacher, and she was trained in this method before I was born. And it's like, I think if I wasn't, if that wasn't my mother, I mean, maybe she had learned it for a reason. I was thinking about, in your book, you talk about how architects or 3D rent, you know, people can sometimes see in 3D differently. If they have dyslexia, Lindsay's father was an architect. So I wonder as well. Maybe I have it too. Maybe. To this day, I still listen to all my books on audio, if I can. Like, to sit there and to read a book is so, so difficult. My audience is going to be, like, amazed by this because they're like, they're going to be like, wait, what? Dr. Peter has dyslexia. It's like, maybe that's why a podcast rather than I write, you know, because it's like there's something about the oral tradition, which is different than the written. Yeah. Well, you would be far from the only psychiatrist that we know.

who it's dyslexic. It's a, it's actually, I think there's a lot of things about the field of psychiatry and psychotherapy more broadly that lend them, lend themselves to the special strengths of the, of the dyslexic mind. Maybe that and mind strengths, you know, narrative and yeah, putting together. Interconnected also I, you know. You have a transition between more or less a narrative account to some kind of a theoretical framework that explains that there's a big, you know, psychiatry, there's a big sort of abductive process where you're really trying to create a theory to explain a whole set of observations that, you know, can look very disconnected. And that kind of pattern matching ability, you know, is very typical

for people who are dyslexic. Okay. So let me, let me slow you guys down a little bit. I do want to hear more about this, but you talk about mind, material reasoning, interconnection, reasoning, narrative reasoning, dynamic reasoning, mind. M-I-N-D as four different possible strengths. Yeah. And so what you're talking about right now is narrative reasoning and how does that, for psychotherapists, for psychiatrists, you're going to have like, people going to be like, wait, what, I want to understand this? So it's like, so you remember stories and then you're able to kind of abstract the stories. Is that what you're saying? So in narrative reasoning, a lot of it comes down to the breakdown between episodic and semantic memory.

So your memory for facts about the world and about events and things like that can really come down to a very abstract system where you sort of pull out all the informational detail from it, strip away all the surrounding context, and distort it as dates, names, particular times, and just kind of the Joe, approach, just the facts, man, kind of thing. And then you have episodic memory, which is your memory for experience, where you encode things like place, time, personal perspective on the event, you know, how you were involved, what you felt at the time, and all of the sort of lived in elements that surround the whole learning process.

And this can be things that you've done, things that you've experienced. It could even be remembering back to when you learned a certain fact in biology that you were in high school sitting in the third row, fifth seat from the left, in such and such a teacher's class, and the weather was so and so outside. So folks who are strong in narrative reasoning tend to have this very episodic, rich memory type system. And so when you ask for fact retrieval, when you discuss concepts and things like that, it often elicits this very rich network of background experience and feeling and other things. And so working from the other direction when you start out with a list of someone else's experience, those experiences in turn will call up in yourself this kind of rich network of experience. And so you have this kind of set of pieces that you can use to put together pictures to explain their narrative. You're basically speaking the same language. You know, your way of reasoning, your way of thinking tends as a dyslexic person with this end strength to be case-based.

It tends to be example-based. it tends to be sort of illustration based rather than analytical. So you're not, you know, you can do psychiatry or other types of medicine by hopping back and forward between a list of symptoms and then an analytic sort of list of things in your mind, you know, do you have, do you check these boxes? Or you can say, you know, this is like this person. This is like this, you know, I'm. feeling this, you know, this experience in myself as a result of what you're describing,

and that reminds me of these things. And so the whole narrative reasoning process involves basically recreation of things using episodic memory and creating sort of illustrations and cases in your mind rather than just pulling up kind of naked definitions. Like the facts of anxiety or the fact. facts of depression. Instead, you more personalize the, you know, like like Brock said, into individual cases or people. Rather, yeah, illustrative cases or people as opposed to like an encyclopedia definition. Absolutely. It seems like autism and dyslexia are kind of like opposite spectrums or the opposite sides of a spectrum. Do you guys see it that way or how do you

you see for my audience maybe how do you see the difference between these two issues yeah it's it's it gets a little bit complex in that uh there are certain aspects of the autism spectrum where diagnoses can be made on the basis of things that involve speed of processing and that that really overlap with dyslexia so when we're talking about spectrumy people sometimes we can we can get sort of overlap But in general, when you're looking at people closer to the center of each diagnostic category, you're right. You really are looking kind of at ends of a spectrum. And it's both a sort of conceptual spectrum where you can look at how people organize ideas and how their thoughts are connected. And it's also a biological spectrum where if you look at the actual structure of the brain, the pattern of axonal connections will be very different.

the structure of the gray matter and the cortex will be very different. And, you know, very, very roughly speaking, you know, there was some excellent work that was done on this by a guy named Manuel Casanova, who was a psychiatrist and a neurologist and a pathologist. And he looked at brains, gross samples, and microscopic samples of brains from both dyslexic and autistic people, and found that, that, that, dyslexic folks basically had their brains organized to facilitate physically long-term connections. So the gyral structure of the brain tended to be a little bit flatter with a little bit broader

gyri that enabled large axons to emerge from kind of local centers and travel to places across the brain or to distant centers in the same hemisphere. And if they looked at the gray matter of the cortex microscopically, they found that the mini-columnar structure of the cells and the six layers of the gray matter were organized in a way that involved large spacing between the mini-columns, which in turn facilitated the arising of these large axonal bodies that would leave and then make these long-distance connections. So the dyslexic brain was geared towards making distant connections in the brain. And the spacing of the mini columns made it more difficult to perform highly specialized, high detail, local functions. So less like the autistic savant types of things, you drop cards on the floor and you instantly see what all the different numbers are. that would be a lot less of an extreme ability of a dyslexic person than an autistic person who might have a lot of hyperwiring in a lower area in a smaller area as opposed to the dyslexic

person has these wider projections, wider associations, remote associations that can lead to divergent thinking and unusual possibilities when trying to generate creative problem solving. That was why when he looked at the autistic brains, he found almost the mirror image pattern which was more in deeper gyril folds. Little wearing. Many columns that were very tightly packed and which tended to give rise to short axons that made numerous connections locally, but relatively few to more diffuse centers of the brain. So again, you get this specialty phenomenon where you can perform these rapid, quick, highly precise calculations in kind of narrow areas,

but you don't necessarily relate them to other things and concepts. And by me too, we recently were talking to Rebecca Kamen, who's a dyslexic artist, who does a lot of things for science, Smithsonian and things like that. And at the University of Pennsylvania, they're studying creativity and curiosity. And so they had this model where they're looking at how different sorts of people would search on Wikipedia. And when they studied her dyslexic brain, they found out her sources of creativity. were much more far afield, which was kind of a neat thing. So she had a lot more wider association.

She was thinking metaphorically, which in another study has shown, a dyslexic group was stronger than a non-dissexic group in terms of metaphorical reasoning. So it's this kind of, again, unusual and wider ranging possibilities with a particular, you know, theme concept or whatever. So it's a, it is kind of a neat thing. Another thing I would add, too, is there was some recent research by Sturm, I think, at UCSF, where she was studying dyslexic students, I think, like late elementary, maybe middle grade. And she was using galvanic skin responses and things like that and finding that the dyslexic group seemed to be more emotionally reactive than non-dissexic students with the idea that that also might be a reflection of those. Like I said, it's a continuum of dyslexia is on one side, and autism is on the other. It's another interesting kind of thing.

That's super interesting. Really interesting. Yeah. I think that resonates. You know, it's funny. Like, a lot of times we, so I run our nonprofit dyslexic advantage. And a good friend of ours is at Summit Center who's a dyslexic psychologist. And it's, you know, a lot of times we like to ask, you know, where did you, do you know, do you know, that that might have lent itself to doing what you do today? And it's kind of interesting because he said when he was very young, he does remember in the classroom where it was like a substitute and things like that. And he was really keenly aware of like the kind of the group dynamics in the room. And that, that he, he felt like there was a sensitivity there to understand. And so.

he was empathizing with a teacher who was trying to get things together. And I thought that was kind of a neat thing. But, you know, I mean, those things don't come out on the typical lists of, you know, what are my strengths or gifts or things like that. But, you know, there it was. It was there. It was very early. And then later on, now he's very, he does a lot of family therapy and stuff like that.

Yeah. I remember always kind of observing the interpersonal dynamics. I didn't feel like I was always a part of the sort of. the natural, you know, playfulness of some of the interactions of people, but I could, like, see what was going on. And I would, like, think about the dynamics and what was going on. And I think I played therapist to some degree in my family structure as well. And I think that might resonate with, like, that sensitivity plus that awareness of what's going on and how to speak in such a way that creates peace, you know. And there's kind of this adapt.

mechanism there. Did you see that guys with your kids at all or how did how did this stuff play out with your own kids? With our daughter who was more classically dyslexic was definitely a strength of hers and she was very interested in the way that the human motivation and human emotions played out in in big systems. So she was very interested in political things and not on an advocacy sense, but as an observer. Creative writer. She became a creative writer and getting into different points of view as a creative writer, but just kind of more of an epic novelist rather than a short story.

But she didn't spell well, but she was an avid and passionate writer. And so that her end strength is definitely there. But, you know, it's like you said, she brought a lot of emotional sense. sensitivity and also, you know, just interested, interest in how things could be seen from multiple perspectives. I thought that was kind of cool. And our son now he's a, he's a, he's a budding graphic novelist. Oh. We just got an agent. Wonderful. Yeah. So hasn't sold anything yet, but it's just, it just got launched onto submission a week

ago. So, yeah. So I think that also, it's in a different realm. He's, he's, he's, He's definitely more visual than verbal, but, you know, the combination of the two is really kind of a neat thing. Could you take us a little bit deeper into the different strengths that we kind of have talked about? There's the M-I-N-D. We mentioned the N, which was the narrative reasoning. And we started to touch a little bit on the M right there. But could you take us a little bit deeper into the other few there? Yeah, the M is really... boils down to three-dimensional spatial reasoning. So it's the ability to sort of mentally conceptualize

spatial form and movement within three-dimensional space. And so, you know, a lot of people that have talent in areas that involve anything from, you know, sort of physics or architecture to mechanics, to construction, people that can see things in their heads. head in three dimensions and sort of kind of walk themselves through those spaces. Yeah, I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about Minecraft for our kids. They love Minecraft. They love Minecraft, but it's like they're, I mean, for parents or for people who are listening to it, and they don't know what it is.

It's like, you can create your own houses, your own worlds. My kids created an aquarium recently, and then they populated it with like animals. And so it's like, yeah, there's that 3D. ability to create anything. And so I think kids who might be more dyslexic just gravitate to that and it's like dopamine because it's like they can manipulate it. Or like you talk about Legos, you talk about like creating 3D structures. Like was that in one study they built twice as many Lego structures or they were more likely

to do that. You know what I'm talking about? I think you mentioned that in your book. I think the best. This year's Lego Master winners dyslexic, we interviewed him for a magazine. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah.

No, he's fabulous. But, and you know, when you actually, he and his brother did these, if you look at their winning builds, tremendous amount of narrative in what they built as well. Not only is it like phenomenal, just from a lot of like there are these ones that are pendular and hanging and there's this dragon bot and stuff like that. But, you know, it's just incredible just from the building perspective,

but also from the narrative. I think, you know, in terms of the research studies, I think maybe the one you're thinking of is, which actually puts together a couple of the strengths also, but they had students navigating through a computer maze, a computer environment, and they told them that they were looking to find a particular object in this architectural rendering on a 3D computer model.

And then at the end of the task, They actually asked them two things. They asked them to reconstruct the house using physical architectural blocks. So what did the house look like in 3D that you just wandered through on the computer? And the dyslexic students were, this was college age students in England. And the dyslexic ones were much better than the non-dissexic ones at rebuilding the three-dimensional model of the house. They also asked them, where did you? spot the blue mouse. And this was, you know, not something that they were asked to look for.

So it was an incidental learning task. And the dyslexic students, again, were much better at being able to identify this off-task thing that they spot it along the way, just incidentally, than the non-dislexic people were. And that incidental learning, learning through experience, again, just goes back to this episodic personal memory bias, and it all fits in together. And, you know, when we can, when we finish talking about the different strengths, we can actually come back to more recent research that seems to be in the process of tying these all together now. Oh, neat.

That'd be neat. Thank you. So that was the M. So we talked about interconnected reasoning? So, yeah, interconnected reasoning is really the kind of systems, thinking, the ability to see how things fit together into a larger system and how they work together. You know, in medicine, something like endocrinology where you're talking about all the feedback loops and the metabolic cycles and things like that would be a classic example of this kind of

systems-based reasoning. But a lot of engineering processes, you know, dyslexic folks tend to often do very well at those. And this brings up a really interesting kind of phenomenon, too, is that we've met a lot of people that work in logistics for private industry and for the military and things like that. And network engineers. Network engineers and dyslexic people tend to be highly overrepresented in those areas. And yet in terms of like the day-to-day management of fine detail organization that involves doing a lot of paper. or filling out a lot of forms or things like that, they can often experience difficulty. So they're really exceptional in some parts of this task in the overall conceptual ability

and the ability to sort of think about how these things are working out in cycles. But they can miss out on the opportunity to display those talents because they get saddled with other things like paperwork or, you know, forms on computers with lots of columns and things like that that are not good fits for their ability. So understanding the parts that are the strengths and the parts that are the challenges is really important. But any big complicated system, you know, like nature, the environment, you know, we're having the big summit now in Glasgow on the environment. And, you know, a lot of the people that have helped to work out some of the big environmental systems for how climate changes and things are dyslexic.

And so these big systems, big system thinking and how things impact each other is a very dyslexic kind of strength. That's cool. Yeah. I really, I really appreciate that kind of like as a strength and that it's like, I think there's also this aspect in our education system that prizes verbal comprehension so much. that I think like I barely got into medical school because I in the MCAT there's three portions. There's the like the physics and the hard science and then there's this like verbal comprehension.

And I could not finish this thing if my life depended on it. So I scored way low on that and then really high on the other two. And I got in, you know, but it was like that there's in our world we naturally have this kind of like there's a prising of. this set of skills like verbal skills. And I think I'm not sure people really understand, like, you could be low and verbal and really gifted in other areas. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, absolutely.

And this happens a lot. And one of the difficulties is that there's a real asymmetry between the talent sets in that people that tend to be sort of high, spatial and low verbal. can easily understand that the talents of the verbal people in those areas kind of outstrip theirs. And they can understand a little bit what they're missing. But we found that there's kind of not a reciprocity on the other end where people that are very high, verbal and low, spatial or visual, have a real problem understanding folks with the opposite pattern.

Because if you do everything analytically, if you do everything verbally, if you do everything verbally, everything step by step, you have a really hard time understanding people that do things using insight-based processing, using non-verbal reasoning, and you just don't understand how they can get from A to B because they can't give a verbal account of it in the same way that you can. And, you know, this is actually extremely common in some of the, you know, cognitive biology fields too. We mentioned before Manuel Casanova when when he was doing his research

he got volunteer brains from some of his fellow faculty members in neurology, academic neurology and pathology. And when he looked at their brains, you know, everyone was more over on the narrow column spectrum side because they were spending their

career creating these organizational flow charts of different pathological conditions and making these fine diagnostic detailed descriptions and things like that. And in general, I think this is true that the academy is full of people who excelled in the verbal fields and that loved school and that thrived in the environment where they had to write grants and create papers and things like that.

And, you know, there are some great counter examples of dyslexic people who have excelled in the academy as well, but usually because they synthesized ideas in such creative way that it was obvious that they were needed. But, you know, there is this really asymmetry. And we were at a conference once that dealt with cognitive subjects. And somebody actually made the claim that there was no knowledge that you could not put into words easily. If your concepts were not coded verbally, they didn't constitute knowledge. So he didn't believe it was.

So actually, well, we know. This is a little, there's a friend, colleague, but he said he didn't think it was possible to actually have thought that wasn't verbal in some way. And I thought, hmm, that tells us more about him specifically, the fact that he didn't think it was possible. That also pointed out the fact that he wouldn't understand nonverbal, spatial predominant thinkers, you know, but he didn't think it was possible to actually have a thought that wasn't completely verbally encoded. So, you know. And the truth is, before there were these brain MRIs in the last decade, there was an ongoing warring between cognitive kind of philosophers who would debate whether there could be something like nonverbal thought and stuff like that.

And only when you actually had these very different appearing scans, you know, fMRIs and things like that, that could show, you know, that, I mean, there was a controversy to some, does it really exist imagery? I mean, there were there were things like that that were going on. on before there was a way to actually quantitated and objectively actually see how these processes could be going on in very different ways. And so imagery definitely got its big boost once there could be ways of imaging that in the brain. And I would say that there is a study with dyslexic versus non-dyslexic subjects. And they did see when they were given certain tasks that there was a lot more imagery associated with certain type, like there's a verbal generation task. And it was kind of funny to see because they weren't focusing on that particular feature. But, you know, I have a soft

spot in my heart for the prekuneas, which has a lot of imagery associated with it. And so I always look on scans and see if they identify that there's a cluster activity. And you could see when the subjects were supposed to think about the verb that went with a noun, and it was boat, that when the dyslexic subjects were actually thinking of a boat and what it would do, they were imaging a little cartoon of a boat sailing, whereas a lot of the non-dissexics were not. There was no picture. It was like a definition of, you know, those definite boat, you know, sales or something like that. So I think that aspect of it really started opening up all these individual differences, you know, making it more legitimate. There was a study, for instance, where they just, I think it was

a journal individual differences or something like that. where they were looking at the degrees of brain activation with imagery and the fact that you could see a lot of variation in individuals on how much their brains were activating when they were actually trying to make pictures. Or the fact that there are some people who say, I can't make a picture at all. You know, the fact that people couldn't believe that this existed until you had a way of confirming that individual differences like this existed. Yeah, it's, wow, this is really good. I'm imagining my child and adolescent psychiatrists who listen are really enjoying this episode because it's so, it's so deep. And I think they'll also be like, wow, I want to read those studies. I want to follow up on those things.

And so I think this is going to lead to a lot of good future thought. So we've talked about material reasoning. We've talked about interconnected reasoning. We've talked about narrative reasoning. Let's make sure we cover D dynamic reasoning. So the heart and soul of dynamic reasoning is really sort of prediction. And it's prediction based on mental simulation. So starting from current conditions and thinking about processes that are ongoing,

what will future states look like if this continues to carry on and move out into the future? or what was the past like that a certain process connecting the past with the present led to our current state of affairs now. So it's basically the ability to kind of work over and over again a particular kind of of process and imagine how that's going to shape the future or how that shape the past. And it kind of in some ways, you know, involves a synthesis of the, the systems-based reasoning and also of the experience-based reasoning. And in the chapters where we discuss dynamic reasoning, we talk a lot about insight-based processing.

And I think it's very important for people that work with students to understand insight-based processing and how it differs from analytical processing, but how it is also a legitimate way of solving problems. Insight-based processing is really a process that involves matching patterns, looking for similarities and seeing groupings. And it proceeds by a kind of sorting process rather than a step-by-step, you know, connected process where every link in the chain is connected with each other. And there's a very well-worked-out biological, neurological.

process that takes place during insight-based problem-solving that was well laid out by a guy named Mark and Beeman at Northwestern University. And he wrote an excellent book on the topic as well. But it's just a very different processing than step-by-step analytical reasoning. And I was thinking about this earlier, David, when you were talking about your experience as a young boy at the math competition where you were given these big problems that you could see the way to the answer, you know, as opposed to the typical math problem where you're, you know, asked to put all the intervening steps down on paper. And that sort of leap to the conclusion, just by insight, by seeing how it works, is a very typical kind of problem-solving pattern that we see in the

dyslexic people that we work with, kind of a bias toward that as opposed to the step-by-step reasoning process. Yeah. Also, if anyone listening wants to take the Mind Strength Survey, it's a free part of the neurolearning app. You know, it's available in iOS and Android, just so you know. It's part of the dyslexia screening app, but you don't have to pay for it. The Mind Strength app is in there and it'll generate a little report.

if anyone wants to, you know, if anyone wants to take it for themselves. That's great. Yeah, I'm going to link that in the show notes for you guys, and I'll put that on the article that I'll put together for this as well. Yeah, and you guys are such a huge resource. So you're running a nonprofit, and the goal of the nonprofit is to kind of bring awareness and to educate people on this stuff.

Is that? Positive awareness, identity, community achievement. That's what it is. That's great. Yeah, positive words. And we have a free monthly newsletter. And we have a for people who want to go really deep into the subject, we also have a premium magazine every month too. And we have kids kind of talent kind of showcases competitions,

creative writing, and there's a STEM Awards too. I think, you know, too, in terms of the nonprofit, you know, the shorter line is, you know, creating a world where dyslexia is viewed for its strengths and understood from a strength perspective. And, you know, as physicians and biologists, this notion always appealed to us when we were working with families. And, you know, we've talked a lot about families, about our own children and our own experiences and things.

The notion that you could have a fifth of the population with a particular cognitive makeup that was just a corruption of the general normal pattern just never seemed to make sense to us. as a biologist. And so we were always interested in what the upside of some of these very common differences could be. And I think you can take the same approach with attention issues and even to some extent with autism spectrum issues. You know, why are large percentages of people wired in these ways? What are they bringing to the table that, you know, that nature is favored in selecting such large percentages of people to display these traits? And so I think that,

that's that really, it always just intuitively to us made sense that there was some there there, that when we sat down with families and got these strength stories, that there were some reason behind them. And it really played out once we got into the basic literature and looked at this in more detail. So I think we want to kind of bring, wrap this up, but I want to see if there's anything that's like you definitely want to convey or, you know, state of our audits. before we kind of wrap things up.

Yeah, I think the first thing is that in order to really understand your own talents and the talents of your children, it's very important to identify what those are. And so because this is a very common issue and because so many children have dyslexic kinds of minds, it's important to identify them early. And with our nonprofit, when we started this out about 10 years ago now, one of the early issues we identified was just the fact that so many people didn't know that they were dyslexic. And so the whole point of early identification, finding out that you have both these educational risks, but also these cognitive opportunities is really important early on. So we would encourage people to try to, you know, if you have some suggestions that your child has a tendency towards dyslexic processing, don't put that aside, investigate that early on because there are significant downsides in terms of self-esteem and self-perception when children are not given the tools to understand the reason for their differences. And there are also benefits educationally and starting on an intervention program early.

So we would encourage people to do that. And also say, you know, even if you don't have a personal connection that, you know, in your practice, you will have a number of people who are dyslexing your practice just by the sheer numbers that are involved. And I mean, I think that once you start investigating and learning more about it, I think you'll discover more and more, and it could be very helpful for the clients that you work with and also yield insights on your own practice and how you make connections. And I think in the coming years where the people that are interested in the strength side of dyslexia are really focused now is trying to help dyslexic and non-diselexic people understand how they can form partnerships and groups

that take advantage of diverse cognitive abilities. in order to achieve things that neither could do separately. And that we're really trying to take a more community-based approach to understanding intelligence and to understanding capability. And it really seems like a very, very fruitful approach. And there's a lot of people that are kind of looking in this direction now. So I think that's where things are really headed in the future. That's a really beautiful vision to think of, you know,

putting all these strengths kind of together in a room and seeing what's possible is what I hear you saying. Yeah, strengths. And it starts with just understanding and it starts with respect, mutual respect from people that are different from one another and how they approach problems. And there's just the brain is so incredibly complex and so incredibly rich in possibilities. There are just so many ways that the brain has of solving different types of tasks and problems. and it looks very different from the inside for everyone who works in these different ways, but understanding all the possibilities for doing things are very important. And building an educational system that recognizes that and understands that and takes advantage of that as well.

Yeah, what would you say that would look like an educational system? I think, you know, when we talked, we didn't talk too much about developmental differences, but there's a, you know, for the psychiatric community and psychological community, having this understanding of the developmental changes that take place between childhood and adolescence and adulthood in the development of working memory capacity and executive functioning in general, I think is something that really needs to be built better into the educational system. And understanding how that dovetails with the differences in memory. and the bias towards episodic memory and experience-based memory for dyslexic folks is really crucial.

So there's a tendency now to really upload basic skills learning into the early grades of education and to focus on those almost exclusively for the first few years. So you're learning to read, you're learning to calculate, you're learning to write by hand, and then you use all those skills to begin learning content later on. Well, dyslexic kids come to school with very strong ability to learn from experience, to learn facts about the world by interacting with it, by doing projects and engaging in activities. But they come with a very weak ability to memorize procedures, to learn wrote skills, to assimilate lists of facts.

And so creating an educational format where early on in the educational experience, these kids are encountering things where they can achieve success and where they're actually starting to build a reservoir of facts and information that will allow them to flourish later on in their education is really important. And the educational system as it's traditionally been structured is almost the exact opposite of what we would want for these kids. You mentioned earlier some of the latest neurological research around dyslexia that you could share about, would you be willing to share the latest? Well, yeah. And also, I want to say that we do have a three library of dyslexia articles on our website. And as I'm like, now I think we're in the 70th issue

of our newsletter archives and things. So there's a ton of stuff at dyslexic manage.org. But, you know, I think the most remarkable things on the neuroscience front are just how well the default mode network, it seems to be correlating with these mind strengths and the fact that there's, there are biological studies that suggest that default mode network may be more active in dyslexic folks. So it's a, it's a way of understanding why certain kinds of talent sets might be arising under different kinds of networks that people have. So I think that aspect of it is really kind of Cool. So it's kind of the default mode network is sort of collecting a sort of loose, you know, loose focus and aspect of it.

And also the other kind of hot area that connects all these talents is work around grid cells and the median intranal cortex and the ways that memories are structured. And when we started this work and wrote the book in 2011, the only grid cell network that seemed to relate to any of the mind strengths was in the spatial reasoning chapter. And we talked about that. But since then, autobiographical personal memory has come to be linked with it. Having a hierarchical network of concepts. So basically what we've called interconnected reasoning has been connected with grid cell networks. and also mental simulation has come to be connected with the grid cell network. So basically, these median temporal structures and functions have all become connected with the different mind strength.

So we're seeing these connections both in the kind of the default mode network and also in the grid cell networks. And in the coming years, I think we'll really see how these things are working together to create these special abilities. But it's all falling into place. And time is confirming the connection of these different talents and abilities. So it's been really gratifying to watch. Really, really neat. That's cool. Yeah.

Well, you guys are the perfect set of experts to come on this show. You've been in the trenches focused on a topic for a couple decades. You have personal experience, professional experience. So really glad to bring you guys to my audience and to get. gain some of your knowledge. I might even actually want to have you guys come back and continue this conversation. So if you're listening to this and you have more questions and you shoot me an email, I'll write them down and make a list for maybe a part two, okay? That sounds good. That's good. And yeah, I'll link all the stuff in the show notes. If you guys

want to check out their nonprofit, I'm sure they would love the support or just reading the stuff that they have there for free, joining their subscription, and educating yourself. And if you're listening to this and you're like, what if I'm dyslexic and I've never been diagnosed to take their free assessment? I don't know. Do you guys do like consultations if someone wants to set up like an hour console? Do you guys do that? You mentioned the actual screen test. There is a... So we haven't really done personal consultations, but we're fairly generous with just answering questions by email.

We should clarify that the mind strength screener, so identifying your personal mind strength abilities are free tests. We have a dyslexia screening test itself, which we have a professional rates for. That's from age seven on through adulthood. And that's a paid app. For professionals, it would be about $20. Awesome. But what's cool about that, that also qualifies.

It's unusual. It can qualify for Bookshare and learning ally if it looks like it identifies he as being dyslexic. So that could be a big deal. Because normally comprehensive testing, which is very important for things like standardized tests, is several thousand dollars. And so sometimes this kind of screening test for someone who you believe may be dyslexic, there's a little bit some suggestion that not just screening every one of the particular age, for instance, but there's some suggestion based on, you know, reading difficulties to coding problems, then this is a fairly cost-effective option for getting identified and also getting some extra attention

potentially in school and your education. Excellent. Fantastic. No, I think those are good resources. And check out the book. If you're listening to this and you do get the book, please put an Amazon review on for them and mention that you listen to this episode. so that they know that you heard them and appreciated it.

And I think we'll leave it there for today. Thanks very much.