http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/the-upside-of-dyslexia.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1

Opinion

The Upside of Dyslexia


By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL
Published: February 4, 2012

THE word "dyslexia" evokes painful struggles with 
reading, and indeed this learning disability 
causes much difficulty for the estimated 15 
percent of Americans affected by it. Since the 
phenomenon of "word blindness" was first 
documented more than a century ago, scientists 
have searched for the causes of dyslexia, and for 
therapies to treat it. In recent years, however, 
dyslexia research has taken a surprising turn: 
identifying the ways in which people with 
dyslexia have skills that are superior to those 
of typical readers. The latest findings on 
dyslexia are leading to a new way of looking at 
the condition: not just as an impediment, but as 
an advantage, especially in certain artistic and scientific fields.

Dyslexia is a complex disorder, and there is much 
that is still not understood about it. But a 
series of ingenious experiments have shown that 
many people with dyslexia possess distinctive 
perceptual abilities. For example, scientists 
have produced a growing body of evidence that 
people with the condition have sharper peripheral 
vision than others. 
<http://cbcl.mit.edu/people/geiger/geiger-new.html>Gadi 
Geiger and Jerome Lettvin, cognitive scientists 
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
used a mechanical shutter, called a 
tachistoscope, to briefly flash a row of letters 
extending from the center of a subject's field of 
vision out to its perimeter. Typical readers 
identified the letters in the middle of the row 
with greater accuracy. Those with dyslexia 
triumphed, however, when asked to identify 
letters located in the row's outer reaches.

Mr. Geiger and Mr. Lettvin's findings, which have 
been confirmed in several subsequent studies, 
provide a striking demonstration of the fact that 
the brain separately processes information that 
streams from the central and the peripheral areas 
of the visual field. Moreover, these capacities 
appear to trade off: if you're adept at focusing 
on details located in the center of the visual 
field, which is key to reading, you're likely to 
be less proficient at recognizing features and 
patterns in the broad regions of the periphery.

The opposite is also the case. People with 
dyslexia, who have a bias in favor of the visual 
periphery, can rapidly take in a scene as a whole 
-- what researchers call absorbing the "visual gist."

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

A more capacious view that takes in the entire 
scene at once, however, reveals that Escher's 
staircases really lead nowhere, that the water in 
his fountains is flowing up rather than down -- 
that they are, in a word, impossible. Dr. 
<http://www.uwec.edu/Psyc/faculty/vonkarolyi.htm>Catya 
von 
Ká<http://www.uwec.edu/Psyc/faculty/vonkarolyi.htm>rolyi, 
an associate professor of psychology at the 
University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, found that 
people with dyslexia identified simplified 
Escher-like pictures as impossible or possible in 
an average of 2.26 seconds; typical viewers tend 
to take a third longer. "The compelling 
implication of this finding," wrote Dr. Von 
Károlyi and her co-authors in the journal Brain 
and Language, "is that dyslexia should not be 
characterized only by deficit, but also by talent."

The discovery of such talents inevitably raises 
questions about whether these faculties translate 
into real-life skills. Although people with 
dyslexia are found in every profession, including 
law, medicine and science, observers have long 
noted that they populate fields like art and 
design in unusually high numbers. Five years ago, 
the <http://dyslexia.yale.edu/>Yale Center for 
Dyslexia and Creativity was founded to 
investigate and illuminate the strengths of those 
with dyslexia, while the seven-year-old 
<http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/dyslexia/LVL/>Laboratory 
for Visual Learning, located within the 
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is 
exploring the advantages conferred by dyslexia in 
visually intensive branches of science. The 
director of the laboratory, the astrophysicist 
<http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/dyslexia/LVL/People/Matt.html>Matthew 
Schneps, notes that scientists in his line of 
work must make sense of enormous quantities of 
visual data and accurately detect patterns that 
signal the presence of entities like black holes.

A pair of experiments conducted by Mr. Schneps 
and his colleagues, published in the Bulletin of 
the American Astronomical Society in 2011, 
suggests that dyslexia may enhance the ability to 
carry out such tasks. In the first study, Mr. 
Schneps reported that when shown radio signatures 
-- graphs of radio-wave emissions from outer 
space -- astrophysicists with dyslexia at times 
outperformed their nondyslexic colleagues in 
identifying the distinctive characteristics of black holes.

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

Given that dyslexia is universally referred to as 
a "learning disability," the latter experiment is 
especially remarkable: in some situations, it 
turns out, those with dyslexia are actually the superior learners.

Mr. Schneps's study is not the only one of its 
kind. In 2006, 
<http://psychology.cua.edu/faculty/howard.cfm>James 
Howard Jr., a professor of psychology at the 
Catholic University of America, described in the 
journal Neuropsychologia an experiment in which 
participants were asked to pick out the letter T 
from a sea of L's floating on a computer screen. 
Those with dyslexia learned to identify the letter more quickly.

Whatever special abilities dyslexia may bestow, 
difficulty with reading still imposes a handicap. 
Glib talk about appreciating dyslexia as a "gift" 
is unhelpful at best and patronizing at worst. 
But identifying the distinctive aptitudes of 
those with dyslexia will permit us to understand 
this condition more completely, and perhaps 
orient their education in a direction that not 
only remediates weaknesses, but builds on strengths.

-----------------------------------------
Annie Murphy Paul is the 
<http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Annie-Murphy-Paul/18895973>author 
of "Origins." She is at work on a book about the science of learning.






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