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.
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.
Catya von
Ká
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
Yale Center for Dyslexia and
Creativity was founded to investigate and illuminate the strengths of
those with dyslexia, while the seven-year-old
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
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,
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.
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Annie Murphy Paul is the
author of "Origins." She is at work on a book
about the science of learning.