EXPAND YOUR MIND
By: Juliana Reider
Tags: Neurodiversity, Reframing, Dyslexia, Learning Disability, Diversity In Tech

A Journey to Understanding the Dyslexic Potential

By Juliana Reider

Imagine you’re walking along in Lincoln Park Zoo, and you’re enjoying the rhino exhibit. As you walk, you come across a small tube, but you’ve never seen anything like it before. You pick it up and peer into one end of it. As it happens, you see rhinos ahead of you, now in perfect miniature. You’ve just discovered a telescope, but you are looking through it backwards. You’re missing the telescope’s key feature: the ability to make far away objects look larger. As you teach others about this instrument, they only learn this unintended use as well, and miss the rest.

Photo by Julien Lanoy on Unsplash

I find that a lot of us, are looking our lives too narrowly. Our conception of ourselves is thus incomplete. By broadening our view, we can see the bigger picture.

Dyslexia is one of those things where I benefited by expanding my view.

The Narrow View

The common view of dyslexia focuses on difficulties with spelling, reading, rote memorization, and other problems. All these are real difficulties that dyslexics, like myself, can face. However, many dyslexics end up being entrepreneurs, artists, engineers and having other prestigious careers. While 15% of Americans are dyslexic, 35% of entrepreneurs are dyslexic and roughly 40% of self-made millionaires are dyslexic. Some famous dyslexics are Richard Branson, Agatha Christie, and Albert Einstein to name a few. And yet, the common view of dyslexia is too narrow to fully encompass success stories.

When I read the book, The Dyslexic Advantage, for the first time, it was a pivotal moment for me. I learned that the same brain wiring that results in some of my difficulties, also results in some of my most valued skills. Dyslexia is tied to a specific brain organization and information processing style. One key pattern in the brain’s neurons, that correlates with a predisposition to dyslexia, provides challenges in fine-detail processing, but excels at big picture tasks. Two sides of the same neurological coin. The same wiring that causes dyslexics frustration, can also be the cause of expertise and joy.

Despite these facts, the narrow view dominates. This perception has been reinforced throughout my life.

Grappling with the Narrow View

Before I even knew I was dyslexic, others defined me in terms of my struggles. In 2nd grade, I was accused of cheating by a teacher. She assumed a student already getting extra help for reading challenges couldn’t also have passed the test to enter the gifted program.

In high school, I was finally diagnosed with dyslexia. My Study Skills teacher helped me understand my diagnosis, but mostly in terms of how to overcome the hardships. And believe me, her instruction was vital. However, this experience also reinforced the idea that dyslexia was fundamentally something that held me back. All I wanted was take a magic pill to make my dyslexia go away. In case you don’t already know it, magic pills don’t exist.

It wasn’t until I read The Dyslexic Advantage, that I realized my view of myself was incomplete. The flip side, of dyslexia, the favoring of big picture processing, explains a lot of the common strengths of dyslexics like myself. The writers of the book have identified these as MIND strengths. This is an acronym for the skills of

(1) Material reasoning

(2) Interconnected reasoning

(3) Narrative reasoning and

(4) Dynamic reasoning

I’ll explain a few of these in more depth, in the next section. “While none of these strengths are exclusive to those with dyslexia, essentially,” every dyslexic person will show some of these skills. After I reading this, I began to connect the dots and realized that some of my greatest strengths were born of my dyslexic processing style.

Reframing My Experience

In that same gifted program, the one that I almost didn’t get to participate in, I thrived. I won our annual Egghead Olympics Tangram Competition all three years. Tangrams requires players to fit smaller shapes into a larger ones in increasingly creative and challenging ways. This clearly demands strong spatial reasoning skills, also known as Material reasoning. Many dyslexics with high functioning Material reasoning skills become architects. It helps them envision what a blueprint will look like in 3-D.

Photo by Kourosh Qaffari on Unsplash

The more I dug into the MIND strengths, the more I began to see parallels to my life. I even realized that my love of philosophy, and my choice to major in it, was partially due to my strong Interconnected reasoning skills. “I-strengths include the ability to [find gist and] see relationships of likeness.” Philosophy requires these abilities because, at its core, philosophy is a search for general principles and connections of all kinds. It focuses on big picture views rather than fine details, and relies on an ability to “create frameworks for understanding the world.”

After college, I still didn’t know what I wanted my career to be. I tried teaching, and even went as far as teaching in Japan, searching for that spark. Almost by accident, I uncovered a passion for programming and so got my masters in Software Engineering. My achievement in this realm is surely related to the fourth, and most fascinating MIND strength, Dynamic reasoning. This is “The ability to imagine or predict how things will change in response to various processes. This skill is valuable in situations that are uncertain, and it’s very good for making predictions. Incidentally, this is one reason why so many dyslexics are entrepreneurs. They thrive in uncertainty and ambiguity. Individuals with D-strengths flourish in rapidly changing settings that others find confusing. And technology is exactly that sort of field. I sometimes worry I’m an impostor, but the truth is, engineering and tech is a perfectly natural place for me to be.

Broaden Your View

I know now, that if my dyslexia were to disappear, as I wished for in high school, I would lose some of the best parts of myself. Let’s celebrate the dyslexic advantages, and move away from teaching the narrow view. Let’s teach students about Richard Branson, Agatha Christie, Albert Einstein, and so many more.

“Habit alone has led us to assume that the first” use of the telescope “we discovered is the only one.” If all we know is how to look through our figurative telescopes backwards, our concept of it diminishes its potential. Don’t fall into that pattern. You may not have Dyslexia, but If you’re struggling with something, try broadening your perspective. Equipped with this wholistic view, we improve our outlook of ourselves, our abilities, and our future.

Photo by Norbert Kundrak on Unsplash

Note: All quotes are from The Dyslexic Advantage, by Brock l. Eide, and Fernette L. Eide, which I highly recommend. Audiobook can be found here: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Dyslexic-Advantage-Audiobook/B005HJ5ZC2