Imagine, if you will, a room full of administrators. Their job is to interpret and categorise events. They are writing documents for one book shelf in a library of many book shelves. They tend to go with what they know and draw a lot from other books that are closest to them in the library. They are the accountants, the linguistic experts and they are confident in what they are accomplishing. Their work is organised, methodical and strict. The library is organised in such a way that anyone can find any record in a matter of minutes. They have no problem answering any question without second guessing themselves. As time passes and the library gets full, they look for the least important bookshelf, take out the books and will move the entire library to ensure they have another book shelf they can place the new entries on keeping everything in chronological order.
Now imagine another library, but this time it is run by artists. They have a different system, where they look at the entire library. If some event happens that they need to record, they will search through the shelves to find something that is related, pick up that old book and write the new entry directly into it. Nothing is in chronological order, instead it is just grouped into categories. These categories are so broad, it can take a while for them to search through them. These people are so creative that they are constantly questioning what it is they are recording, often getting into philosophical debates about the smallest entry. These philosophical debates spill over into what they should delete and keep. They delete pages out of books, not entire shelves and often this means that they don’t have much time to record the new things. So they attempt to pick and choose the most important to record, but often even important things will be gone due the limited space they have to store the unprocessed events.
What I described to you is an overly simplified and opinionated view on how the left and right side of the brain works. The first part being the left and the second the right. For mostly everyone, these parts of the brain work together, connected with various pathways between the two halves. And the reason I’m explaining this is due to the differences in how dyslexic and neurotypical eyes work in relation to these two halves.
Albert Le Floch and Guy Ropars from the University of Rennes discovered something interesting. In a nutshell, they found that neurotypical people tend to have only one dominant eye, whereas dyslexics have both competing for dominance. Of course many people who understand dyslexia will know that it is associated with language as a whole and not necessarily just reading. But let’s go through it.
Our brains have limited resources and if we imagine it as a company who has the capacity for only 10 members of staff and they have hired people for documenting events. They have a choice between the two groups I mentioned at the beginning.
They could hire only the administrators who would ensure every detail is documented and stored in a chronological order, focused completely on the task at hand specialising in that particular task.
They could hire the artists who would creatively categorise the events, holistically trying to piece together not just what they are looking at but what it’s related to. Able to combine different concepts to create new things.
But most likely they would hire a mixture of them both and as those newly hired people get more experience, the better they become at it. The biggest problem is, the artists and administrators are in two separate board rooms and can only communicate through email. In a neuro-typical, that would mean that all the visual information on any event will only go to the administration team and the artists would only be able to browse the library and look at what the administration team wrote about the picture. In terms of resources that would mean there would be 3 artists to 7 administrators in our fictional company to deal with the extra demand.
In dyslexics, both teams will get those images and both teams will get the opportunity to change the library and edit it to how they see fit. But because of the limited resources, there would be 5 artists and 5 administrators.
This makes the artistic team stronger in a dyslexic mind, making them more creative, holistically minded, finding it easy to connect the dots and also find it easy to understand people since they are able to look at more sides than one. But this uses more resources, where both the teams are doing a lot of overtime to be able to keep up with the average neurotypical. The artists are much slower than the administrators causing a delay in images being stored behind the administrators. The administrators and artists often record the same things twice, each team creating their own version causing the dyslexic problems reading as the words seem to dance across the page as the delayed image is overlaid on the current one.
The artists are often rewriting what the administrators originally wrote since they disagree with the result. But as the artists get tired, they tend to make more mistakes than the administrators when they are in a similar situation. All of this causes memories to be altered by the artists as they are being called up again and again as the dyslexic attempts to understand the issue. The dyslexic looks at all possible angles they can, not only fixating on that particular thought, but also forgetting the actual words that have been spoken.
This way of working soon manifests itself as a greater understanding of the subject on a deep level, but losing the ability to explain it. Besides recalling the information seconds after it had been given to them since they have had no time to think about it, if dyslexics can’t connect all the different segments of a topic together, then they struggle to explain the topic. Dyslexics need a deep understanding to be able to explain it even on a basic level.
The artists in the dyslexic mind become experts in what they do, but regularly feel drained from trying to keep up with the administrators and the constant input of new experiences. Therefore the dyslexic takes longer to learn a topic, but will retain that information much longer. For many people, they learn something in school and will forget it 5 years later. Dyslexics still retain what they have learned, still at the same level when they finished school, maybe forgetting only a few things. Dyslexics have great long term memory but terrible short term. As a dyslexic gets older, they appear just like everyone else since they have caught up, but their sense of time becomes distorted as current memories bleed into old since their mind is constantly trying to find associations and connect memories together that could be years apart.
If you know a dyslexic, you have undoubtedly seen them call someone by the wrong name because that person fits into the same category as another in their mind e.g. calling one of their children the name of their other child. In time, as those children grow in the dyslexic mind, so does the space they take and therefore will fall into more categories, some of which are their own and the mix up becomes less and less. But those children will always be a part of the dyslexic mind as those children take up more and more space. Even after they have grown, the dyslexic will still be able to visualise them as little children since for the dyslexic, it doesn’t matter if it was yesterday or years ago, the memory will still be the same.
This all, of course, sounds so heavy. But in reality there are advantages to these artists receiving images as well. Give a dyslexic a task to plan out a room and figure out where to put furniture from a pile that is dismantled. Most people will see the pile and be having to ask what the things are and maybe using some software to decide where to put the stuff. The dyslexic recognizes the pieces of furniture, they may tidy the pile into the different pieces of furniture but then they are able to visualise the size of that furniture and what it will look like in different places in the room without much thought.
If a dyslexic knows programming and was assigned to make a module for a program they know well. They will naturally have in their mind every piece of that program and how it all connects together. You will see them easily write out code and creatively come up with solutions to challenges they may face while creating the module. They have a map of how the different modules in a program interact with each other and it gives them a natural ability to connect them and ensure they aren’t rewriting what already exists. But they may just rewrite it because sometimes it is quicker to just type it all out rather than copy and paste.
But often the positives are overlooked as society in general considers dyslexia as a “learning disability” rather than simply a different way of thinking. If you go back in time as recent as the 1990’s, you will see parents being told that their dyslexic child will never be able to pass any exam. That dyslexics are generally stupid. This idea that dyslexics have so many troubles continues today as you search google for dyslexic traits and are served a plethora of negative traits and no mention of what they find effortless.
This causes many dyslexics to lack self-confidence as they are told all of this from a young age. Causing them to feel that they have to try harder to get noticed and they develop little quirks that make them seem arrogant and pretentious. In reality those are to mask the insecurity and feeling that they are less than everyone else, that they constantly need to prove themselves. In reality, if they have overcome the various challenges that dyslexia can bring then they often do become highly intelligent.
But it appears that Nasa has confidence in them as it has been theorised that more than half the staff are dyslexic. Professor Julie Logan of Cass Business School found that between 20% – 40% of successful entrepenures are dyslexic compared with 15% – 20% of the general population. The list of famous dyslexics are extensive and a quick google search can show you how many there are. So in reality, dyslexics really shouldn’t feel less than but the emotional scars suffered in childhood will often last an entire lifetime and mean there could be a high chance of them ending up in a prison cell instead.
These frustrations of feeling inadaquate can spill over into emotional dysregulation showing anger, frustration and low self-esteem. These intense emotions cause emotional overload but also potentially create greater pathways to be formed within the emotional networks of the brain. Giving the ability to have stronger relationships, more empathy and compassion pushing the dyslexic to have a greater need to do the right thing.
On the negative side, this all means that dyslexics:
- Struggle with emotional regulation, sometimes showing fear, sometimes frustration
- Suffer with self-confidence
- Struggle to read
- Have seemingly disorganised thoughts (even though they are just structured in a different way)
- Have a slow loading time, meaning they fall behind in conversation
- Appear not to listen as they are making sense of the new information
- Struggle to explain as it takes time to organise their thoughts
- Struggle to remember even what happened an hour ago
- And struggling to read due to the words appearing to constantly move, just imagine reading in the car, the dyslexic will not notice a difference.
On the positive side, this means that dyslexics:
- Are great note takers since they had to learn that skill to get into a good job
- Understand people on a deep level and how to support them or understand when someone is trying to fool them
- Are able to visualise something before it even exists and understand how it can fit in an environment
- See the big picture and find it effortless to connect dots
- Creative, effortlessly finding solutions to the greatest challenges
- Determined since they have had to continually go against the status quo to learn and survive
- Great storytellers since they can easily create worlds in their head with their holistic abilities, visual thinking and can see things from more angles than a neurotypical.
- And can remember something in great detail from years ago
I hope this gives you some good insight into the dyslexic mind. I am dyslexic myself and have been researching different ways of looking at it and different ways to cope over the years. Which has meant that slowly as I learned more, a narrative had formed in my mind as to what being dyslexic means.
You have just listened to those thoughts and as you can see, my theory is that a dyslexic brain isn’t initially coded to be different however, there is a difference in the way the dyslexic eye functions. Meaning that it forces the brain to give more resources to a part which wouldn’t need as many in a neurotypical, causing that part of the brain to get better at all those positive things mentioned earlier but also reduces resources causing all of the negative traits of dyslexia. So in the end, the dyslexic mind does end up being wired differently and when us dyslexics really understand how different we actually are, it can be quite lonely.
So please be empathic, patient and understand that we don’t mean to sound arrogant, recall things in the wrong way or forget your birthday. It really is a struggle and we should all celebrate our dyslexic wins as us dyslexics really do have some powerful abilities given to us that are perfectly adept to create something new or investigate what could be wrong and fix it.
This in mind, us dyslexics really are best adapted for this ever increasingly mechanised world. If more recognition goes to us and the education system adapts to ensure that not every child is taught the same way. Then I can really see a future where more of us dyslexics play an important part in elevating humanity, with less of us in jail and more of us joining the ranks of many successful dyslexics before us.
This being said, the study I have been referencing has come out with an interesting result showing 100% of dyslexic participants showing that both eyes are dominant and 100% of non-dyslexic participants have 1 eye dominant. If you have ever studied statistics, you would realise that these results seem a bit too perfect. There are often mis-matches and it’s been said that the dominant eye theory has been looked at before and dismissed. So it won’t be until scientists investigate this further when we will know whether this is true. But, from my perspective, it seems to fit the narrative of what it is to be dyslexic.
Sources:
Original Study: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2017.1380
Argument Against: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10898962/