Dyslexia: My New Favorite Asset

I just fin­ished read­ing Think­ing Like Ein­stein: Return­ing to our Visual Roots with the Emerg­ing Rev­o­lu­tion in Com­puter Infor­ma­tion Visu­al­iza­tion by Thomas G. West. West addresses dyslexia, visual-spacial think­ing, and cur­rent inno­va­tions in com­puter graph­ics. This was the first time I read some­thing that treated the poten­tials of dyslexic think­ing with enthu­si­asm and antic­i­pa­tion. I have never seri­ously inves­ti­gated dyslexia because I found the rhetoric around learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties alien­at­ing. This book col­lects West’s arti­cles on the topic, specif­i­cally in rela­tion to com­puter graph­ics, and paints a pic­ture of flex­i­ble, intu­itive minds not fit­ting into con­ven­tional aca­d­e­mic and work sce­nar­ios, but devel­op­ing the most inno­v­a­tive responses to sci­en­tific and visual problems.

I was diag­nosed with dyslexia when I was in 1st grade. The testers at Yale con­cluded that I was smart enough to com­pen­sate for the dyslexia and that I needed no spe­cial assis­tance. This expec­ta­tion is unset­tling when I look back. Even if I made good grades and was often favored by teach­ers, I found school to be a murky, treach­er­ous place where I would be ridiculed for stu­pid mis­takes and not try­ing hard enough. This had a long term impact on my rela­tion­ship to insti­tu­tion­al­ized learn­ing and my sense of self gen­er­ally. While I com­pen­sated alright, I feel like I had spo­radic help at best in iden­ti­fy­ing and nur­tur­ing my strengths asso­ci­ated with dyslexia.

West uses a vari­ety of peo­ple as exam­ples of visual-spatial think­ing who strug­gled with or even repeat­edly dropped out of school, only to late make major con­tri­bu­tions to their fields. The most promi­nent exam­ples are Ein­stein and the Wright broth­ers. There is an inverse rela­tion­ship between visual-spacial abil­i­ties and ver­bal abil­i­ties. Dyslex­ics can have trou­ble with writ­ten as well as oral lan­guage, hand­writ­ing, lin­ear orga­ni­za­tion, and short term mem­ory, among other things. The asso­ci­ated strengths then include visual-spatial skills, lat­eral think­ing, and intu­ition. There is a joke that you should never trust a sur­geon who can spell. This com­bi­na­tion of strengths and weak­nesses often clashes with the expec­ta­tions of tra­di­tional school­ing. West argues that as visual and spa­cial medi­ums like 3D com­puter graph­ics grow and as the avail­abil­ity of vast amounts of infor­ma­tion increases, the skills asso­ci­ated with dyslexia will become increas­ingly relevant.

In a vivid pas­sage titled “Global Thinkers, Global Tools,” he writes

Many, because of ver­bal dif­fi­cul­ties, may be unable to com­plete years of dis­ci­plined study and intense exam­i­na­tion. Oth­ers find it impos­si­ble to apply them­selves to dull rep­e­ti­tion of a prop­erly con­ducted spe­cial­ist career… But, in time, these same cre­ative visual thinkers with ver­bal dif­fi­cul­ties often have learned, by incli­na­tion and neces­sity, what their unaf­fected fel­lows can­not have learned; how to gain the most under­stand­ing with the least infor­ma­tion, how to learn as much from what they see as what they read, how to be sav­agely selec­tive in their read­ing, and how to guess what is inessen­tial and focus only on the really impor­tant… They learn the value of their own limits.

The anec­dotes and descrip­tions in this book help me con­tex­tu­al­ize much of my child­hood expe­ri­ences of learn­ing. The first and only test I ever cheated on was a spelling test in 1st grade. I was caught and humil­i­ated. It took until 7th grade when I read an Isaac Asi­mov short story to dis­cover read­ing as enjoy­able. I would some­times enter­tain myself by trick­ing my body into feel­ing like it was spin­ning ver­ti­cally in space, no hal­lu­cino­gens needed. I used to get up early in the morn­ings to watch the sci­ence pro­grams of Mr. Wiz­ard, may he rest in peace. My inter­est in sci­ence faded as soon as math became heav­ily involved and hands on exper­i­ments stopped. I felt ter­ri­bly cheated by my high school math expe­ri­ence upon learn­ing Pro­cess­ing this sum­mer. I feel like if some­one had used an equiv­a­lent dig­i­tal visu­al­iza­tion for­mat, I would have remained aca­d­e­m­i­cally engaged in math and sci­ence. It’s really hard to keep num­bers in order in lists for a dyslexic, espe­cially when it’s divorced from the visual real­ity that is rep­re­sented by the equa­tion. Latin was the vain of my exis­tence in high school. I threw myself into set design for the drama club. I did excep­tion­ally well on stan­dard­ized art his­tory tests despite the teacher’s fail­ure to cover any­thing but west­ern art. The year I took the test was the first time it included non-western art.

Do why do I repeat­edly get the mes­sage from my design school edu­ca­tion that my design skills are weak? My best guess at this point is that I am retreat­ing from some­thing I asso­ciate with unpleas­ant early school­ing expe­ri­ences. Even if most of the teach­ers I have had at Par­sons can pro­duce com­pelling work them­selves, I have had few teach­ers who are keen at teach­ing visual lit­er­acy. If I have buried any innate abil­ity around this under lay­ers of dis­ori­ent­ing school expe­ri­ences, it will take some work to draw it back out. I have con­sci­en­tiously stared this work, as I noted in ear­lier blog entries. West’s book has helped me feel con­fi­dent with where I am and rein­forced my con­fi­dence to con­tinue where I am going with a lit­tle less anx­i­ety and self-consciousness.