Dyslexia - Flashbacks and Epiphanies

It was walking round the supermarket that did it, a week after I had been told that I was dyslexic.  There I was pushing my trolley, looking at the shopping list I had been gathering on my mobile phone and pondering whether I should try to use Buzan’s ‘Use your Memory’ or mentally mind map my shopping needs, when it happened.  It?  What was it?  It was the possible reason I was so bad at French at school.  I had always assumed that I was just wasn’t good cut out for foreign languages until I spent a couple of months in Russia in 1992.  It was an interesting place, Yeltsin had just come to power and Moscow had plenty of demos.  I couldn’t speak Russian before I went and, like a typical Brit, sought out any English speaker that I could.  But I quickly realized that I could think of words and phrases very quickly and my pronunciation wasn’t that bad.  I liked the sound of the language and the words seemed easier on the ears and the brain.

 

School French

So there you have it, and I was walking round the supermarket.  Bang!  School French, taught from day one from the basis of written grammar –this is the last thing a dyslexic needs.  Secondly, definite articles; ‘la chat’, ‘la maison’, ‘le’, ‘la’, ‘ill’, ‘ille’ etc.  You get the picture or actually you don’t.  Davis (see review) draws attention to the fact that it dyslexics struggle over what he calls ‘trigger’ words, words that do not easily conjure pictures.  How do you picture an ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘did’, ‘do’.  La maison?  We struggle over that with words in English mate!  But in Russian; ‘dom’ (house) ‘koshka’ (cat); see no definite or indefinite article to get stressed about.  Russian has an easier access point for a dyslexic.

 

Okay I’ve also heard it spoken a lot, but there again I had a lot of English spoken before I learnt to write it.  I want to talk about learning a second language another time.  For now it will serve as an example.

 

This man was everywhere in Russia and
 still stretches a long shadow of the past.

Naive or normal?

For the past month I have been having a continual stream of flashbacks and epiphanies.  Winceful memories of school French giving a clue as to how my brain might work.  It’s as if my head is working backwards and re-evaluating experiences that I can come to terms with an opening of possibilities as to what I might do.  Is a this naive or normal?

The Gift of Dyslexia

Ronald D. Davis with Eldon M. Brain

3rd edition 2010, Souvenir Press

 

The genius of this book lies in the fact that it is not mainstream. 

I inhabit a world that seems focussed to the point of obsession with ‘evidence based’.  Evidence based medicine is a good thing it establishes and helps maintain standards.  But Archimedes, if the story is true, didn’t discover the principle of the density of metal by evidence base but when he was in the bath, and promptly celebrated by shouting eureka whilst running through the streets naked.  This book is based on a personal eureka moment – more about which later.

The refreshing aspect of this very honest book is that it has attitude.  It acknowledges the difficulties that dyslexia can cause and backs this up with some personal memories but it points out that the problem with this might lie with the education system rather than the dyslexic.  Take the following as an example:

Besides resolving confusion, dyslexics utilise the altered perceptions....for creative imagination.  When it is applied to solving a problem during non verbal conceptualisation, it might be called intuition, invention or inspiration.  When it is done for entertainment, it is called fantasising or daydreaming.’

Were you ever told off at school for daydreaming or lacking concentration?  It could be that the education system squashes the very thing it spends all its time claiming it fosters – creativity!

 

Key to Davis’s theory is that the imaginative talent of dyslexics, the ability to visualise, is a ‘mind’s eye’.  This ‘mind’s eye’ allows them to look at the world and problems from a multitude of perspectives that gives them a more holistic view.  The key to making the most of this talent is in controlling this mind’s eye.

 

 

Structure

Set out in a very spacious dyslexic friendly way the book consists of four parts:

• What dyslexia really is (interestingly beginning with a chapter entitled) ‘The Underlying Talent’.
• A developmental theory of dyslexia.  (The eureka moment)
• The Gift
• Doing something about it.

 

So what is Dyslexia?

According to Davis it is ‘the result of a perceptual talent.’  I know, bit of a mouthful that one.  Basically dyslexics just see the world differently but that makes for a difficult life if 90% of the population see it one way and the remaining 10% of dyslexics don’t.  It’s not so much speaking different languages but akin to someone who speaks BBC English (the 90%) meeting someone with a strong Glaswegian accent (the 10%).  (No offence to Glaswegians my family roots lie north of the border!)

 

Eureka

The turning point of the book, the ‘eureka’ moment, lies at the end of the second section just before Davis moves on to the gift.  In a blocked off personal testimony Davis recounts how as a result of trying to write a letter he eventually realised; ‘that if my dyslexia could be changed by something I was doing mentally, it could not possibly be a structural problem but must be a functional problem.’

This led Davis to postulate his theory of dyslexia being a gift of mastery, ‘the ability to master many skills faster than the average person could comprehend or understand them.’  The reason for this is that from an early age dyslexics have developed the ability to look at anything they come into contact with from a variety of angles and seek to understand it by fully comprehending it.  We might say owning it, making it part of them.

 

From this point onwards Davis develops a technique of meditatively and kinaesthetically encouraging dyslexics to learn to live in different worlds.  It is the ability to move from their dyslexic viewpoint to the more common viewpoint of the wider world.  This is known as the Davis technique.

The technique itself applies:

 

• Visualisation (which I found fascinating because I have practised and taught meditation for a number of years)

• Using plasticine to physically create memorable images for remembering what he calls trigger words.  A trigger word is a word that a dyslexic stumbles over reading because they cannot create a mental picture for it.  So, for example, ‘cat’ is easy. ‘The cat’ is not easy because what mental picture/visualisation can you create for ‘the’?  So you use the plasticine to create a unique image for you that moves into your subconscious and becomes part of you.  You ‘master ‘it.

• Physical exercises for improving co-ordination. 

In short, a great book and one of those reads that leaves you with the gut feeling that Davis himself has made a profound intuitive leap.

Where has it left me?  Watch out for blogs on mastery, visualisation (meditation) and plasticine! 

Dyslexia and learning to read?

‘As with all aspects of study, the adult with dyslexia who wishes to become an efficient reader must be organised and know how to process the text.’ (1)

True or false? 

When I first read the above I thought well, obviously I need to learn to read differently.  And I probably do, but there’s a nagging doubt that I have about this concept.  It seems to assume that large sections of the information that we need is dull.  In other words we need to find techniques to help us store data that we really wouldn’t want to look at were it not for the fact that it is necessary for us to know it to achieve something.  But how true is this? 

 

Who needs dull information?

It seemed to me at first that it must be true of most of the information that I take in on a daily basis, but as I thought about it more and more I realised that there’s not a great deal of dull information that I take in and I suspect that this might also be true for many people who are not dyslexic.  Let me give a simple example.

 

 

             Traffic Lights

 

 

If you sat me down and said that you would like a discussion about the history of traffic lights I suspect that I might be asleep before the end of the sentence.  If you then said that it is important that I know about this history I would want to know why, because at the back of my mind would be the thought that the only thing that I really need to know about traffic lights is that I stop at red, go at green and get ready to do something when amber appears.  This ‘important’ information is only important because it helps me to drive my car safely and thereby get to destinations that I want to get to and achieve something that I want to achieve.  In other words my interest in traffic lights is conditional on a higher purpose.  It is this higher purpose that helps me to be interested in what traffic lights do and allows me to retain the information.  If the history of traffic lights was essential to my ability to drive properly, would this then make information about it easier to recall?

 

Let me tell you a story



Let’s look at this by thinking about a children’s story.  ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,’ is the beginning of what is supposed to be one of the best opening sentences to a book.  I find it particularly easy to remember because it immediately conjures images in my mind.  So too does the phrase, ‘it was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’ from Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities.



In both of the examples above the words serve the purpose of conveying the reader into a different or a greater realm, the realm of the story.  They spark the imagination into life - but only if you like the stories.  If you do not they may cause the imagination to shrink and to go to sleep.  However, the point is that the information given is memorable because it serves a higher purpose – the whole story.

 

Word or Picture?

So, in terms of language which comes first the word or the picture?  When early humanity first got thinking did it have a list of words to attach to objects or did words emerge from images and a desire to convey something about that image to others?  If it’s the latter then maybe the opening quote is wrong and it should be that dyslexics are given the opportunity to teach the rest of the population how to relive language so that it is no longer just dull information.   Who really struggles with reading?

 

(1)    Reid, Gavin & Kirk Jane; Dyslexia in Adults, Education and Employment.  John Wiley & Sons Ltd, UK 2001.

Dyslexia Adult Diagnosis

Eh!  So what’s dyslexia?

 

Thus began the saga that got me here.  It was the start of a conversation with friend who informed us that she had been diagnosed as dyslexic.  Only when we heard her description did it occur to us that our eldest son might be dyslexic.  He was tested at school and he was.  He was re tested at university and it was confirmed.  But where did it come from?  According to my wife, it was me.  We were, she claimed, wired up the same. 

 

It took a while to get round to it (nearly 3 years) but as I had decided that in my 50’s there was some tidying up to do in life then it was natural that getting this question answered would be part of it.  So as a 51^st birthday present to myself I booked the test with an educational psychologist.  There are no prizes for guessing the answer.  But I can’t be dyslexic I can read and write OK - apparently not!  Whilst I fit a typically ‘spiked’ profile of big strengths and big weaknesses, I discovered that I am a very slow reader (timed test) and what I took to be forgivable distractedness turns out to be pretty bad short term memory.  I honestly assumed that everyone on meeting someone for the first time kept repeating their name in their heads in order to try and remember it whilst creating funny mind pictures. 

 

My reaction to this revelation?

Well to be honest I don’t know I’m still coming to terms with it.  In the first instance it was relief, so that’s why I feel so tired when I’ve been reading.  Suddenly a lot of things about the way I think and see the world made sense so there was a great sense of liberty.  On the other hand, however, grim images of my school days and ‘dodgy grades and marks’ began to force themselves into my mind’s eye and old embarrassments were revisited.

 

Curse or Blessing

Is this good or bad?  I just don’t know.  I think, overall, that it’s good to know – self knowledge and all that but I don’t like labels because often they turn into classification and once classified people try to limit you or perceive you in a particular way. I am also wrestling with some of the literature that I’m beginning to come into contact with.  Is it a problem or is it a ‘gift’ as one book claims.  My guess is that it will be both and that that’s just unavoidable.  I can see how the processing of written information has and does affect me.  At the same time I can also see how in my professional life it has greatly helped me.  Whenever I need to speak a group of people I don’t need written notes, I just create pictures in my mind that I project into the space in front of my eyes so that I can see the picture and the audience at the same time and let the pictures guide me.  No need for loads of words and built in flexibility if I need to depart from my ‘script’.

 

A touch of Philosophy

 

For those who are philosophically minded I have the found the following quote from Francis Bacon useful:

 

‘Nature is often hidden; sometime overcome; seldom extinguished.’

 

And yes, I have looked it up several times because I can’t memorise it.