Reading: Getting Beyond Your Struggles (Video Slides)

Getting Beyond Your Struggles

Henry Reyenga

The Nature of Dyslexia (1) 

They don't have as many brain cells in those regions as they should. As the fetus develops inside the womb, neurons are supposed to travel to the appropriate areas of the brain, taking their places like pieces on a chessboard.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-01). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (p. 99). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

The Nature of Dyslexia (2) 

But for some reason, the neurons of dyslexics sometimes get lost along the way. They end up in the wrong place. The brain has something called the ventricular system, which functions as the brain's entry and exit point. Some people with reading disorders have neurons lining their ventricles, like passengers stranded in an airport.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-01). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (p. 99). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

The Nature of Dyslexia (3) 

While an image of the brain is being made, a patient performs a task, and then a neuroscientist looks to see what parts of the brain have been activated in response to that task. If you ask a dyslexic to read when he or she is having a brain scan, the parts that are supposed to light up might not light up at all.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-01). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (pp. 99-100). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

The Nature of Dyslexia (4) 

The scan looks like an aerial photo of a city during a blackout. Dyslexics use a lot more of the right hemisphere of their brains during reading than normal readers do. The right hemisphere is the conceptual side. That's the wrong half of the brain for a precise and rigorous task like reading. Sometimes when a dyslexic reads, every step will be delayed, as if the different parts of the brain responsible for reading were communicating via a weak connection.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-01). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (p. 100). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

The Nature of Dyslexia (5) 

Dyslexia is a problem in the way people hear and manipulate sounds. The difference between bah and dah is a subtlety in the first 40 milliseconds of the syllable. Human language is based on the assumption that we can pick up that 40-millisecond difference, and the difference between the bah sound and the dah sound can be the difference between getting something right and getting something catastrophically wrong. Can you imagine the consequences of having a brain so sluggish that when it comes to putting together the building blocks of words, those crucial 40 milliseconds simply go by too quickly?

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-01). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (p. 101). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

The Nature of Dyslexia (6) 

Maybe you were the cool kid on the playground when you were four. Then you entered kindergarten and all your peers suddenly started reading, and you can't figure it out. So you get frustrated. Your peers may think you're stupid. Your parents may think you're lazy. You have very low self-esteem, which leads to an increased rate of depression. Kids with dyslexia are more likely to end up in the juvenile system, because they act up. It's because they can't figure things out. It's so important in our society to read.”

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-01). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (p. 102). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

A Desirable Difficulty?

Can dyslexia turn out to be a desirable difficulty? It is hard to believe that it can, given how many people struggle with the disorder throughout their lives-- except for a strange fact. An extraordinarily high number of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. A recent study by Julie Logan at City University London puts the number somewhere around a third. 

The list includes many of the most famous innovators of the past few decades. Richard Branson, the British billionaire entrepreneur, is dyslexic. Charles Schwab, the founder of the discount brokerage that bears his name, is dyslexic, as are the cell phone pioneer Craig McCaw; David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue; John Chambers, the CEO of the technology giant Cisco; Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko's-- to name just a few. The neuroscientist Sharon Thompson-Schill remembers speaking at a meeting of prominent university donors-- virtually all of them successful businesspeople-- and on a whim asking how many of them had ever been diagnosed with a learning disorder. "Half the hands went up,” she said. "It was unbelievable.”

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-01). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (p. 106). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

A Possible Desirable Disability 

There are two possible interpretations for this fact. One is that this remarkable group of people triumphed in spite of their disability: they are so smart and so creative that nothing-- not even a lifetime of struggling with reading-- could stop them. The second, more intriguing, possibility is that they succeeded, in part, because of their disorder-- that they learned something in their struggle that proved to be of enormous advantage.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-01). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (pp. 106-107). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

Beyond Capitalization Learning (1)

A young boy named Tiger Woods is unusually coordinated for his age and finds that the game of golf suits his imagination, and so he likes to practice golf. And because he likes to practice so much, he gets even better, and on and on, in a virtuous circle. That's "capitalization learning”: we get good at something by building on the strengths that we are naturally given.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-01). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (p. 112). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

Beyond Capitalization Learning (2)

But desirable difficulties have the opposite logic. In their CRT experiments, Alter and Oppenheimer made students excel by making their lives harder, by forcing them to compensate for something that had been taken away from them. That's what Boies was doing as well when he learned to listen. He was compensating. He had no choice. He was such a terrible reader that he had to scramble and adapt and come up with some kind of strategy that allowed him to keep pace with everyone around him.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-01). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (pp. 112-113). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

Beyond Capitalization Learning (3)

Most of the learning that we do is capitalization learning. It is easy and obvious. If you have a beautiful voice and perfect pitch, it doesn't take much to get you to join a choir. "Compensation learning,” on the other hand, is really hard. Memorizing what your mother says while she reads to you and then reproducing the words later in such a way that it sounds convincing to all those around you requires that you confront your limitations. It requires that you overcome your insecurity and humiliation.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-01). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (p. 113). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

Beyond Capitalization Learning (4)

It requires that you focus hard enough to memorize the words, and then have the panache to put on a successful performance. Most people with a serious disability cannot master all those steps. But those who can are better off than they would have been otherwise, because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-01). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (p. 113). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

One Result

"My upbringing allowed me to be comfortable with failure,” he said. "The one trait in a lot of dyslexic people I know is that by the time we got out of college, our ability to deal with failure was very highly developed. And so we look at most situations and see much more of the upside than the downside. Because we're so accustomed to the downside. It doesn't faze us. I've thought about it many times, I really have, because it defined who I am. I wouldn't be where I am today without my dyslexia. I never would have taken that first chance.”

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-01). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (p. 123). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

What People Smart Disadvantages Do You Deal With? 

Too introverted

Too Extroverted

Too Hurt

Too Angry

Too Defeated

Too Ignorant