Sue Hall is author of the book, Fish Don’t Climb Trees. The inspiration for the title comes from Albert Einstein’s famous quote: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

The idea behind Sue’s book or Albert Einstein’s quote is that our brains do not all work the same way. Neurodiversity is a viewpoint that acknowledges that brain differences are normal, rather than deficits.

Instead of teaching our dyslexic children to learn in a way most neurotypical children learn, let’s accept that dyslexia is a learning difference and work with what our children can do ie their strengths, rather than what they can’t.

Hear what Sue has to say in her TEDx Talk here.

Thanks CaringSG for the feature! It is an honour to be invited to join CaringSG’s pioneering group of CAREconnect champions to support fellow special needs caregivers.

We all have been there before, that moment when a bombshell was dropped on us when we received news about our children’s diagnosis, be it for a special educational need, a medical condition, etc.

What better way than to have a group of caregivers who have gone through similar experiences whom you can draw strength from and turn to for guidance.

A ground up initiative, CaringSG is a platform that brings together the various support groups and makes it easy for caregivers to reach out to other caregivers. It does not have to be a lonely journey.

Dyslexics tend to think primarily in pictures, as opposed to thinking in words. Very often, they do not have a monologue going on in their heads where they are thinking with the sound of words.

The illustration above would not be too far off from what goes on in a dyslexic’s mind when they are reading.

Because of the way they think, whenever they come across words whose meaning they cannot picture, typically the high frequency words, their mental imagery goes blank. A blank picture is the essence of confusion.

Having pushed through many of these high frequency words when reading, a dyslexic will eventually reach his threshold for confusion and becomes disoriented. At this point in time, he is no longer getting an accurate perception of the words on the page.

When asked what he just read, he will likely give you a variation of what the story is about. If he was reading a comprehension passage, the end result you see is the lack of comprehension, especially when answering implicit questions.

An interesting quiz that screens for ADD/ADHD. Very often, children with dyslexia get distracted easily, cannot sustain their focus and/or get fidgety. And because of this observation, they have been mistaken as displaying ADHD symptoms.

The DSM-5 (The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth edition) is used by mental heath professionals to diagnose ADHD. There were some changes in the DSM-5 for the diagnosis of ADHD: symptoms can now occur by age 12 rather than by age 6; several symptoms now need to be present in more than one setting rather than just some impairment in more than one setting; new descriptions were added to show what symptoms might look like at older ages; and for adults and adolescents age 17 or older, only 5 symptoms are needed instead of the 6 needed for younger children.

Deciding if a child has ADHD is a several step process. It cannot be decided just by observations alone. For many of the dyslexic children, once they learned how to control their disorientation, they will be able to stay focus more easily and do not fidget beyond what is expected for a child of that age.

Please note that the screening only serves to indicate the possibility of a person showing ADD/ADHD symptoms and is not meant to be a diagnostic tool. Try it!

Today, I want to touch on intervention programmes. This is one area that parents find mind boggling.

The key to helping a child struggling with dyslexia is early identification and intervention. Very often, I see the identification process being delayed because of lack of knowledge or parents did not pick up the red flags.

I went with my gut feel even when educators and doctors I consulted dismissed my concerns. These are people we deem as professionals and I fully respect them. But I have learnt that they may not necessarily be the best person to dispense advice. With persistency, I eventually spoke to a psychologist friend who pointed me in the direction of dyslexia and as a result, my daughter was diagnosed early and received intervention at 6 years old.

As far as intervention goes, different theories create different approaches. We should get it by now that dyslexics have an alternative way of thinking and learning. If we continue to look at dyslexia as a deficit instead of working with a dyslexic’s strengths, we are adding yet another obstacle to the child’s remediation journey.

To give you an example, because people still think the only way to decode a word is through phonics and if the child finds it difficult to process the sounds of letters or blending, they see it as a deficit and therefore, with all good intention, try to equip the child through drilling and repetitions.

Many intervention programmes target the symptoms and not the root cause. You may take the position that if a particular programme helps with a certain issue, such as the ability to recall and retain a spelling word learnt, why not? To me, the bigger question is, how about the child’s challenges in other areas such as decoding ability, reading fluency or comprehension? All these are necessary components of learning. Without a holistic approach, the child may seem to have made some progress in a certain area, but making progress is not the same as closing the gap. If a child is making progress, he or she may still be falling behind.

Therefore when evaluating any intervention programmes, keep in mind what we have learnt about how dyslexia develops. Find out if the programme works with a dyslexic’s strengths or is the focus still on what the child can’t do? How does the programme help the child resolve his confusion with common sight words? What is the approach to reading fluency and comprehension?

Many parents have the misconception that their child is dealing with some complex learning difficulties that will need long term intervention and that they will not perform as well as their peers. This need not be the case.

Dyslexia is a learning difference, not a limitation. It is a gift, not a disability. Approach correctly, your child can be remediated successfully. Of course, the child has to have the motivation to want to correct the problem and is able and willing to take responsibility for doing so.

Just a quick recap, we’ve covered 2 of the 3 factors that explain how dyslexia develops, namely a dyslexic’s picture thinking style and perceptual talent.

The last factor that Ron talked about is a dyslexic’s special way of reacting to the feeling of confusion. He calls this disorientation. Ron said the symptoms of dyslexia that we see are actually symptoms of disorientation.

What is disorientation? It is a state of mind where mental perceptions do not agree with the true facts and conditions in the environment. Most people experience disorientation at one point or another. One example is, you are sitting in a stationary vehicle and another vehicle next to you moves, creating a false perception that you are moving.

For most of us, the disorientation we experience doesn't affect our day-to-day functioning. To a dyslexic, they disorient so frequently that it impacts their learning. So how does a dyslexic’s perceptual talent and disorientation help to explain the learning difficulties a dyslexic faces?

This is how. In response to a symbol a dyslexic sees that confuses him, let’s say the letter ‘b’ (see illustration below), he will disorient in order to identify the letter he is looking at. He will start looking mentally at the letter from different angles. When it is a real object, like a chair, it doesn’t matter which angle he looks at. It will still look like a chair. But when it comes to 2-dimensional symbols, like a letter or word, looking at it from different locations gives a different picture each time. The letter ‘b’ can be a ‘d’, ‘p’ or ‘q’, depending on where the individual is looking from.

So putting everything together, when a dyslexic sees a symbol which does not make sense to his picture thinking style, he gets confused and when that threshold for confusion is reached, it will trigger a disorientation and he will start looking mentally from different locations in order to figure out what he is looking at.

When this happens, sensory perceptions become distorted and the brain receives an inaccurate input. This then manifests itself in mistakes. The resulting negative emotions that follow lead to low self-esteem and the child starts developing coping mechanisms such as concentrating harder, pushing through, dependency on others, giving excuses and so on. The whole vicious cycle repeats itself.

Can you see how, if there is no solution to break that chain of causation, the child will continue to struggle and the learning gap gets wider and wider? In our next post, we will look at how to resolve the issues step by step. Don’t go away!

In our previous post, we looked at a dyslexic’s picture thinking style and how this can cause confusion for them whenever they encounter words whose meaning they cannot picture. 75% of a page consists of such trigger words and it’s no wonder when they try to read, they would make mistakes.

Today, we’ll look at a dyslexic’s perceptual talent. This is the ability to perceive multi-dimensionally. Simply put, a dyslexic can see an object mentally from many different perspectives, whether by moving their perception to different locations or by mentally manipulating and turning an object, much like rotating a 3D model in a computer to look at its other sides.

Matthew, the dyslexic metal fabricator whom I interviewed just before the start of Circuit Breaker, shared that when he was creating a piece of work, he could rotate the end product in different directions in his mind. He would sometimes have an exploded view of the product where he would pull everything apart and then figure out how to fit each piece back together.

Another mother whom I spoke with recently also related to me how her dyslexic daughter told her she is able to move her perception to different locations to view an object in her mind.

This perceptual talent that a dyslexic possesses allows the individual to think out of the box and to see the big picture. It enhances their performance and is an asset in many occupations such as architects, designers, inventors, scientists, engineers, actors and so on.

As with a dyslexic’s picture thinking style, this perceptual talent, while it is a gift, is also a source of learning problem. How so? Let’s hold our thoughts for now until we cover the last factor, and I’ll put the pieces together for you.

We have heard of many famous dyslexics such as Albert Einstein, Walt Disney, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Lee Kuan Yew, Bill Gates, Tom Cruise, Jamie Oliver, the list goes on. While having dyslexia won’t make every dyslexic a genius, it is definitely good for the self-esteem of all dyslexics to know their minds work in the same way as the minds of these great geniuses.

Ronald D. Davis, the author of the book The Gift of Dyslexia, taught himself to read at the age of 38. It was in this book that I found the answers to my daughter’s struggles and how to resolve them.

Ron said that dyslexia is not a complexity but a compound of simple factors that can be dealt with step by step. He figured out that dyslexia is a product of thought, talent and a special way of reacting to the feeling of confusion. Simply put, understanding these three factors helps to explain the anatomy of dyslexia.

Let’s now look at the first factor. Dyslexics tend to think primarily in pictures/images, as opposed to thinking with words. Picture thinking, typically at 32 pictures per second, is a lot faster than thinking with the sounds of words, which is typically 100-200 words per minute. This picture thinking style is not to be confused with the three learning styles, which are visual, auditory and kinaesthetic.

Thinking with words is sequential and linear in process, whereas when one thinks in pictures, they see things all at once without going through a step by step process (see illustration). This is why dyslexics are often good at problem solving and seeing the big picture. They show creativity in solving all kinds of problems and are good at seeing how things fit together.

But how does this picture thinking style cause learning problems? Essentially, when a dyslexic encounters certain symbols (and all words are symbols, so are alphabet, punctuation marks, speech sounds, math symbols and numerals), they get confused by those words (or letters, punctuation marks, numerals, etc) whose meaning they cannot picture.

To illustrate this, if I say the word ‘cake’, do you see an image of a cake or the word in your head? What about ‘rainbow’? Majority of us would see an image, dyslexics included. That’s picture thinking. If I say ‘from’ or ‘by’ or ‘if’, do you see an image or word? While most regular people will see the word, dyslexics will draw a blank. Ask your child and see what he/she tells you.

Many of the words dyslexics encounter which confuse them are often high frequency words that we use a lot of in the English language, such as ‘the’, ‘when’, ‘is’, etc. We call these trigger words. They are non-picture words which cause confusion for a dyslexic as the individual does not have a mental image of what the word means or represents, and many of these words have multiple meanings.

When a dyslexic is confused or triggered by a symbol, the individual will mentally move it around in his/her head and explore it from different perspectives. This leads us to the second factor, a dyslexic‘s perceptual talent, which we will talk about in our next post.