IF YOU COULD SEE THE WAY I THINK

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.