The Dyslexic Advantage (21 page)

This need for patient reflection can also create enormous problems at school, where time for reflection is in critically short supply. Try convincing a teacher that staring out the window is how you work best or that “getting busy” means you'll get less done. Yet this passive and reflective approach really is a valid problem-solving method, and there's plenty of scientific evidence to support its validity and effectiveness. In the research literature, this method of problem solving is referred to as
insight.

Insight involves the sudden recognition that connections exist between elements of a problem. The classic historical example of insight is Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” and leaping from his bathtub as he suddenly realized how water displacement could be used to measure the volume of irregularly shaped objects.

Insight is at its most useful when step-by-step or analytical problem-solving is hampered by the ambiguity or incompleteness of the information—that is, in situations where D-strengths are required. Insight is also highly dependent upon the I-strengths we described in part 4. This is because insight depends on the same broad and “distant”
cognitive
connections between concepts and ideas that are characteristic of I-strengths. Because insight is so closely linked with D- and I-strengths, one would expect to find that individuals with dyslexia are especially good at insight-based problem solving; and in our experience that's precisely what we do find.

Although insight-based problem solving is very powerful, because much of its connection-making process takes place outside the person's conscious awareness, it can often seem second-rate, mystical, shoddy, or even slightly disreputable. But there's an observable neurological mechanism underlying insight that's been well worked out over the last decade by researchers.

One of the scientists who has contributed most to our understanding of insight is Dr. Mark Beeman, whom we met in chapter 4 when we discussed his work on hemispheric language functions. Dr. Beeman has been especially instrumental in showing that the process of insight involves several distinct phases.

In the first phase, the mind focuses actively upon the problem at hand and sets out the questions that need to be answered. This highly focused phase quickly gives way to a
relaxation
phase, where the mind loosens its focus and begins to wander. As Dr. Beeman has described this stage, “There's an overall quieting of the brain's processing because it's trying to calm everything down and wait for something to pop out.” That “something” the brain is waiting on is the recognition of “distant or novel associations or relationships,”
³
which are just the kinds of connections that individuals with dyslexia typically excel at making. When a suitable connection is found, it results in the simultaneous activation of a broad cellular network that stretches all over the brain. This widespread electrical burst creates the subjective sensation of the eureka moment.

Notice how closely this insight mechanism links mental states like relaxation, reflection, and daydreaming with productive abilities like creativity, the ability to detect distant connections, and the ability to solve problems. Research by Dr. Demis Hassabis and others has shown that the brain circuits that become activated during daydreaming or mind wandering (termed the brain's “default network”) are essentially identical with the episodic construction system. In other words, daydreaming consists of free-form and undirected scene construction, or the creative recombination of episodic memories. This is largely what
imagination
means. Small wonder there's such an extensive overlap between imagination and insight, daydreaming and problem solving—or between staring at the mountains and solving difficult geological problems.

Factors like emotional well-being and positive mood also seem to play an especially large role in supporting successful insights, and they work by enhancing the relaxation phase. This is why many great insights seem to occur in showers, baths, beds, or on beaches or when gazing out windows or staring emptily into space. Attempting to “force” or hurry insight will only inhibit it. This is one of insight's most confusing features: its success seems to vary almost inversely with effort, so that the deepest engagement requires a kind of deep disengagement. The harder you try to solve some problem using insight, the less likely you are to succeed. Insight is most likely to occur when the mind is wandering in a relaxed state rather than when hurrying toward a specific goal.

This isn't the first time in this book that we've stated that tight mental focus and attention can inhibit creative connections. Think back to our discussion in chapter 12 of latent inhibition, where we mentioned that tight mental focus and resistance to distraction are inversely correlated with creative achievement. In contrast, making distant, creative, insightful connections may be fostered by a slightly leaky attentional system, which allows ideas to mix.

Childhood may be the time in life above all others when nature favors us with the capacity to make creative and insightful connections. Dr. Beeman speculated to us on the value that the human species' unusually prolonged period of attentional immaturity may play in the development of creativity: “Perhaps there's some benefit in the delayed development of mental focus—maybe that's why humans in general develop so slowly. And perhaps those children who are developing more slowly in their attentional skills are developing more richly in certain aspects of creativity; and perhaps this extra creativity means that they'll actually develop in great ways if we don't mess them up too much in the meantime.”

Dr. Beeman was clear about the kind of “messing up” he had in mind. “One big concern I have is with the use of stimulant medications used for ADHD [e.g., Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall, Vyvanse]. These drugs improve mental focus and resistance to distraction, but getting people to focus more may ultimately be bad for creative thinking. We may actually be inhibiting growth in areas like creativity and insight that are very useful—and that's something that we really should not do unless it seems absolutely necessary.”

Rather than judging a child's development solely on qualities like speed, quantity, and focus during work, we should be monitoring their development of creativity, use of insight, and time spent in reflection. By failing to recognize the value of the slower but incredibly rich insight system, and instead placing all our emphasis on linear, rule-based, deductive thinking styles, we hinder the development of all children, but perhaps especially those who are the most creative and insight dependent.

One area where we often see insight-based problem-solvers suffer unnecessarily is in math. It's not uncommon to find phenomenal young mathematicians in our clinic who are unable to show—or in some cases even describe—the steps in their work, yet who get nearly every problem right. These students are solving problems through insight—matching the patterns of new problems with ones they've seen before, and sorting through their memory stores for answers that fit rather than employing step-by-step analytical reasoning. While it's important to gradually help these students learn to trace through the intervening steps, in the preteen years so long as they are able to consistently reach right answers they should be given credit for their understanding even if they fail to demonstrate all the steps in their work. As they age and their long-distance circuits become better insulated, their efficiency at moving between insight and analytical problem solving will improve, and they'll be better able to “reverse engineer” the intervening steps and to show their work. Unfortunately, we've seen some truly disastrous cases where profoundly gifted young mathematicians have lost their love for math simply because too much emphasis was placed on having them show their work when they weren't developmentally ready to do so.

It's important to recognize that certain individuals are simply predisposed to solving problems through insight rather than analysis. In our experience, this is true of many individuals with dyslexia. People whose reasoning is based primarily on insight can sometimes look unfocused, inefficient, “nonlinear,” or slow to others who don't fully grasp the nature of the insight mechanism they're using, and they often have difficulty getting others to accept the results of their reasoning process if they can't “show their work.” However, insight-based reasoning deserves far more respect than it receives. As teachers, parents, co-workers, and bosses, we need to be watchful for individuals who frequently reach the right results through insight, and when we find them we need to treat their different reasoning style with the seriousness it deserves. Not all staring out the window is productive reasoning, but quite a lot is; and it's important to understand that some people—including many of the most creative—really do need to “relax into their work.”

D-Strengths in Action

W
e've seen how Dynamic reasoning can help in situations that are changing, uncertain, or ambiguous. Now let's look at some intriguing evidence that demonstrates how individuals with dyslexia as a group have achieved conspicuous success in one of the most changeable and uncertain environments of all: the world of business.

Let's begin by looking at one dyslexic entrepreneur who's shown a knack for building successful businesses. His name is Glenn Bailey.

Since Glenn began his first company at the age of seventeen, he's built many profitable businesses in a wide range of sectors including services, construction, and retail. Yet for all his success in the business world, Glenn rarely found success in school.

“My school career was dismal. I had a hyperactive mind, so my focus was just not there. My mind tended to wander a lot—usually in order to entertain myself. I'd be off in another world and thinking about other stuff.

“My mind is very visual: I can see anything in pictures, and I always visualize things.” I can't help it. It's how I'm wired. So whatever you talk about, I'll see pictures in my head. Very vivid, colorful, lifelike pictures. They aren't still pictures. I can make them move. Reality, fiction, whatever. I really have to pull it back in to get focused. It was also a problem in the classroom because I'd sit there and imagine where I'd want to be, and what I'd want to do, and what I wanted to become, and I'd think happy thoughts, and I'd just be tuned out the whole time in class. I'd sit there nodding and smiling, but really I was like, ‘What are you talking about?'

“I was also very curious, and strangely enough that became an issue at school.” I'd ask questions like, ‘Why's this?' or ‘Why's that?' and that was treated like a problem. Teaching was regarded as a one-way street, but I really learned best through interaction.

“My biggest problem was in English. Being able to read is the ‘face of intelligence' you present to society, and if you can't read, people just automatically assume that you're stupid. What happens to individuals with dyslexia in school is that reading becomes this big fifty-pound weight that just drags your whole body under. So I didn't have much confidence in any department of academics. I just thought I wasn't that bright. I called myself ‘the Shadow' because I was just trying to get by day by day.”

Glenn left school at age seventeen, when he found that it wasn't adding much to the strengths he intended to use in the real world. “The last day I ever went to school I found myself studying for English—which I didn't excel in or even like—during my math class. And I thought that was quite ironic, because I love math and I love numbers. They're very logical, and I can do math in my head quite quickly. Yet here I was studying for a course that I hate—English—in a math class so that I wasn't learning math. So that was it for me. I left school, and that became a huge trigger point in my life. I said, ‘Look, I can't do anything about the last sixteen to seventeen years, but I can do a lot about the future. Where do I want to be in the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years?'”

So Glenn set goals, and he began pursuing them. After opening and running his own ski shop for several years, Glenn spotted an opportunity to introduce bottled water to Vancouver. At the time he was twenty-three. Within ten years Glenn's company had thirty-two thousand accounts and annual revenues of $14 million. He was so successful in building the Canadian Springs Water Company that he became known in his hometown of Vancouver as “the Water Boy.” In 1996 Glenn sold his share of the business for $24 million and received a Business Development Bank of Canada Young Entrepreneur Award. Since then he's built many more successful businesses, including another water business, which provides on-site purification rather than delivery of bottled water.

When we asked Glenn to identify the keys to his success as a “serial entrepreneur,” he mentioned his abilities to spot opportunities and develop a vision, but he also cited his ability to form relationships with other people: “For me—as for any dyslexic—it's about having the right people around you. Motivating and delegating is a massive part of what I do. You can't do everything by yourself. I rely on people a lot, and on their support. I also have amazing family—parents who always loved and believed in me absolutely—and friends, and teachers, and my wife is absolutely super. Everything I've ever done I owe to them.”

Glenn Bailey is a true success story, but he's far from alone in being a successful dyslexic entrepreneur. At the time of this writing, a Google search on the term “dyslexic entrepreneur” calls up over thirty-seven thousand links. Many of these links bring up lists of dyslexic entrepreneurs or biographies of particular success stories like Glenn. But a substantial number also link to the work of Dr. Julie Logan, who is professor of entrepreneurship at the Cass School of Business, City University, London. While Dr. Logan isn't dyslexic herself, for over a decade she has studied many dyslexic entrepreneurs and has published several widely quoted studies on her work. We spoke with Dr. Logan and asked how she first became interested in the special abilities of dyslexic entrepreneurs.