Positives to Dyslexia – Everything is Connected to Everything Else (Part 2)

Are there more positive aspects to dyslexia beyond the ability to see that everything is connected to everything else?

In the book, The Dyslexic Advantage, Brock and Fernette Eide talk about four areas of strength that dyslexics can have:

• “Three-dimensional spatial reasoning and mechanical ability…”
• “The ability to perceive relationships like analogies, metaphors, paradoxes, similarities, differences, implications, gaps, and imbalances…”
• The ability to remember important personal experiences and to understand abstract information in terms of specific examples…”
• “The ability to perceive and take advantage of subtle patterns in complex and constantly shifting systems and data sets” (5).

Not everyone with dyslexia will have all these strengths:

• However, they will each have at least one of the strengths.
• We’ll look at the second strength in today’s post.

Brock and Fernette Eide talk about how one of the dyslexic strengths will be the capacity to identify connections.

• In other words, global thinking allows dyslexics to see both the context and the connectedness in different types of information.
• People with dyslexia seem to have the ability to see these connections because their brains have developed extensively linked, long-reaching neural pathways.
• These pathways, in turn, promote a tendency toward holistic “big picture” thinking which cultivates novel associations between data sets.

This brain organization allows the dyslexic to recombine information in useful, and even unexpected, ways. However, it does so at the expense of being able to handle details quickly and precisely.