The True Gifts of a Dyslexic Mind | Dean Bragonier | TEDxMarthasVineyard

Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven Here's the moment of truth: Does anyone in this audience have dyslexia? Show of hands. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Anything else. Thank you. That's an almost fair assessment. Approximately 20% of the general population has dyslexia. That's one in five people. And I think dyslexia is most commonly understood as this reading problem, you know, we have a tendency to reverse our b's and d's and our q's and g's, and that's, you know, I think that's a fair assessment, at least in the symptomatic department. But I want to take this opportunity to talk a little more in depth about the neuroscience of dyslexia.

So, we have this outer layer of our brain called the cortex. And we all know that we have, or maybe we don't know, but we have these little things called mini columns, okay? And these mini-columns serve as telephone poles, so to speak. What joins these minicolumns are the axons. Well? Now, people with autism, for example, have axons that are located very close to each other, and as a result, the length of their axons is very, very finite and short, and as a result, they can do these incredibly detailed operations. Very specific patterns, behaviors and skills, right?

Well,

dyslexic

s are on the other side of that spectrum; we have our mini columns that are very, very far apart. As a result, the length of our axons is significantly longer. And this actually carries some significant cognitive advantages. We have the ability to look at a situation and identify seemingly disparate pieces of information and combine them into a narrative or tapestry that makes sense to us and that most people can't see. This translates into an exceptional level of success in four major vocational paths. That is entrepreneurship, engineering, architecture and arts. I just want you to remember that as it will be addressed later in this discussion.

However, dyslexia comes at a cost, okay? We find it incredibly difficult to do what is called phonetic decoding. Well, that's the most complex word I'm going to use and I hope it impresses you. Phonetic decoding is essentially our ability to identify these wavy lines, translate them into a sound in our

mind

, and then put those sounds together to make up a word. For

dyslexic

s, that requires five times more energy than a normal brain. So to give you a little historical context on dyslexia, I'm going to go back and start with the first nine-tenths of human existence.

Societies relied heavily on apprentice models, right? From hunters and gatherers to traders of more recent times, people learned by observing and then engaging in kinesthetic learning. Now, this turns out to be the wheelhouse for dyslexics; This is our main opportunity to learn. Then there was a little twist in the story, okay? It was called the Industrial Revolution. And what happened during the Industrial Revolution is that society said, "Okay, we have this new form of economy. What we have to do is educate the masses to become effective worker bees in these factories." Now, this historically coincided with the importation of the printing press from Europe.

And so everyone was incredibly excited to have this new technology that would allow us to incorporate knowledge into a format that could then be scaled up and distributed nationally. Now, this served society tremendously well, except for the fact that at that very moment, you basically closed the door on 20% of the population, right? Those of us who have dyslexia. So what does the dyslexic experience feel like? Of those who raised their hands, we certainly know, but I'll illuminate it for the rest of you. I ask you to go back to those sepia-toned images of your 7, 8, 9 years old, where school was a kind of montage of recess, nap time, and snack time;

The world was a really good place, right? And then suddenly, at one point, they tightened the screws a little bit and said, "We're going to introduce our first intelligence benchmark." They didn't put it that way; They said, "Let's learn to read." And suddenly, for those of us with dyslexia, our world changed overnight. As we looked at our classmates, we realized that what everyone else was doing effortlessly, we were having an incredible time trying. And we actually didn't just fail on day one, but we failed on day two, three, and four, and so on, and the years started to pile up where we were exposed to this level of failure that became so common that we started wearing this mantle. of shame.

There is a psychologist named Dr. Gershen Kaufman. Dr. Kaufman studies shame. Dr. Kaufman says that people who cannot read or have difficulty learning to read feel the same level of shame as people who have committed incest. So you can imagine what it's like - again, you see it in yourself, you know, many, many years ago - and you realize that after a while, you're weighed down by this shame, and then you get this reinforcement, negative, although , when you walk down the hall, you hear things like, "That guy, Dean. The kid is so dumb he can't even read." Good?

Or the best one is the teacher-parent conference where they say, "You know, Dean is a smart kid, but if he tried harder, I think he'd be a little lazy." Well? And then what happens is that you formulate this evil self-esteem; You start to believe, no matter how strong your personal resolve may be, you start to believe what everyone tells you. So it shouldn't surprise you: You transition to middle school and then high school, thinking, "Okay, who am I going to be?" We all remember that. Horrible experience, right? Trying to define who we were going to be in our sect, our pack, our community.

And we knew we weren't going to be the smart kid. I mean, even if the assessment was wrong, we knew we weren't going to be the smart kid. Maybe we were the talented athlete, but more likely we were watching the kids, after school, smoking pot in the stands, or the kids throwing rocks through the glass, or someone maybe even getting a little involved in participating in gangs. And we would think that they have a very low barrier to entry; I can be that guy; that's very easy. And so we naturally gravitate toward those identities. And statistically, it's a very sad story.

You know, 35% of all dyslexics drop out of high school and 50% of all teens involved in drug and alcohol rehab have dyslexia. Another blow is 60% - in fact, professionals say it's more like 70%, but I think that's crazy - people who work in the juvenile detention system say that 70% of all juvenile offenders have dyslexia . So, obviously, that's a very strong and depressing narrative. But we've all heard... I heard a previous speaker talk about Einstein... we've all heard that Einstein was dyslexic. JFK, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo DaVinci, Richard Branson, Charles Schwab. I mean the laundry list is endless, right? In fact, dyslexics, when fully empowered and recognize that innate intelligence, represent 35% of all entrepreneurs.

They represent 40% of all self-made millionaires. And you know those NASA rocket scientists? One in two is dyslexic. My favorite, because I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is this easy-to-access school called MIT; They call dyslexia the "MIT disease." So, I've struggled a little bit with this notion of why my people, right? - suffer this huge delta in results. And about a year and a half ago, I found myself at a conference on learning disabilities (which is the worst name imaginable) and I was listening to these professors, and they were really impressive. They had, you know, three or four acronyms behind their last names, and they were sitting there saying that the way we should teach dyslexic students is through two things.

We need to teach them the executive functioning methodology of social/emotional learning. Well? That's the key word for sequencing, time management, and emotional intelligence. And I sat there, like all of you, and I was getting a little warm. Man, what they don't understand is that adding another discipline to an already frustrated student is like, "Okay, kids, are you headed to the Gulag? Here's an 800-pound sledgehammer called executive function social/emotional learning." Take this. It'll really help you when you get there." It makes absolutely no sense. So I got frustrated and attended a conference breakout session hosted by the Carroll School, which is in Lincoln, Massachusetts, for dyslexics in grades kindergarten through eighth grade.

And the principal of the school, a brilliant guy named Steve Wilkins, was very smart. He said, "I'm not going to speak to a room full of educators. Let me put my kids in there." So, I remember an eighth grade kid, a small, gangly guy, who came up, he was all nervous, standing in front of a room like this. And he reaches into this backpack, and he pulls out this high top basketball size 11, and on the heel, it has this erector assembly attached, right? And this long cord coming out of it. And he explains to everyone that this is his prototype shoe that allows you to charge your cell phone while you walk. .And everyone's like, "That's really cool, man, right?

Yes, there are some technical problems, right? But they're details." But the nice thing was that the moment this kid's presentation was over, all the arms in the room went up, right? And all these very impressed educators were saying, "How did you come up with that? He's very creative." And I watched this kid, literally, this little eighth grader, blossom into this deity. That kid was going to walk out of that presentation room and I was never going to believe that he was stupid or lazy or lazy. In fact, the kid will probably, in five years, go to Palo Alto and give Zuckerberg a chance.

Well, he's going to displace Zuckerberg. This kid was so empowered. And I thought, "Here's the answer." the answer. What we have to do is take these students who are so disenfranchised, so frustrated, so thirsty for positive reinforcement, and introduce them to that set of cognitive skills that they have, which is a direct result of building their brains. As I said before, entrepreneurship, engineering, architecture, the arts... what we have to do is take those subjects, those vocations, refine them to an age-appropriate high school level, and then once that we have hooked these students, we can integrate it with that social/emotional learning and executive functioning methodology because I can attest that once you have a dyslexic captive, they become voracious;

They are thirsty; They've built up this grit and courage, and then suddenly you're revealing something they're better at in front of their peers—this is a whole new message. So I'm in Cambridge, as I said, the Saudi Arabia of academics, and I went to the best institutions: I went to the Harvard School of Education, I went to Tufts University, I went to the Carroll School, and I said this is what I want to build. They said, "We are down." He said it was brilliant. Nobody has done that. It's not brilliant. I hope they said it's brilliant.

They said, "We're interested." (Laughs) I guess a little artistic freedom. Still resolving some issues from my youth. (Laughs) But the good thing was that they came together and then I was faced with the question: "Okay, how do I avoid the mistake of the traditional educational path?" Good? How do I avoid text as a barrier to entry? So I looked it up and it turns out that Harvard, MIT and Stanford University have created something called edX. edX is a next-generation Internet platform where they offer their MOOCs, their massively open online study plans. And because these three universities have the GDP of a small country, each of them said that part of building this and part of our social responsibility is that we will open our software, which means that anyone can use this state of- cutting-edge technology to create your own MOOCs.

So, I found a company that works between me, as a content provider, and the software, and we determined that they could actually deliver each of my lesson plans through a variety of modalities. I could offer my lesson plan through a video presentation; You could offer it through an audio presentation or a graphic or pictorial representation, allowing that dyslexic student to access the information without having to encounter the text as a barrier. Now, I never want to be mistaken for saying that dyslexics don't have to learn to read; They absolutely do. But here's the thing: If we can reach these kids when they're in high school, we can access them or reveal to them what their inherent capabilities are sooner, as my friend Ben Foss, another friend in the field, says: "Before they solidify the cement of their personality," we can, in theory - and I hope to demonstrate - take these kids and empower them in such a way that we can not only reduce dropout rates and reduce drug, alcohol and incarceration rates. , but, better yet, we can give birth to these children; can access within themselves anew narrative, an empowered narrative, where they can come out and join the ranks of those famous dyslexics that I mentioned earlier, but more importantly, so that these individuals can self-actualize, feel fulfilled and content. , trusting human beings.

And I'll end with this: there are many problems facing today's society. I think the previous speaker talked about an environment that is plagued with problems. Some of the most creative and innovative

mind

s are currently atrophying behind bars. And all of this is the result of a system that insists on the most archaic form of educational media: the text. I hope they invite me again in five years and I will be able to explain it to you...no, better yet, I will be able to put together a panel of my students, that is not TEDx, but let's say, put together a panel of my dyslexic little brothers and sisters, small and newly empowered, and let them show you what it is.

It is what they have invented, or what they are going to do to solve some type of environmental problem. I'm so grateful to have had this opportunity to talk to all of you and hopefully tell you a little more about this dyslexic potential that we're trying to unlock. So I really appreciate you being here. (Applause)