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Q- Do many people have dyslexia?
Recent research states that as few as 10% to as many as 20% of the population are dyslexic. That means from 2 to 6 children in each classroom are dyslexic! There seems to be a genetic pre-disposition within families that makes dyslexia not certain, but possible.
With the possibility of 6 children in a single classroom having dyslexia, you would think everyone would be aware of this and talking about it. There are several reasons why this doesn’t happen:
One, many people are unaware they have dyslexia. Think about it. How do you know that you perceive the same way as everyone else? Unless someone points out that they perceive differently than you do, you think everyone has the same abilities as you do. I’ve had attorney’s, engineers, and parents of every possible profession bring in family members for an evaluation, and as we explain and look for the visual gifts that establish dyslexia, the attorneys, and engineers are nodding and saying, “I can do that. I can do that, too. Can’t everyone?” The natural disorientation that characterizes dyslexia often happens so fast that they are unaware that they were disoriented for either short or long periods of time.
Two, every person with dyslexia is unique. Every person with dyslexia has symptoms whose severity in each area of disorientation are unique to that person, continually changing, and are constantly inconsistent throughout each day. [This is one proof that dyslexia is not a structural brain defect, but a special way that their brain is functioning.]
Three, school evaluations in the past have miss-labeled it as a “reading disability,” instead of the correct description of it as a “different way of thinking,” using pictures rather than words and sounds.
Four, dyslexics find clever ways to hide their dyslexia. It is only human to want to belong and fit in. So, dyslexics often hide their amazing abilities because when they describe what they can do with their imagination, most people won’t believe them. Their gifts and visual abilities do seem truly unbelievable to non-dyslexics. I know of adult dyslexics who won’t even share their abilities with their own family. Students would rather misbehave, be taken out of class and punished, than let their peers know they have a problem.
My mission is to facilitate their understanding of their unique abilities so they can enjoy them and use them to better our world. They should be taking pride in their gifts and in what is in many ways a superior way to think.
Q – What causes a person to be dyslexic?
All the symptoms a person with dyslexia has are due to their incredible visual ability to think through pictures instead of sounds. Some words, like "chair" and "run", are easily pictured and are no problem for them to picture. Unfortunately, about half the words we read are abstract, so for a picture-thinker, words like "are", "if", "when", and 216 other words are not easily pictured. These abstract words become thinking or reasoning “blanks,” which create enough confusion to cause their perception to disorient. Their ability to understand, their sense of time, their movement, their hearing and vision simultaneously and non-voluntarily distort.
This disorientation is often at a subliminal speed so they often aren’t aware of it and often don’t realize they have dyslexia. My goal, what I want them to understand, is that they are unbelievably gifted in many ways and that there is a way to control the distortion so all they are left with are the gifts to enjoy.
Q – What gifts do they have?
The first gift is the ability to turn anything you can imagine into reality. We all have a “mind’s eye.” It is what sees when we dream. Have you had any dreams that you would say are exactly the same as reality – where you are in the middle of a “place”? Dyslexics use their mind’s eye to turn whatever they can imagine into that same reality while they are awake. It is indistinguishable from reality for them just like your dreams are for you, and, unlike our dreams, they are in control of every aspect of their “daydreaming.” When you are confused or bored in the classroom, what would you do if you had this ability?
The second gift is the ability view objects from multi-dimensional perspectives - to combine the memory pictures of any object previously seen or imagined so that it can be perceived from an infinite number of viewpoint.
The third gift is the ability to think through pictures rather than sound. The phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” is never truer than when used to describe dyslexics. Abstract words often lack a picture for dyslexics and cause distorted perception.
All information contained here is derived from the two books written by Ronald. D. Davis, The Gift of Dyslexia and The Gift of Learning. .