March 16, 2024 • 43 mins
For a learning disability that everyone seems to know about, dyslexia is maybe the most commonly misunderstood and controversial cognitive difficulty there is. Some people think it’s a gift, some people think it doesn’t even exist. Learn more in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey there, everybody.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Chuck here picking out a Saturday episode, a classic Stuff
you Should Know, curated and handpicked by me to you Valentine,
if you will. And this one is from March twenty nineteen,
and it's about dyslexia. And this one hits close to
home for me now and I enjoyed going back and
re listening to it so I could relearn myself.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
So I hope you do as well.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
And it's called How Dyslexia Works.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles
w Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Jerry, And this
is Stuff you Should Know about dyslexia. How are you
doing good? Good?
Speaker 1 (00:52):
How are you?
Speaker 3 (00:53):
I'm doing pretty good, man, Just you know, hanging out
over here. Yeah, ready to wrap.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
I thought this is pretty cool. I'm surprised that we
had not.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Discussed this yet because it's right up our alley, totally
very stuff you Should Know type show. Yeah, and I
think it's an interesting uh.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
You know, I guess it's labeled a learning disorder.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Most most definitely it's a specific learning disorder. According to
the US government.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
I always just have a hard time, what you know,
knowing whether or not to like almost at affliction them, like,
is that an affliction?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
I don't even know.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
I think it's I think anybody with dyslexia and anybody
any expert in the field would say it's a learning disability.
It's a specific learning disability that that we're not entirely
certain what causes it. But most people would tell you
that typically it's considered a neurobiological condition. They think that
(01:50):
there's a basis to the brain that leads to this
situation where otherwise bright and capable yep and intelligent students
have what they call unexpected difficulty learning to read, and
that it afflicts them their entire life. Yeah, but there's
(02:12):
a lot of questions, yes, that surround the definition. And
one of the problems with dyslexia research is that that's
that that's not the official definition. There's about as many
definitions as there are studies of dyslexia.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Yeah, this one from Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity
made sense to me though, as far as just sort
of a simple way to say it, an unexpected difficulty
in reading in an individual who has the intelligence to
be a much better reader. So in other words, like,
this isn't adding up. All the tools are there and
you should be a better reader than you are, but
(02:48):
you're not. So why what gives?
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Yeah, So there's there's there's a lot to that though, right,
Like there's this idea that if if we know enough
about the brain and we have things like MRIs and
stuff like that, so you would think that by now,
since maybe the nineties or whatever, we would have positively
identified what it is. But there's a confounding problem that
(03:12):
they've run into in dyslexic dyslexia research, and we'll get
into it more later, But they haven't figured out if
what they're looking at is the changes that would come
from not reading as much, or if the brain structure
they're seeing is actually dyslexia. Right, so they're having trouble
(03:34):
with it. I'll explain it better later.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
No, but I know what you mean.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Well, good as long as you do. But it also
counts as like the million or so people listening to
this also do.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Hey, everybody dyslexia is very studying it and understanding it
and learning how to teach children with the dyslexia is
very important because up until semi recently, I'm just going
to go say recently, if you were had dyslexia and
you were a student, you might have been called stupid
(04:06):
or dumb, and you might have been teacher, yeah, you
might have been put at a separate table and said, well,
you go over here because we you can't keep up
this one guy.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Man, this one really hit home, or not.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Hit home, but hitch in the bread basket.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
In the bread basket, which is like home. Pulitzer Prize
winner Philip Schultz was diagnosed later in life, and he said,
growing up in the nineteen fifties, he said, basically he
was placed in what he called the dummy class. Three
children in his class were separated, put at a table
in the corner. The teacher didn't talk to them much.
(04:43):
And essentially one day like the principal was coming around
and she said, here these books, pretend to read them.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Right, the principle's coming.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Yeah. Man, that is just tough.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
But there's something really significant about that. That was a
column written by a guy named Philip Schultz, who is
a Pulitzer Prize winner. So that really kind of reveals
the fact that what they figured out through decades and
decades of research is that people with dyslexia aren't stupid.
They specifically have trouble learning to read and spell and write,
(05:19):
and more and more research has kind of gotten to
the root of the problems with dyslexia. But we have
found that with patients and practice, people with dyslexia can
learn to read. You have dyslexia your entire life. There's
no cure for it, but you can learn to read,
and you can learn to navigate and cope with dyslexia
(05:41):
as a child and into adulthood.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Yeah, and I don't want to certainly don't want to
sound like I'm bagging on teachers, because you know, both
of my parents are teachers, and even back in the
day when you know, let me just say this, teachers
back then didn't have the same tools that they have today,
and they didn't have an understanding of dyslexia. So if
they had students that weren't keeping up and would force
(06:07):
the class to maybe lag behind, they may not have
made the best decisions, but they didn't have all the
tools at their disposal to make better decisions.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Right, the presence of a kid with dyslexia in a
class creates a conundrum. Do you slow the class down
to that kid's speed and as far as like reading
and spelling and writing lessons go, potentially risking like slowing
down the rest of the class who are learning at
a normal clip. Or do you take this guy with
(06:37):
dyslexia or this girl with dyslexia and put them in
a special needs class that may address their reading and writing,
but they're going to get so far behind their classmates
and every other subject that they're normally proficient at. It's
a problem, and they had no idea how to grapple
with it for almost all of the twentieth century, and
(06:59):
multiple generations of kids with dyslexia suffered as a result.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Yeah, it's really sad. There are a lot of symptoms
for dyslexia, key symptoms, and these are very important because
there is no blood tests, There is no there's no
even I mean, there are a lot of testing they
can do, but that there's no standardized, specific tests that
will really nail it down.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Right, So so keep that in mind. There's no there's
no official definition of dyslexia. Yeah, and there's no specific
tests to suss out dyslexia, right, two big problems.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Yeah, so you got to look at this collection of symptoms.
The first obvious one is slow reading and accurate reading,
difficulty sounding out words, difficulty pronouncing longer words with multiple syllables,
which we'll.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Get to that in a bit.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Inability to read or speak made up nonsense words, which
I thought was interesting, Poor short term memory for verbal information,
whether it's written or spoke spoken. Poor spelling, like really
poor spelling, to where you sometimes can't even tell what
the words they're trying to spell are.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Right, not not just like a you know, like using
an F instead of a pH or something like that.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, and we should also point out too, that is
it's very much an incorrect notion that if you have
dyslexia you just transpose letters or spell things backwards.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
That's what I thought for most of my life. Yeah,
dyslexia was people they spelled things backwards, and that was that,
and that they also read backwards, and that they could
train themselves to read things backwards. Right, totally made up,
It's not totally made up, but it's so such a
such a just a one component of dyslexia that it
(08:40):
might as well just be an urban legend.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
And then what this can lead to. It's not just like, oh,
I have trouble reading like that. That spills out into
all aspects of life, whether it's your self esteem, or
you might have problem with directions directionally, you might have
issue with your budgets or money items, or you might
not n tell time very well, frustrated, anger, difficulty planning things.
(09:08):
It's not just limited to reading issues.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
And then in real life, you might read something and
have very little recollection of what you just read. You
will probably have problems giving presentations, finding the right word,
recalling words, that kind of thing. When you do read,
and when you learn to read, you will be reading
(09:32):
slower than anybody else, even reading at your reading level.
You just do it more slowly. And then as an adult,
a lot of people are like, oh, good god, I'm
done with school. Let me just go off and find
a job that doesn't require any reading or any writing,
and I will be fine. I will go to restaurants
and order the same thing at every restaurant. And if
(09:54):
this routine that I've developed to mask my dyslexia is
ever interrupted, I will flip out and try to keep
it under control, but I will seem a little awkward
socially during instances like this. There's ways you can carve
out a life for yourself, but you don't have to
because now we understand dyslexia way more than we did before,
(10:15):
and we understand the treatment of it too.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Yeah, and as far as how many people have it,
it's tough to get because of all these reasons we're
talking about. Tough to get a good number that's reliable,
but anywhere between five and fifteen to seventeen percent it
looks like, which is sort of well, it's not the
biggest range in the world.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
But they don't really know, No, they have no idea
because there's a couple of problems. One, there's a lot
of people out there who don't realize they have dyslexia.
And then there's a lot of people who do know
they have dyslexia in are either ashamed of it or
have just set up their life to where they don't
have time or room to go be diagnosed and then
go learn to overcome it. They're just like, whatever, I
(10:56):
have this thing, this issue where I'm slower at reading
than other people. So yeah, it's probably very much underreported
and underestimated how many people in the population have.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah, and we're talking mainly about, almost exclusively, about developmental dyslexia,
which is, you know, the kind we mostly think about.
We're not talking about a choir dyslexia, which is can
happen as a result.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Of an injury. So I just want to point that out.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Well, let's take a break and then we'll come back
and talk about the history that actually features both of those. Okay, yes, sir,
(11:58):
so Chuck. The first time the word dysli was used
was in eighteen seventy two by an ophthalmologist named Rudolph Berlin,
who coined the term dyslexia. But the case that he
was describing was a case of acquired dyslexia, where you
can you can develop the symptoms of dyslexia trouble reading,
trouble writing, trouble sounding out words from a head injury
(12:22):
or say a lesion on your brain, something like that. Yeah,
and that told them a lot, right it really. Initially
they thought maybe it was just a sign of low intelligence,
maybe it was a problem with vision or something like that.
But the fact that you could acquire dyslexia told neurologists
and optalmologists working in the nineteenth century. No, this is
(12:45):
a this is a there's a neurobiological basis to this.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, and they called it early on in the nineteenth century,
and I guess even in the early twentieth century. Well,
actually they called it that up until the sixties. Yeah,
the sixties word blindness.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
And it was a German who coined that term, and
they called it vort blindhyped. Can you say that that's good? Okay,
you would do it way better than well.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
I would put on some dumb voice. But that's perfect pronunciation.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
You said that it's a W right, yeah, and you
said it is a V.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
Yeah, perfect Okay. They didn't click my heels together, and.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
It checks out, Dorothy.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
So they called it, like you said, up into the sixties,
congenital little word blindness. Uh. There were a lot of
people in the late eighteen hundred or not a lot,
but a handful of people studying this stuff.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Yeah. Henchelwood and Morgan were the two big ones.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, And they were optomologists and a doctor. Henchelwood was
the optomologist and they and then there were also neurologists.
A man named Samuel Orton, and uh, they it's interesting
to look back because they were sort of on the
right track with how they what they thought was wrong.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Yeah. Word blindness also is a term. Is not that
not that far off? Yeah, I mean it really does
a good job describing the thing, because they're saying, like,
there's some condition that these people have, specifically because they're
otherwise totally intelligent. They're just they have a problem with words,
with seeing words and recognizing them like everybody else can.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, And it was obviously since the dawn of time
people have had this condition, but it didn't obviously if
you think about it. There are a lot of things
that came along that really brought it into the forefront, like.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Printing, widespread literacy.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Yeah, newspapers and books and street signs exactly, menus like
you were saying in a restaurant. Yeah, like everywhere there's
the printed word and all of this.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
As all of this started to emerge in like the
second half of the nineteenth century, at least in the
United States and in the Western Europe, all of a sudden,
people who had dyslexia suddenly became a parent, whereas before
this it wouldn't have been a parent because they're there
was no way for dyslexia to manifest itself. People didn't
(15:04):
walk around reading. You weren't expected to learn to read
and write as a kid. You had to be like
basically a monk to learn to read and write, or
part of the aristocracy. Now it became democratized and public
schooling became widespread, and so as a result, dyslexia became
a thing for the very first time. It's actually a
relatively new condition that was born out of the modern era.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Yeah, Or if you were a kid back then and
they were trying to teach you read and you couldn't,
you were just they were like, all right, well, I
guess he's not a reader, right, So get out to
the factory of the field, right, and don't worry about it.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
But that was what Morgan, like w Pringle Morgan and
James Hinchelwood were doing, was they were the first ones
to say, wait, wait, get that kid out of the field,
because he seems otherwise bright to me. He just is
having trouble reading. This might just be a thing. So
they were the first ones to say, no, this is
its own thing. This isn't just being being generally slow.
(16:00):
Specific learning disability.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Right, Samuel Orton, the neurologists I mentioned, he created the
Orton Society in nineteen forty nine. They were researchers and
teachers trying to figure out like, all right, we know
this is a problem. Now how do we go about
teaching kids like this? And that eventually led to the
International Dyslexia Association, But it really took until the the
(16:25):
nineteen seventies. That was a book written by McDonald Critchley
called The Dyslexic Child, And that's when things really started
to come to the forefront more.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, they started to realize, oh, wait, you can teach
kids with dyslexia how to read, so maybe we should
start doing that, right, And here are these symptoms and
the signs of dyslexia, and let's take it seriously in
the general education system.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
And one of the interesting things that they learned, they
have learned over the years is part of the problem,
at least in the case of English, is that it's
a really tough language to learn, extraordinarily tough, and it
matters if you have dyslexia. When compared to Italian. It
says English has over a thousand ways to spell it's
basic set of forty phonological sounds. Italian has twenty five
(17:14):
speech sounds speech sounds and only thirty three ways to
spell them. So incidences of dyslexia, while they may be
the same technically in Italy, kids don't have as much
of a problem in Italy.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Yeah, like thinking about this, so that the sure e
sound eh eh, you can spell it ai as in
staid EO is in leopard, You is in barry, Ie
is in friend.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Okay, English is so tough.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
It is tough. But what you're doing is when you're
spelling those things, you're encoding a sound. A phoneeme is
what it's called. Right, And like you said, in English,
we have forty phonemes, and when you spell, when you read,
you're encoding and coding a phoneme. And we've attached phonemes
onto specific things out in real life. Leopard, Right, if
(18:07):
you can spell leopard, you can write down that word
and you can create a leopard in somebody else's mind's
eye by reading it. Okay, this is all spectacular that
we can do this, but it's a totally human construct.
If you have dyslexia, you're the ground problem that is
the basis of your condition is you have trouble sorting
(18:29):
through phonemes. You have trouble with what's called phonological awareness,
where you hear impart as two separate distinct sounds that
you can learn to spell and learn to write. You
can't sort them. Sometimes they run together. It's a problem
(18:50):
on the very basis of reading, writing, spelling the phonology.
You have trouble. Your brain has trouble processing it and sorting.
That's the basis of dyslexia. So if you are a
kid with dyslexia, in learning English with as difficult as
it is where there's all these different rules for the
same phoneme, it's going to be way harder than it
(19:13):
is in something like Italian.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Like you were saying, yeah, And as a result, as
you would imagine, learning a second language if you have
dyslexia is really tough. But they have found that Italian
can almost be like a therapy.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
A training like training camp for learn really interesting. Yeah,
because you learn, Oh there's rules with certain things, but
these are really basic rules and they make sense. So
maybe now I can learn English a little more easily
with the expectation that the rules are structurally the same,
but they're just different for English than they are for
Italian in nuance, but ultimately they're getting across the same stuff.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Yeah, the whole concept of language and symbols, e letters
and words, it's.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Just fascinating to me, endlessly fascinating.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Yeah, because again I don't like the humans.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Like creating this and saying that thing over there. If
you draw these symbols in this order, that's what that is.
See that leopard like, that's and then the word leopard like. Yeah,
it's just all fascinating.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
It is because you're encapsulating knowledge that can be shared
later on, can be unlocked later on by anyone who
understands how to decode it in the same way.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Yeah, what's the science? What was it called? When you
study that?
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Linguistics?
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Is it just linguistic?
Speaker 3 (20:31):
I'm pretty sure I could have.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Been a linguist. Oh yeah, if I had only known
what it was called.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yeah, I just realize how anything that would have dumb
dumb what's that thing called?
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yeah, I could have been good at that.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
Yeah, Yeah, I couldn't. It was on the tip of
my tongue.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
So I guess we can talk about the the fMRI
and the MRI. Obviously, the Wonder Machine figures in pretty
big when it comes to this kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
And in the mid nineties is about when the fMRI
came on the scene with dyslexia and studies with dyslexia.
Once they one of the problems was little kids. You're like, well,
we can't throw them in there, that they will explode
their brain. And then they're like, oh no, the fMRI
machine is fine for kids.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
We tested it out on some bad kids and.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
They were fine, and so they started putting children in
there because you could obviously do this at any age,
but it's important for school age children to like figure
out what's going on in their brains.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Well, that's one of the reasons why that's the sample
population is because it takes years for dyslexia to be prominent. Right,
every kid has problems learning, reading and writing at first, sure,
but then as other kids progress and this one kid doesn't,
but they're otherwise bright, same socioeconomic opportunities and all that stuff.
(21:55):
That's when it becomes possible that they have dyslexia. But
by that time a couple more years have gone by,
right right, Yeah, so you're you're not testing for dyslexia
on babies, right, you have to wait until it basically
manifests itself.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
And of course with the fMRI they I think there
was some hope that it could, like you mentioned earlier,
just be like, well there it is, yeah, but.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
You know it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
It wasn't as they you know, different regions of the
brain would light up or not light up. But they
didn't get any hard like pinpointing conclusions.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
No, they have kind of focused in on a few spots,
like different studies have said, this is what we found,
and it actually correlates with other studies too. There's left
hemisphere areas, the ventral occipito temporal region, the temporal parietal region,
and the inferior frontal cortices, which have to do with
(22:48):
language processing. Yeah, but also visual processing of language too.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
So again they think that the basis of all of
this is that when you were hearing sounds and somebody's
holding up a piece of bread that has been dried
through heat and says toast, you're hearing toast. Yeah, and
you can learn to write t A. It's a little confounding, sure,
(23:15):
and then st over time, maybe the first few times
you write te ST, it doesn't matter. You're going to
learn to write T A S T and you can
write it down and then someone else can read it
and they think of toast. Right, with dyslexia, you're not
hearing toast. You're you're you, and you certainly can't extrapolate
something that you're not hearing correctly into words and letters. Yeah, yeah, okay,
(23:40):
it's a.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Good way to put it, the Toast analogy. There you go, U,
there is a genetic component. You are likely, if you
have dyslexi to also have other family members who have it,
and they have isolated some genes associated with it. But
again they haven't been like here's the cause. Let's just
figure out how to switch this gene off or.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
On right, And it's I think it's just correlated. It's
not necessarily the cause. It's it's like people who have
been shown to have dyslexia have these set of genes
that are doing this.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
But what, like I said earlier, what's interesting is those
early doctors weren't super far off. It does have to
do with visual processing of this linguistic information, and they
were on the right track even way back then.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
So not bad.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
And then even still though with this new understanding of like, Okay,
this brain region looks like this, this brain region looks
like that, this is the sign of a dyslexic brain,
there's still the question is this the result of going
years and years without reading or is that the structure
(24:47):
of a brain with dyslexia? Right, because we know that
your brain changes when you read, when you learn to read.
They've done studies in the MRI with illiterate adults who
have learn to read. So they do a scan of
them while they cannot read, and then they scan them
again while they can read, and then look for differences
in the brain. And there are structural differences that take
(25:10):
place in the brain, which makes sense because it makes
you think, So an illiterate adult is that the normal
structure of the brain, and an adult that can read
is that an abnormal structure? Because think about it, we've
only been doing that for one hundred and fifty years.
That's a new construct. So it makes sense that the
brain would be neuroplastic like that in that respect, because
(25:33):
that's a new thing we've all started to try to
do to alter our brains.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, and that's where the practice part comes in which
we'll get to more. But it's interesting that and it
sounds simple, but the better if you have dyslexia, the
better you get at reading and writing, the better you
will get at reading and writing exactly.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
You're just you're strengthening, You're creating new neural connections and
strengthening those pathways. And the fact that it all comes
down to apparent patience and practice and that like it's
saying like these kids with dyslexi are going through the
same thing that every kid does with learning to read
(26:10):
and write and spell, it just takes them way longer.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
The fact that generations of kids with this lexi were
just abandoned by the school system because of a lack
of patience is really what it comes down to. Is
beyond sad.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Yeah, patients and resources, I think, and that's part of it. Sure, Yeah,
I just don't want to it sound like we're saying
like teachers just were impatient about it, all right, It's
like it was complex and still very sad.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Yes, that teachers have to buy their own school supply
still gets to me every year. Yeah, the fact that
we're like living with this as a country, Like that's
just become normal to us. Is it's embarrassing. Yeah, it's
just a mark of shame on our country.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
If you ask me, all right, let's take a break.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
No, I'm gonna go.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
I'm going to give you your out of nine tails
so we can flog each other.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
I realize I'm I sound really forceful in this episode.
Do I feel like I'm sounding forceful? Do I sound forceful?
Think you're great?
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Do I? Well? That did?
Speaker 2 (27:11):
All right, we'll be right back everyone. All right, So,
(27:42):
like you said earlier, there is no cure for dyslexia.
There is a treatment, and they even put that in quotes,
but you shouldn't think of it as a disease cure
type of thing.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
It's practice and patience.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
You have it for life.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Yeah, and those are the two strategies that we will
say it one more time for the tenth time patients.
In practice, you have to have that patience there as
a parent, as a teacher, as someone with dyslexia. I
know it's frustrating, but the more patient you are give
(28:21):
yourself time, teachers can. And then there are programs now
where students can get extra time to take tests and
things like that. And oh yeah, I think even officially,
like with the SAT and stuff like that. Oh yeah,
there are programs where you are not to put it
a disadvantage.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
There's the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of two
thousand and four, the IDEA Act or IDEA. It specifies
dyslexia as a specific learning disorder. And when you have
a diagnosis of dyslexia, the whole world opens up to you.
You all of a sudden have your own personal teachers
(28:58):
assistant working with you. Hopefully, you have all sorts of
resources that just weren't available to you before that are
being funneled directly toward helping you learn to read faster.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
I wonder if that's across the board.
Speaker 3 (29:14):
Yeah, I think that schools probably have specific funding for
IDEA stuff. I mean, like when Congress comes up with
an act like that, they fund it, and then they
fund it out of it, like those huge omnibus budgets
have funding for that, and that goes to the school
and school's supposedly not allowed to spend it on anything
but that stuff. So yeah, probably if you get a
(29:35):
diagnosis of dyslexia, it's pretty sweet and a huge relief
because all of a sudden, it's just like a brand
new world. You're taken away from the dumb kid's table
like Howard Schultz was, and all of a sudden, you
have your own one on one reading and spelling lessons
(29:56):
that you just didn't have before.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
The other, like said, is practice, and over time, you
know you can learn to read and you make those
new neural pathways, and it just it's heartening to know
that if you have this patience and you put in
the time, it is something that can be overcome if
everyone works together.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Right, And if you can learn to read, even as
an adult. You're not going to learn to read necessarily proficiently.
I think you can if you really really practice, if
you put your mind to it. It's going to be
very slow, but it's not like you'll never read a
book or something like that.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
But I saw one woman describing her condition as an adult,
and she said she was very proud to be at
like a seventh grade reading level now as an adult,
which is like, you can navigate through life with a
seventh grade at a seventh grade reading level pretty easy.
The problem comes when you don't ever you've never gotten
any help, and you're basically an illiterate adult because of dyslexia.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah, they have technology can help out. There are what
they call assist of listening devices because sometimes if you
have someone your ear reading something out loud while you're
reading along, sort of like a teacher, and an app
like that one on one experience, that can really really help.
Seeing a transcription sometimes of what someone's saying.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
A real time transcription.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Yeah, yeah, so all these apps and devices are really
helping things along.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
This so's it's like a brand new world for kids
with dyslexia compared to like last century. Oh yeah, or
even a few decades ago, you know.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
The one thing I didn't quite get was this thing
that you sent from Sir Jim Rose. I didn't fully
get what this guy was saying.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
He was part of it. So he's not saying this,
he's he's he's definitely all into dyslexia. But there is
a thread that of experts in childhood education, psychology, childhood
cognition who who suspect that there's no such thing as dyslexia,
(32:02):
really that those earliest neurologists and ophthalmologists and doctors who
who named it and made it a thing were wrong,
and that really an inability to read transcends any level
of intelligence. It's disconnected from intelligence. That no matter whether
you are of high intelligence or low intelligence, you can
(32:24):
suffer from an inability to learn to read. And so
if you have dyslexia and you are of high intelligence,
the kid next to you who has low intelligence and
can't read also has dyslexia or or else. No one
has dyslexia, and it's just an inability to learn to read.
Most experts say dyslexia is a thing, sure, which means
(32:46):
then the debate is, okay, doesn't have anything to do
with intelligence. And if it doesn't have anything to do
with intelligence, then all of these resources that are being
diverted to these kids who are of high intelligence but
are having trouble learning to read is really doing a
disservice to the kids of low intelligence. And I'm making
air quotes here. Everybody who are having trouble learning to read?
(33:10):
Why differentiate they're both having trouble learning to read. Start
attacking the problem with both of them. And there was
this one Australian expert who basically said, like, yes, dyslexia
is the thing. It is his own thing. It has
a neurobiological basis. It's not made up. It's not a myth.
But let's treat first and then diagnose later. If you
(33:32):
see an inability to learn to read, go after that.
Don't say, well, is a dyslexia. Let's test the kids
intelligence it doesn't matter, and focus on learning. How I'm
teaching them how to read interesting and apparently interventions. There's
this guy named Julian, Professor Julian.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
What's his name, Chuck Lenin.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
Sands, Yes, Julian Sands In boxing Helena, and he makes
it's a big soliloquy about whether or not dyslexi is
a myth. I can't remember the guy's last name, but
I get the impression that parents of children with dyslexi
are not a big fan of this guy. But he's
basically said, we're diverting a lot of funding away from
(34:16):
kids who know how to who don't know how to read,
just because they don't they supposedly don't have a high IQ.
Let's treat all the kids. So that's the idea of
whether it's a myth, not that dyslexi doesn't exist, although
I think some people suspected it didn't for a while
now people believe it does, but not necessarily that it's
just intelligent upper middle class kids who have dyslexia. It's
(34:39):
just an inability to read for the same reason. Interesting,
that's the basis of it. It's still up in the air,
and it's a really touchy subject, very touchy subject, sure,
and rightfully so. I mean, like, I can imagine you
feel lost in the woods if there's no official diagnosis,
there's no official test of it, there's no official definition
of it. Your kid has it, and you know your
(35:02):
kid has it. Yeah, I can't imagine what it must
feel like to have some expert going like there's no
such thing as dyslexia, right, you know, yeah, yeah, thanks
a lot. It is very touchy and rightfully so.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Well.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Finally, there's this whole notion that if you have dyslexia,
then you may excel in other areas. You may be
more creative, or you may be more prone to be
like an entrepreneur, perhaps.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Yeah, because you think outside of the box.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Yeah, I mean there's a long list of people, like,
you know, famous creative types that have dyslexia.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
IGETHA. Christie, did you know that one?
Speaker 1 (35:38):
I didn't but I didn't either that.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
You know, I didn't just make it up. I learned there's.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
A long list. But just recently part of this bugs
me though, I don't know. I just hate it when
they're like, well, look what celebrities have this thing. I mean,
I get it. Maybe that it might, I don't know.
I just don't see the value in that.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Well, it's saying like, look at this guy, this guy,
this lady.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Maybe I guess so.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
He's not a street sweeper. You don't have to spend,
you don't have to look forward to a life of
shoveling horse maneuver because you have dyslexia. You can achieve
just stick to a kid.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
No, I get all that, and that's valid.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
Are you're questioning the cult of celebrity?
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Yeah, that's what I was.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
That just sort of bugs me, But no, there is benefits.
I'm sure if some kid is like Tom Cruise has dyslexia,
right and look at him.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
I have had some questions about xanax and its value myself.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Oh goodness.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
There have been some studies though over the years that
may or may not support this, Like supposedly, if you
have dyslexia, you may be quicker to find something in
your peripheral vision. Maybe you can like mc esher style
drawings or the impossible images hidden images, you might see
those quicker or more easily find patterns in noise. Sure,
(36:53):
like you could be a great data analysts perhaps.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
And they think like and this makes total sense. But
the problem is it's anecdotal at this point. But it
makes total sense that, yes, you're the same senses that
you were using to read and write. If you don't
know how to read and write, your brain's going to
compensate with other things. It's going to possibly excel at
other stuff just because it's structured different If your brain
(37:18):
is structured differently, which we know that's the case, if
you do not read or write, you would expect that
it would manifest itself in real world behaviors and traits.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Well, yeah, and the first thing I thought it was like, yeah, totally,
like if your vision impaired you hear things better.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Well, supposedly that's a myth.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Well I looked it up.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
There are studies where if you are vision impaired, you
are better at pinpointing like location of sound and certain sounds.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
But it's not as you can't hear something two miles away.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Yeah, it's not as cut and dry as you can't
he better, Yeah, because like your ears developed better.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
You know, if you remember that guy who can echo locate,
he's visually impaired and he's like, no, he uses clicks
or something like that, like a he basically taught himself
to echo locate. Really amazing.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
The first thing I thought about was the guy with
the ear in his arm? What was his name?
Speaker 3 (38:07):
Stellarc? Stell what's great?
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Oh man?
Speaker 3 (38:11):
I love that you and I like go back and
forth on remembering the guy's name. Last time we bought
most of it, I didn't remember his name, and you
rattled it right at Stellark Between us, Stellarc is going
to live forever like the transhumanist to you.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
But then that last thing about being entrepreneurial or maybe
a corporate executive. They did do a study in two
thousand and nine that found there was an anecdotal evidence
of over representation in those fields. But then that's the
thing too, where they're like, maybe they were just better
at overcoming adversity, right, and that stayed on through their
(38:44):
whole life to where it wasn't just dyslexia but like
and nothing would keep them down.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
So they excelled, right, they learned how to how to
try harder than their peers.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
So yeah, even if that is the case, great, Sure,
But the point is it's still anecdotals, so you have
to be careful with saying like, oh, yeah, people with
dyslexia are way better at this, right, or they're they're
more likely to be entrepreneurs. It's just it hasn't been settled. Yeah,
But I think the overall point of this episode is
if you are if you do have dyslexia, there is
(39:17):
plenty of hope. Do not give up hope, whether that
your kid has dyslexia or you have dyslexia, you can
learn to read and write and spell, and you can
become a Pulitzer Prize winning.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Columnist or Agatha Christie yep.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
Or John Irving. I saw his yslexia, John Oiving. Yeah,
Richard Branson, that was really good.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Ozzy Osbourne, for God's sake, look at that guy. Sure,
if I'm going around the house.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
He's successful. Yeah, despite himself. If you want to know
more about dyslexia, you can learn all about it on
the internets. And since I said that it's time for
listener mail.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
I'm going to call this Sid and Marty Kroft email.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
This guy wrote in to email us about a personal
connection he had to the Schoolhouse Rock episode. I'm not
gonna read that half of the letter because I don't
want to further embarrass the family, but he's his relation
to the person that we kind of called out as
the guy who ruined Schoolhouse Rock.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
Oh okay, wasn't he an exec?
Speaker 1 (40:16):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (40:16):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
But the second half of this, as speaking of unbelievable stories, guys,
I thought it. You'd be jealous to know that I
grew up hanging out on the sets of all the
Sidden Marty Croft shows because my mom was on a
bunch of them. He used to have lunch with the
slee stacks and throw around big foam boulders from Land
to the Loss. She was Nashville on the Captain Cool
(40:39):
and the Kong Show, which wrapped around the Saturday morning cartoons.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
I remember that, mm hm.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
They also that also led to the music group the
Bay City Rollers showing up to my birthday party when
I was like five. It caused such a big mom
scene the police had to come.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
That's the SA yeah, you are d a. Why you
know how they got their name They threw a dart
at a map and it landed on Bay City, Michigan.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Because they're like Scottish, aren't they.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
I think so they are.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
I remember my sister.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
We had a babysitter, and then my sister and the babysitter.
I don't know why my sister wasn't just my babysitter.
She was six years older. There was another girl who
babysat that was like a sister's age, and they would
sit around. This is my big memory of the Bay
City Rollers. They would there was one of their albums
that had each of their pictures sort of in a
dartboard like fashion in a circle, and they would spin
(41:32):
the record around and close their eyes and stop it
with their finger, and.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
Like they had to make out with that picture.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Yeah, they had to like kiss that picture or whatever.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
I hope your sister doesn't listen to this.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
No, it's great. The seventies man, so innocent.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
I love the seventies.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
So the Bay City Rollers came through his birthday party.
They called the cops.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
She went on.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
My mom went on to do a ton of cool
stuff that I'm sure you guys would know a bunch
of episodes of Plastic Man, Wow, all the women voices
on Celebrity Deathmatch, Cool, hosting a game show called Rodeo Drive,
playing Joan Rivers on Family Guy Wow, being in the
Catskills on Broadway nice for two years. Too much more
to mention, guys, except also she went on the road
with Tim Conway and Harvey Korman for a number of
(42:15):
years posing is Carol Burnette, and my little brother ended
up engaged to Harvey Corman's daughter, Wow, but it didn't
work out.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Anyway, I love the show, guys. If I can ever
be a resource, let me know. That is from Keith
or Ell Keith.
Speaker 3 (42:29):
That was amazing. You remember Celebrity Deathmatch?
Speaker 1 (42:32):
Yeah, man, so great. Big shout out to your mom too.
Speaker 3 (42:34):
Yeah, and to see your mom's Keith. Yeah. Well, if
you want to brag on your mom because she's done
some awesome stuff, we love hearing about that. Moms always
have great welcomeness here and stuff. You should know. That's right,
that's gonna end up being a crummy T shirt. If
you want to get in touch of this, you can
hang out on stuff youshould know dot com. And check
out our social links there, and you can get in
(42:56):
touch with me, Chuck and Jerry and everybody else here
at Stuff Should Know by sending an email to Stuff
podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey there, everybody.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Chuck here picking out a Saturday episode, a classic Stuff
you Should Know, curated and handpicked by me to you Valentine,
if you will. And this one is from March twenty nineteen,
and it's about dyslexia. And this one hits close to
home for me now and I enjoyed going back and
re listening to it so I could relearn myself.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
So I hope you do as well.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
And it's called How Dyslexia Works.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles
w Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Jerry, And this
is Stuff you Should Know about dyslexia. How are you
doing good? Good?
Speaker 1 (00:52):
How are you?
Speaker 3 (00:53):
I'm doing pretty good, man, Just you know, hanging out
over here. Yeah, ready to wrap.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
I thought this is pretty cool. I'm surprised that we
had not.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Discussed this yet because it's right up our alley, totally
very stuff you Should Know type show. Yeah, and I
think it's an interesting uh.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
You know, I guess it's labeled a learning disorder.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Most most definitely it's a specific learning disorder. According to
the US government.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
I always just have a hard time, what you know,
knowing whether or not to like almost at affliction them, like,
is that an affliction?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
I don't even know.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
I think it's I think anybody with dyslexia and anybody
any expert in the field would say it's a learning disability.
It's a specific learning disability that that we're not entirely
certain what causes it. But most people would tell you
that typically it's considered a neurobiological condition. They think that
(01:50):
there's a basis to the brain that leads to this
situation where otherwise bright and capable yep and intelligent students
have what they call unexpected difficulty learning to read, and
that it afflicts them their entire life. Yeah, but there's
(02:12):
a lot of questions, yes, that surround the definition. And
one of the problems with dyslexia research is that that's
that that's not the official definition. There's about as many
definitions as there are studies of dyslexia.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Yeah, this one from Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity
made sense to me though, as far as just sort
of a simple way to say it, an unexpected difficulty
in reading in an individual who has the intelligence to
be a much better reader. So in other words, like,
this isn't adding up. All the tools are there and
you should be a better reader than you are, but
(02:48):
you're not. So why what gives?
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Yeah, So there's there's there's a lot to that though, right,
Like there's this idea that if if we know enough
about the brain and we have things like MRIs and
stuff like that, so you would think that by now,
since maybe the nineties or whatever, we would have positively
identified what it is. But there's a confounding problem that
(03:12):
they've run into in dyslexic dyslexia research, and we'll get
into it more later, But they haven't figured out if
what they're looking at is the changes that would come
from not reading as much, or if the brain structure
they're seeing is actually dyslexia. Right, so they're having trouble
(03:34):
with it. I'll explain it better later.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
No, but I know what you mean.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Well, good as long as you do. But it also
counts as like the million or so people listening to
this also do.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Hey, everybody dyslexia is very studying it and understanding it
and learning how to teach children with the dyslexia is
very important because up until semi recently, I'm just going
to go say recently, if you were had dyslexia and
you were a student, you might have been called stupid
(04:06):
or dumb, and you might have been teacher, yeah, you
might have been put at a separate table and said, well,
you go over here because we you can't keep up
this one guy.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Man, this one really hit home, or not.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Hit home, but hitch in the bread basket.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
In the bread basket, which is like home. Pulitzer Prize
winner Philip Schultz was diagnosed later in life, and he said,
growing up in the nineteen fifties, he said, basically he
was placed in what he called the dummy class. Three
children in his class were separated, put at a table
in the corner. The teacher didn't talk to them much.
(04:43):
And essentially one day like the principal was coming around
and she said, here these books, pretend to read them.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Right, the principle's coming.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Yeah. Man, that is just tough.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
But there's something really significant about that. That was a
column written by a guy named Philip Schultz, who is
a Pulitzer Prize winner. So that really kind of reveals
the fact that what they figured out through decades and
decades of research is that people with dyslexia aren't stupid.
They specifically have trouble learning to read and spell and write,
(05:19):
and more and more research has kind of gotten to
the root of the problems with dyslexia. But we have
found that with patients and practice, people with dyslexia can
learn to read. You have dyslexia your entire life. There's
no cure for it, but you can learn to read,
and you can learn to navigate and cope with dyslexia
(05:41):
as a child and into adulthood.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Yeah, and I don't want to certainly don't want to
sound like I'm bagging on teachers, because you know, both
of my parents are teachers, and even back in the
day when you know, let me just say this, teachers
back then didn't have the same tools that they have today,
and they didn't have an understanding of dyslexia. So if
they had students that weren't keeping up and would force
(06:07):
the class to maybe lag behind, they may not have
made the best decisions, but they didn't have all the
tools at their disposal to make better decisions.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Right, the presence of a kid with dyslexia in a
class creates a conundrum. Do you slow the class down
to that kid's speed and as far as like reading
and spelling and writing lessons go, potentially risking like slowing
down the rest of the class who are learning at
a normal clip. Or do you take this guy with
(06:37):
dyslexia or this girl with dyslexia and put them in
a special needs class that may address their reading and writing,
but they're going to get so far behind their classmates
and every other subject that they're normally proficient at. It's
a problem, and they had no idea how to grapple
with it for almost all of the twentieth century, and
(06:59):
multiple generations of kids with dyslexia suffered as a result.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Yeah, it's really sad. There are a lot of symptoms
for dyslexia, key symptoms, and these are very important because
there is no blood tests, There is no there's no
even I mean, there are a lot of testing they
can do, but that there's no standardized, specific tests that
will really nail it down.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Right, So so keep that in mind. There's no there's
no official definition of dyslexia. Yeah, and there's no specific
tests to suss out dyslexia, right, two big problems.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Yeah, so you got to look at this collection of symptoms.
The first obvious one is slow reading and accurate reading,
difficulty sounding out words, difficulty pronouncing longer words with multiple syllables,
which we'll.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Get to that in a bit.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Inability to read or speak made up nonsense words, which
I thought was interesting, Poor short term memory for verbal information,
whether it's written or spoke spoken. Poor spelling, like really
poor spelling, to where you sometimes can't even tell what
the words they're trying to spell are.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Right, not not just like a you know, like using
an F instead of a pH or something like that.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, and we should also point out too, that is
it's very much an incorrect notion that if you have
dyslexia you just transpose letters or spell things backwards.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
That's what I thought for most of my life. Yeah,
dyslexia was people they spelled things backwards, and that was that,
and that they also read backwards, and that they could
train themselves to read things backwards. Right, totally made up,
It's not totally made up, but it's so such a
such a just a one component of dyslexia that it
(08:40):
might as well just be an urban legend.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
And then what this can lead to. It's not just like, oh,
I have trouble reading like that. That spills out into
all aspects of life, whether it's your self esteem, or
you might have problem with directions directionally, you might have
issue with your budgets or money items, or you might
not n tell time very well, frustrated, anger, difficulty planning things.
(09:08):
It's not just limited to reading issues.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
And then in real life, you might read something and
have very little recollection of what you just read. You
will probably have problems giving presentations, finding the right word,
recalling words, that kind of thing. When you do read,
and when you learn to read, you will be reading
(09:32):
slower than anybody else, even reading at your reading level.
You just do it more slowly. And then as an adult,
a lot of people are like, oh, good god, I'm
done with school. Let me just go off and find
a job that doesn't require any reading or any writing,
and I will be fine. I will go to restaurants
and order the same thing at every restaurant. And if
(09:54):
this routine that I've developed to mask my dyslexia is
ever interrupted, I will flip out and try to keep
it under control, but I will seem a little awkward
socially during instances like this. There's ways you can carve
out a life for yourself, but you don't have to
because now we understand dyslexia way more than we did before,
(10:15):
and we understand the treatment of it too.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Yeah, and as far as how many people have it,
it's tough to get because of all these reasons we're
talking about. Tough to get a good number that's reliable,
but anywhere between five and fifteen to seventeen percent it
looks like, which is sort of well, it's not the
biggest range in the world.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
But they don't really know, No, they have no idea
because there's a couple of problems. One, there's a lot
of people out there who don't realize they have dyslexia.
And then there's a lot of people who do know
they have dyslexia in are either ashamed of it or
have just set up their life to where they don't
have time or room to go be diagnosed and then
go learn to overcome it. They're just like, whatever, I
(10:56):
have this thing, this issue where I'm slower at reading
than other people. So yeah, it's probably very much underreported
and underestimated how many people in the population have.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah, and we're talking mainly about, almost exclusively, about developmental dyslexia,
which is, you know, the kind we mostly think about.
We're not talking about a choir dyslexia, which is can
happen as a result.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Of an injury. So I just want to point that out.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Well, let's take a break and then we'll come back
and talk about the history that actually features both of those. Okay, yes, sir,
(11:58):
so Chuck. The first time the word dysli was used
was in eighteen seventy two by an ophthalmologist named Rudolph Berlin,
who coined the term dyslexia. But the case that he
was describing was a case of acquired dyslexia, where you
can you can develop the symptoms of dyslexia trouble reading,
trouble writing, trouble sounding out words from a head injury
(12:22):
or say a lesion on your brain, something like that. Yeah,
and that told them a lot, right it really. Initially
they thought maybe it was just a sign of low intelligence,
maybe it was a problem with vision or something like that.
But the fact that you could acquire dyslexia told neurologists
and optalmologists working in the nineteenth century. No, this is
(12:45):
a this is a there's a neurobiological basis to this.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, and they called it early on in the nineteenth century,
and I guess even in the early twentieth century. Well,
actually they called it that up until the sixties. Yeah,
the sixties word blindness.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
And it was a German who coined that term, and
they called it vort blindhyped. Can you say that that's good? Okay,
you would do it way better than well.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
I would put on some dumb voice. But that's perfect pronunciation.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
You said that it's a W right, yeah, and you
said it is a V.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
Yeah, perfect Okay. They didn't click my heels together, and.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
It checks out, Dorothy.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
So they called it, like you said, up into the sixties,
congenital little word blindness. Uh. There were a lot of
people in the late eighteen hundred or not a lot,
but a handful of people studying this stuff.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Yeah. Henchelwood and Morgan were the two big ones.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, And they were optomologists and a doctor. Henchelwood was
the optomologist and they and then there were also neurologists.
A man named Samuel Orton, and uh, they it's interesting
to look back because they were sort of on the
right track with how they what they thought was wrong.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Yeah. Word blindness also is a term. Is not that
not that far off? Yeah, I mean it really does
a good job describing the thing, because they're saying, like,
there's some condition that these people have, specifically because they're
otherwise totally intelligent. They're just they have a problem with words,
with seeing words and recognizing them like everybody else can.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, And it was obviously since the dawn of time
people have had this condition, but it didn't obviously if
you think about it. There are a lot of things
that came along that really brought it into the forefront, like.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Printing, widespread literacy.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Yeah, newspapers and books and street signs exactly, menus like
you were saying in a restaurant. Yeah, like everywhere there's
the printed word and all of this.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
As all of this started to emerge in like the
second half of the nineteenth century, at least in the
United States and in the Western Europe, all of a sudden,
people who had dyslexia suddenly became a parent, whereas before
this it wouldn't have been a parent because they're there
was no way for dyslexia to manifest itself. People didn't
(15:04):
walk around reading. You weren't expected to learn to read
and write as a kid. You had to be like
basically a monk to learn to read and write, or
part of the aristocracy. Now it became democratized and public
schooling became widespread, and so as a result, dyslexia became
a thing for the very first time. It's actually a
relatively new condition that was born out of the modern era.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Yeah, Or if you were a kid back then and
they were trying to teach you read and you couldn't,
you were just they were like, all right, well, I
guess he's not a reader, right, So get out to
the factory of the field, right, and don't worry about it.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
But that was what Morgan, like w Pringle Morgan and
James Hinchelwood were doing, was they were the first ones
to say, wait, wait, get that kid out of the field,
because he seems otherwise bright to me. He just is
having trouble reading. This might just be a thing. So
they were the first ones to say, no, this is
its own thing. This isn't just being being generally slow.
(16:00):
Specific learning disability.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Right, Samuel Orton, the neurologists I mentioned, he created the
Orton Society in nineteen forty nine. They were researchers and
teachers trying to figure out like, all right, we know
this is a problem. Now how do we go about
teaching kids like this? And that eventually led to the
International Dyslexia Association, But it really took until the the
(16:25):
nineteen seventies. That was a book written by McDonald Critchley
called The Dyslexic Child, And that's when things really started
to come to the forefront more.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, they started to realize, oh, wait, you can teach
kids with dyslexia how to read, so maybe we should
start doing that, right, And here are these symptoms and
the signs of dyslexia, and let's take it seriously in
the general education system.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
And one of the interesting things that they learned, they
have learned over the years is part of the problem,
at least in the case of English, is that it's
a really tough language to learn, extraordinarily tough, and it
matters if you have dyslexia. When compared to Italian. It
says English has over a thousand ways to spell it's
basic set of forty phonological sounds. Italian has twenty five
(17:14):
speech sounds speech sounds and only thirty three ways to
spell them. So incidences of dyslexia, while they may be
the same technically in Italy, kids don't have as much
of a problem in Italy.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Yeah, like thinking about this, so that the sure e
sound eh eh, you can spell it ai as in
staid EO is in leopard, You is in barry, Ie
is in friend.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Okay, English is so tough.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
It is tough. But what you're doing is when you're
spelling those things, you're encoding a sound. A phoneeme is
what it's called. Right, And like you said, in English,
we have forty phonemes, and when you spell, when you read,
you're encoding and coding a phoneme. And we've attached phonemes
onto specific things out in real life. Leopard, Right, if
(18:07):
you can spell leopard, you can write down that word
and you can create a leopard in somebody else's mind's
eye by reading it. Okay, this is all spectacular that
we can do this, but it's a totally human construct.
If you have dyslexia, you're the ground problem that is
the basis of your condition is you have trouble sorting
(18:29):
through phonemes. You have trouble with what's called phonological awareness,
where you hear impart as two separate distinct sounds that
you can learn to spell and learn to write. You
can't sort them. Sometimes they run together. It's a problem
(18:50):
on the very basis of reading, writing, spelling the phonology.
You have trouble. Your brain has trouble processing it and sorting.
That's the basis of dyslexia. So if you are a
kid with dyslexia, in learning English with as difficult as
it is where there's all these different rules for the
same phoneme, it's going to be way harder than it
(19:13):
is in something like Italian.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Like you were saying, yeah, And as a result, as
you would imagine, learning a second language if you have
dyslexia is really tough. But they have found that Italian
can almost be like a therapy.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
A training like training camp for learn really interesting. Yeah,
because you learn, Oh there's rules with certain things, but
these are really basic rules and they make sense. So
maybe now I can learn English a little more easily
with the expectation that the rules are structurally the same,
but they're just different for English than they are for
Italian in nuance, but ultimately they're getting across the same stuff.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Yeah, the whole concept of language and symbols, e letters
and words, it's.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Just fascinating to me, endlessly fascinating.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Yeah, because again I don't like the humans.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Like creating this and saying that thing over there. If
you draw these symbols in this order, that's what that is.
See that leopard like, that's and then the word leopard like. Yeah,
it's just all fascinating.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
It is because you're encapsulating knowledge that can be shared
later on, can be unlocked later on by anyone who
understands how to decode it in the same way.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Yeah, what's the science? What was it called? When you
study that?
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Linguistics?
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Is it just linguistic?
Speaker 3 (20:31):
I'm pretty sure I could have.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Been a linguist. Oh yeah, if I had only known
what it was called.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yeah, I just realize how anything that would have dumb
dumb what's that thing called?
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yeah, I could have been good at that.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
Yeah, Yeah, I couldn't. It was on the tip of
my tongue.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
So I guess we can talk about the the fMRI
and the MRI. Obviously, the Wonder Machine figures in pretty
big when it comes to this kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
And in the mid nineties is about when the fMRI
came on the scene with dyslexia and studies with dyslexia.
Once they one of the problems was little kids. You're like, well,
we can't throw them in there, that they will explode
their brain. And then they're like, oh no, the fMRI
machine is fine for kids.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
We tested it out on some bad kids and.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
They were fine, and so they started putting children in
there because you could obviously do this at any age,
but it's important for school age children to like figure
out what's going on in their brains.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Well, that's one of the reasons why that's the sample
population is because it takes years for dyslexia to be prominent. Right,
every kid has problems learning, reading and writing at first, sure,
but then as other kids progress and this one kid doesn't,
but they're otherwise bright, same socioeconomic opportunities and all that stuff.
(21:55):
That's when it becomes possible that they have dyslexia. But
by that time a couple more years have gone by,
right right, Yeah, so you're you're not testing for dyslexia
on babies, right, you have to wait until it basically
manifests itself.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
And of course with the fMRI they I think there
was some hope that it could, like you mentioned earlier,
just be like, well there it is, yeah, but.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
You know it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
It wasn't as they you know, different regions of the
brain would light up or not light up. But they
didn't get any hard like pinpointing conclusions.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
No, they have kind of focused in on a few spots,
like different studies have said, this is what we found,
and it actually correlates with other studies too. There's left
hemisphere areas, the ventral occipito temporal region, the temporal parietal region,
and the inferior frontal cortices, which have to do with
(22:48):
language processing. Yeah, but also visual processing of language too.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
So again they think that the basis of all of
this is that when you were hearing sounds and somebody's
holding up a piece of bread that has been dried
through heat and says toast, you're hearing toast. Yeah, and
you can learn to write t A. It's a little confounding, sure,
(23:15):
and then st over time, maybe the first few times
you write te ST, it doesn't matter. You're going to
learn to write T A S T and you can
write it down and then someone else can read it
and they think of toast. Right, with dyslexia, you're not
hearing toast. You're you're you, and you certainly can't extrapolate
something that you're not hearing correctly into words and letters. Yeah, yeah, okay,
(23:40):
it's a.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Good way to put it, the Toast analogy. There you go, U,
there is a genetic component. You are likely, if you
have dyslexi to also have other family members who have it,
and they have isolated some genes associated with it. But
again they haven't been like here's the cause. Let's just
figure out how to switch this gene off or.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
On right, And it's I think it's just correlated. It's
not necessarily the cause. It's it's like people who have
been shown to have dyslexia have these set of genes
that are doing this.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
But what, like I said earlier, what's interesting is those
early doctors weren't super far off. It does have to
do with visual processing of this linguistic information, and they
were on the right track even way back then.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
So not bad.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
And then even still though with this new understanding of like, Okay,
this brain region looks like this, this brain region looks
like that, this is the sign of a dyslexic brain,
there's still the question is this the result of going
years and years without reading or is that the structure
(24:47):
of a brain with dyslexia? Right, because we know that
your brain changes when you read, when you learn to read.
They've done studies in the MRI with illiterate adults who
have learn to read. So they do a scan of
them while they cannot read, and then they scan them
again while they can read, and then look for differences
in the brain. And there are structural differences that take
(25:10):
place in the brain, which makes sense because it makes
you think, So an illiterate adult is that the normal
structure of the brain, and an adult that can read
is that an abnormal structure? Because think about it, we've
only been doing that for one hundred and fifty years.
That's a new construct. So it makes sense that the
brain would be neuroplastic like that in that respect, because
(25:33):
that's a new thing we've all started to try to
do to alter our brains.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, and that's where the practice part comes in which
we'll get to more. But it's interesting that and it
sounds simple, but the better if you have dyslexia, the
better you get at reading and writing, the better you
will get at reading and writing exactly.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
You're just you're strengthening, You're creating new neural connections and
strengthening those pathways. And the fact that it all comes
down to apparent patience and practice and that like it's
saying like these kids with dyslexi are going through the
same thing that every kid does with learning to read
(26:10):
and write and spell, it just takes them way longer.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
The fact that generations of kids with this lexi were
just abandoned by the school system because of a lack
of patience is really what it comes down to. Is
beyond sad.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Yeah, patients and resources, I think, and that's part of it. Sure, Yeah,
I just don't want to it sound like we're saying
like teachers just were impatient about it, all right, It's
like it was complex and still very sad.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Yes, that teachers have to buy their own school supply
still gets to me every year. Yeah, the fact that
we're like living with this as a country, Like that's
just become normal to us. Is it's embarrassing. Yeah, it's
just a mark of shame on our country.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
If you ask me, all right, let's take a break.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
No, I'm gonna go.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
I'm going to give you your out of nine tails
so we can flog each other.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
I realize I'm I sound really forceful in this episode.
Do I feel like I'm sounding forceful? Do I sound forceful?
Think you're great?
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Do I? Well? That did?
Speaker 2 (27:11):
All right, we'll be right back everyone. All right, So,
(27:42):
like you said earlier, there is no cure for dyslexia.
There is a treatment, and they even put that in quotes,
but you shouldn't think of it as a disease cure
type of thing.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
It's practice and patience.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
You have it for life.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Yeah, and those are the two strategies that we will
say it one more time for the tenth time patients.
In practice, you have to have that patience there as
a parent, as a teacher, as someone with dyslexia. I
know it's frustrating, but the more patient you are give
(28:21):
yourself time, teachers can. And then there are programs now
where students can get extra time to take tests and
things like that. And oh yeah, I think even officially,
like with the SAT and stuff like that. Oh yeah,
there are programs where you are not to put it
a disadvantage.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
There's the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of two
thousand and four, the IDEA Act or IDEA. It specifies
dyslexia as a specific learning disorder. And when you have
a diagnosis of dyslexia, the whole world opens up to you.
You all of a sudden have your own personal teachers
(28:58):
assistant working with you. Hopefully, you have all sorts of
resources that just weren't available to you before that are
being funneled directly toward helping you learn to read faster.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
I wonder if that's across the board.
Speaker 3 (29:14):
Yeah, I think that schools probably have specific funding for
IDEA stuff. I mean, like when Congress comes up with
an act like that, they fund it, and then they
fund it out of it, like those huge omnibus budgets
have funding for that, and that goes to the school
and school's supposedly not allowed to spend it on anything
but that stuff. So yeah, probably if you get a
(29:35):
diagnosis of dyslexia, it's pretty sweet and a huge relief
because all of a sudden, it's just like a brand
new world. You're taken away from the dumb kid's table
like Howard Schultz was, and all of a sudden, you
have your own one on one reading and spelling lessons
(29:56):
that you just didn't have before.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
The other, like said, is practice, and over time, you
know you can learn to read and you make those
new neural pathways, and it just it's heartening to know
that if you have this patience and you put in
the time, it is something that can be overcome if
everyone works together.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Right, And if you can learn to read, even as
an adult. You're not going to learn to read necessarily proficiently.
I think you can if you really really practice, if
you put your mind to it. It's going to be
very slow, but it's not like you'll never read a
book or something like that.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
But I saw one woman describing her condition as an adult,
and she said she was very proud to be at
like a seventh grade reading level now as an adult,
which is like, you can navigate through life with a
seventh grade at a seventh grade reading level pretty easy.
The problem comes when you don't ever you've never gotten
any help, and you're basically an illiterate adult because of dyslexia.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah, they have technology can help out. There are what
they call assist of listening devices because sometimes if you
have someone your ear reading something out loud while you're
reading along, sort of like a teacher, and an app
like that one on one experience, that can really really help.
Seeing a transcription sometimes of what someone's saying.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
A real time transcription.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Yeah, yeah, so all these apps and devices are really
helping things along.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
This so's it's like a brand new world for kids
with dyslexia compared to like last century. Oh yeah, or
even a few decades ago, you know.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
The one thing I didn't quite get was this thing
that you sent from Sir Jim Rose. I didn't fully
get what this guy was saying.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
He was part of it. So he's not saying this,
he's he's he's definitely all into dyslexia. But there is
a thread that of experts in childhood education, psychology, childhood
cognition who who suspect that there's no such thing as dyslexia,
(32:02):
really that those earliest neurologists and ophthalmologists and doctors who
who named it and made it a thing were wrong,
and that really an inability to read transcends any level
of intelligence. It's disconnected from intelligence. That no matter whether
you are of high intelligence or low intelligence, you can
(32:24):
suffer from an inability to learn to read. And so
if you have dyslexia and you are of high intelligence,
the kid next to you who has low intelligence and
can't read also has dyslexia or or else. No one
has dyslexia, and it's just an inability to learn to read.
Most experts say dyslexia is a thing, sure, which means
(32:46):
then the debate is, okay, doesn't have anything to do
with intelligence. And if it doesn't have anything to do
with intelligence, then all of these resources that are being
diverted to these kids who are of high intelligence but
are having trouble learning to read is really doing a
disservice to the kids of low intelligence. And I'm making
air quotes here. Everybody who are having trouble learning to read?
(33:10):
Why differentiate they're both having trouble learning to read. Start
attacking the problem with both of them. And there was
this one Australian expert who basically said, like, yes, dyslexia
is the thing. It is his own thing. It has
a neurobiological basis. It's not made up. It's not a myth.
But let's treat first and then diagnose later. If you
(33:32):
see an inability to learn to read, go after that.
Don't say, well, is a dyslexia. Let's test the kids
intelligence it doesn't matter, and focus on learning. How I'm
teaching them how to read interesting and apparently interventions. There's
this guy named Julian, Professor Julian.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
What's his name, Chuck Lenin.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
Sands, Yes, Julian Sands In boxing Helena, and he makes
it's a big soliloquy about whether or not dyslexi is
a myth. I can't remember the guy's last name, but
I get the impression that parents of children with dyslexi
are not a big fan of this guy. But he's
basically said, we're diverting a lot of funding away from
(34:16):
kids who know how to who don't know how to read,
just because they don't they supposedly don't have a high IQ.
Let's treat all the kids. So that's the idea of
whether it's a myth, not that dyslexi doesn't exist, although
I think some people suspected it didn't for a while
now people believe it does, but not necessarily that it's
just intelligent upper middle class kids who have dyslexia. It's
(34:39):
just an inability to read for the same reason. Interesting,
that's the basis of it. It's still up in the air,
and it's a really touchy subject, very touchy subject, sure,
and rightfully so. I mean, like, I can imagine you
feel lost in the woods if there's no official diagnosis,
there's no official test of it, there's no official definition
of it. Your kid has it, and you know your
(35:02):
kid has it. Yeah, I can't imagine what it must
feel like to have some expert going like there's no
such thing as dyslexia, right, you know, yeah, yeah, thanks
a lot. It is very touchy and rightfully so.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Well.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Finally, there's this whole notion that if you have dyslexia,
then you may excel in other areas. You may be
more creative, or you may be more prone to be
like an entrepreneur, perhaps.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Yeah, because you think outside of the box.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Yeah, I mean there's a long list of people, like,
you know, famous creative types that have dyslexia.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
IGETHA. Christie, did you know that one?
Speaker 1 (35:38):
I didn't but I didn't either that.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
You know, I didn't just make it up. I learned there's.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
A long list. But just recently part of this bugs
me though, I don't know. I just hate it when
they're like, well, look what celebrities have this thing. I mean,
I get it. Maybe that it might, I don't know.
I just don't see the value in that.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Well, it's saying like, look at this guy, this guy,
this lady.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Maybe I guess so.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
He's not a street sweeper. You don't have to spend,
you don't have to look forward to a life of
shoveling horse maneuver because you have dyslexia. You can achieve
just stick to a kid.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
No, I get all that, and that's valid.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
Are you're questioning the cult of celebrity?
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Yeah, that's what I was.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
That just sort of bugs me, But no, there is benefits.
I'm sure if some kid is like Tom Cruise has dyslexia,
right and look at him.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
I have had some questions about xanax and its value myself.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Oh goodness.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
There have been some studies though over the years that
may or may not support this, Like supposedly, if you
have dyslexia, you may be quicker to find something in
your peripheral vision. Maybe you can like mc esher style
drawings or the impossible images hidden images, you might see
those quicker or more easily find patterns in noise. Sure,
(36:53):
like you could be a great data analysts perhaps.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
And they think like and this makes total sense. But
the problem is it's anecdotal at this point. But it
makes total sense that, yes, you're the same senses that
you were using to read and write. If you don't
know how to read and write, your brain's going to
compensate with other things. It's going to possibly excel at
other stuff just because it's structured different If your brain
(37:18):
is structured differently, which we know that's the case, if
you do not read or write, you would expect that
it would manifest itself in real world behaviors and traits.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Well, yeah, and the first thing I thought it was like, yeah, totally,
like if your vision impaired you hear things better.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Well, supposedly that's a myth.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Well I looked it up.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
There are studies where if you are vision impaired, you
are better at pinpointing like location of sound and certain sounds.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
But it's not as you can't hear something two miles away.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Yeah, it's not as cut and dry as you can't
he better, Yeah, because like your ears developed better.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
You know, if you remember that guy who can echo locate,
he's visually impaired and he's like, no, he uses clicks
or something like that, like a he basically taught himself
to echo locate. Really amazing.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
The first thing I thought about was the guy with
the ear in his arm? What was his name?
Speaker 3 (38:07):
Stellarc? Stell what's great?
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Oh man?
Speaker 3 (38:11):
I love that you and I like go back and
forth on remembering the guy's name. Last time we bought
most of it, I didn't remember his name, and you
rattled it right at Stellark Between us, Stellarc is going
to live forever like the transhumanist to you.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
But then that last thing about being entrepreneurial or maybe
a corporate executive. They did do a study in two
thousand and nine that found there was an anecdotal evidence
of over representation in those fields. But then that's the
thing too, where they're like, maybe they were just better
at overcoming adversity, right, and that stayed on through their
(38:44):
whole life to where it wasn't just dyslexia but like
and nothing would keep them down.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
So they excelled, right, they learned how to how to
try harder than their peers.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
So yeah, even if that is the case, great, Sure,
But the point is it's still anecdotals, so you have
to be careful with saying like, oh, yeah, people with
dyslexia are way better at this, right, or they're they're
more likely to be entrepreneurs. It's just it hasn't been settled. Yeah,
But I think the overall point of this episode is
if you are if you do have dyslexia, there is
(39:17):
plenty of hope. Do not give up hope, whether that
your kid has dyslexia or you have dyslexia, you can
learn to read and write and spell, and you can
become a Pulitzer Prize winning.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Columnist or Agatha Christie yep.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
Or John Irving. I saw his yslexia, John Oiving. Yeah,
Richard Branson, that was really good.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Ozzy Osbourne, for God's sake, look at that guy. Sure,
if I'm going around the house.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
He's successful. Yeah, despite himself. If you want to know
more about dyslexia, you can learn all about it on
the internets. And since I said that it's time for
listener mail.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
I'm going to call this Sid and Marty Kroft email.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
This guy wrote in to email us about a personal
connection he had to the Schoolhouse Rock episode. I'm not
gonna read that half of the letter because I don't
want to further embarrass the family, but he's his relation
to the person that we kind of called out as
the guy who ruined Schoolhouse Rock.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
Oh okay, wasn't he an exec?
Speaker 1 (40:16):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (40:16):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
But the second half of this, as speaking of unbelievable stories, guys,
I thought it. You'd be jealous to know that I
grew up hanging out on the sets of all the
Sidden Marty Croft shows because my mom was on a
bunch of them. He used to have lunch with the
slee stacks and throw around big foam boulders from Land
to the Loss. She was Nashville on the Captain Cool
(40:39):
and the Kong Show, which wrapped around the Saturday morning cartoons.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
I remember that, mm hm.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
They also that also led to the music group the
Bay City Rollers showing up to my birthday party when
I was like five. It caused such a big mom
scene the police had to come.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
That's the SA yeah, you are d a. Why you
know how they got their name They threw a dart
at a map and it landed on Bay City, Michigan.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Because they're like Scottish, aren't they.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
I think so they are.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
I remember my sister.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
We had a babysitter, and then my sister and the babysitter.
I don't know why my sister wasn't just my babysitter.
She was six years older. There was another girl who
babysat that was like a sister's age, and they would
sit around. This is my big memory of the Bay
City Rollers. They would there was one of their albums
that had each of their pictures sort of in a
dartboard like fashion in a circle, and they would spin
(41:32):
the record around and close their eyes and stop it
with their finger, and.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
Like they had to make out with that picture.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Yeah, they had to like kiss that picture or whatever.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
I hope your sister doesn't listen to this.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
No, it's great. The seventies man, so innocent.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
I love the seventies.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
So the Bay City Rollers came through his birthday party.
They called the cops.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
She went on.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
My mom went on to do a ton of cool
stuff that I'm sure you guys would know a bunch
of episodes of Plastic Man, Wow, all the women voices
on Celebrity Deathmatch, Cool, hosting a game show called Rodeo Drive,
playing Joan Rivers on Family Guy Wow, being in the
Catskills on Broadway nice for two years. Too much more
to mention, guys, except also she went on the road
with Tim Conway and Harvey Korman for a number of
(42:15):
years posing is Carol Burnette, and my little brother ended
up engaged to Harvey Corman's daughter, Wow, but it didn't
work out.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Anyway, I love the show, guys. If I can ever
be a resource, let me know. That is from Keith
or Ell Keith.
Speaker 3 (42:29):
That was amazing. You remember Celebrity Deathmatch?
Speaker 1 (42:32):
Yeah, man, so great. Big shout out to your mom too.
Speaker 3 (42:34):
Yeah, and to see your mom's Keith. Yeah. Well, if
you want to brag on your mom because she's done
some awesome stuff, we love hearing about that. Moms always
have great welcomeness here and stuff. You should know. That's right,
that's gonna end up being a crummy T shirt. If
you want to get in touch of this, you can
hang out on stuff youshould know dot com. And check
out our social links there, and you can get in
(42:56):
touch with me, Chuck and Jerry and everybody else here
at Stuff Should Know by sending an email to Stuff
podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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