March 7, 2019 • 42 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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and 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? How are you? I'm doing
(00:23):
pretty good man, just you know, hanging out over here. Yeah,
ready to wrap. I thought this is pretty cool. I'm
surprised that we had not discussed this yet because it's
right upart alley totally very stuff you should know type show. Um,
and I think it's an interesting uh you know, I
(00:44):
guess it's labeled a learning disorder most most definitely it's
a specific learning disorder according to the US government. Yeah.
I always just have a hard time, what you know,
knowing whether or not to like almost aid affliction them, like,
is that an affliction? I don't even know. 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
(01:06):
a specific learning disability that um 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
there's a basis to the brain that leads to this
situation where otherwise um bright and um yep and intelligent
(01:32):
students have what they call unexpected difficulty learning to read
and that it afflicts them their entire life. But there's
a lot of questions that's surround the definition. And one
of the problems with dyslexia research is that that's that's
that's not the official definition. There's about as many definitions
(01:53):
as there are studies of dyslexia. Yeah, this one from
Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity made sense to me
that as far as just sort of a simple way
to say it, uh, 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, um, and you should be
(02:16):
a better reader than you are, but you're not. So
why what gives? Yeah, So there's um, there's there's a
lot too that though, right, Like, there's this idea that
if if we know enough about the brain and we
have things like m r S 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.
(02:39):
But there's a confounding problem that they've run into and
dyslexic read 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, UM,
or if the brain structure there's is actually dyslexia. Right,
(03:03):
So they're having trouble with it. I'll explain it better later. No,
but I know what you mean. Well, good as long
as you do. But it also counts if like the
million or so people listening to this also do uh, hey, everybody,
dyslexia is very um studying it and understanding it and
UM learning how to teach children with dyslexia is very
(03:24):
important because up until semi recently, I'm just gonna go
say recently, if you were had dyslexia and you are
a student, UM, you might have been called stupid or
dumb and you might have been Yeah, you might have
been put at a separate table and said, well you
go here because we you can't keep up. UM this
(03:46):
one guy, man, this one really hit home or not
hit home, but UM hit you in the bread basket
in the bread basket, which is like home um pull it.
Pulletzer Prize winner Philip Schultz was diagnosed later in life,
and he said, growing up in the nineteen fifties, he
he said, basically he was placed in what he called
the dummy class. Three children in his class were separated,
(04:09):
put at a table in the corner. The teacher didn't
talk to them much. And essentially one day, like the
principle was coming around and she said, here these books,
pretend to read them, right, the principles coming Yeah. Man,
that is just tough. But there's something really significant about
that that that was a column written by a guy
(04:29):
named Philip Schultz who was a Pulitz Surprise 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, and more and more
research has kind of gotten to the root of their
(04:51):
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 as a child and
(05:12):
into adulthood. 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 were teachers, and uh, even back
in the day when you know, let me just say this, Uh,
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
(05:35):
uh would force 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. 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 um as far as like reading
and spelling and writing lessons go um uh, potentially risking
(06:01):
like slowing down the rest of the class who are
learning at a normal clip. Or do you take this
guy with dyslexia, 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.
(06:22):
It's a problem, and they had no idea how to
how to grapple with it for almost all of the
twentieth century and multiple generations of kids with dyslexia suffered
as a result. Yeah, it's really sad. Um. There are
a lot of symptoms for dyslexia, key symptoms, uh, and
these are very important because there is no blood tests,
there is no there's no even I mean, there are
(06:44):
a lot of testing they can do, but that there's
no standardized, specific tests that will really nail it down, right,
So so keep that in mind. There's no there's no
official definition of dyslexia, and there's no specific tests to
suss out dysleke, right, two big problems. Yeah, so you
gotta look at this collection of symptoms. Um. The first
(07:05):
obvious one is slow reading and accurate reading. Difficulty sounding
out words, UM, difficulty pronouncing longer words with multiple syllables,
which we'll get to that in a bit. UM. Inability
to read or speak made up nonsense words, which I
thought was interesting, poor short term memory, for verbal information,
(07:26):
whether it's written or spoken spoken. Uh, poor spelling, like
really poor spelling, to where you sometimes can't even tell
what the words they're trying to spell are, right, not
not just like you know, like using an F instead
of a pH or something like that. Yeah, And we
should also point out too, that is it's very much
an incorrect notion that if you have dyslexi you just
(07:46):
transpose letters or spell things backwards. That's what I thought
for most of my life 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. Totally made up. It's not totally made up,
but it's so such a such a just a one
(08:07):
component of dyslexia that it might as well just be
an urban legend. Yeah, totally um. 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 with directions directionally, you might have issue
(08:29):
with your budgets or money items, or you might not
can tell time, very well, frustrated, anger, difficulty planning things.
It's not just limited to reading issues. And then in
real life you, um, you might read something and have
very little recollection of what you just read. Um, you
(08:50):
you will probably have problems giving presentations, finding the right word,
recalling words, that kind of thing. Um. When you do read,
and when you learn to read, you will be reading
slower than anybody else, even reading at your reading level. Um,
you just do it more slowly. And then as an adult,
a lot of people are like, oh, good god, I'm
(09:12):
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
in order the same thing at every restaurant, and um,
if 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
(09:32):
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,
and we understand the treatment of it too. Yeah, and
as far as how many people have it it's it's
tough to get UM because of all these reasons we're
talking about to have to get a good number that's reliable.
(09:53):
But anywhere between five and fifteen to seventeen percent, it
looks like UM would is sort of it's not the
biggest range in the world. But they don't really know, no,
they have 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 UM. And then there's
a lot of people who do know they have dyslexia
in are either ashamed of it or have just set
(10:16):
up their life to where they don't have time or
room to go be diagnosed and then go learn to
overcome it. There's just like, whatever, I have this thing,
this issue where I'm slower at reading than other people. UM. So, yeah,
it's probably very much underreported and underestimated how many people
in the population have at Yeah, and we're talking mainly about,
(10:38):
almost exclusively about developmental dyslexia, which is, you know, the
kind we mostly think about. We're not talking about acquired dyslexia,
which is can happen as a result of an injury um,
so just want to point that out. 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,
(11:27):
so Chuck. The first time the word dyslexia was used
was in eight 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 um sounding out words from a head
(11:51):
injury or say a lesion on your brain, something like that.
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 um
neurologists and optimologists working in the nineteenth century, No, this
(12:14):
is a this is a there's a neurobiological basis to this. Yeah.
And they called it early on um 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, um word blindness, and they it was a
German who who coined that term, and they called it
vart blind height. Can you say that that's good? Okay,
(12:38):
you would do it only better than well, I would
put on some dumb voice. But that's perfect pronunciation. You
said that it's a w right, Yeah, and you said
it as a va perfect Okay, click my heels together
and said it checks out, Dorothy. Um. So they called it,
like you said, up into the sixties, congenital word blindness. Uh,
(12:59):
there a lot of people in the late eight d
or not a lot, but a handful of people studying
the stuff. Henschelwood and were the two big ones. Yeah,
and they were optimologists and a doctor um Henschelwood was
the optimologist and they and then there were also neurologist,
a man named Samuel Orton and uh they they it's
(13:20):
interesting to look back because they were sort of on
the right track with how they what they thought was wrong. Yeah.
Word blindness also as a term, is not that not
that far off? Yeah? I mean it really does a
good job describinting the thing because they're saying, like there's
some condition that these people have specifically because there are
otherwise totally intelligent. They're just they have a problem with words,
(13:43):
with seeing words and recognizing them like everybody else can. 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 printing,
widespread literacy. Yeah, newspapers and books and street signs exactly,
(14:06):
menus like you're saying in a restaurant. Yeah, Like like
everywhere there's the printed word and all of this. 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 um, all of a sudden,
people who had dyslexia suddenly became apparent. Whereas before this
(14:27):
it wouldn't have been a parent because there was no
way for dyslexia to manifest itself. People didn't 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 to learn to read and write or part of
like the aristocracy. Now it became democratized in public schooling
became widespread, and so as a result, dyslexia became a
(14:49):
thing for the very first time. It's actually a relatively
new condition that was born out of the modern era. Yeah,
or if you were a kid back then then you uh,
they were trying to teach your reading. You could and
you were you were just they were like, all right, well,
I guess he's not a reader, so get out to
the factory of the field and don't worry about it.
But the that was what Morgan, like w Pringle Morrigan
(15:11):
and James Henchelwood were doing was they were the first
ones to say, wait, 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. This is a specific learning disability, right. Uh.
(15:32):
Samuel Orton, the neurologists I mentioned, he created the Orton
Society in nineteen forty nine. Um, they were researchers and teachers, uh,
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. Um, but it really took until the like
(15:54):
the nineteen seventies. That was a book written by McDonald
Critchley called The Ayslexic Child, And that's when things really
started to come to the forefront more. 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 here are the symptoms and the
signs of dyslexia, and let's let's take it seriously in
(16:17):
the general education system. Yeah. And one of the interesting
things that they learned, uh, 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 uh
(16:40):
phonological sounds. Italian has twenty five 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. Yeah,
like thinking about this, so that short E sound you
(17:03):
can spell it ai as in said EO is in leopard,
You is in Barry, I E is in friend. Okay,
it is tough. But what you're doing is when you're
when you're spelling those things, you're you're encoding a sound.
A phoneeme is what it's called. And like you said,
(17:23):
in English, we have forty phonemes. And when you spell,
when you read, your encoding and decoding a phoneme. And
we have attached phone emes onto specific things out in
real life. Leopard, right, if 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,
(17:45):
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 that is the basis of your
condition is you have trouble sorting through phonemes. You have
trouble um with what's called phonological awareness, where you hear
(18:06):
in part as two separate distinct sounds that you can
learn to spell and learn to write. You you can't
sort them sometimes they run together. It's a it's a
problem on the very basis of reading, writing, spelling, the phonology.
You have trouble. Your brain has trouble processing it and
(18:29):
sorting it. That's the basis of dyslexia. So if you
are a kid with dyslexia in in learning English with
as difficult as it is, where there's all these different
rules for the same phoneme, it's gonna be way harder
than it isn't something like Italian, like you're saying, Yeah,
And as a result, as you would imagine, learning a
second language if you have dyslexia is really tough. But
(18:50):
they have found that Italian is can almost be like
a therapy, a training like jam camp for learning 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 UM a little more
easily with the expectation that the rules are structurally the same.
(19:13):
But they're just different for English than they are for Italian.
In nuance, but ultimately they're getting across the same stuff. Yeah,
the the whole concept of language and um and symbols, e,
letters and words, it's just fascinating to me, endlessly fascinating. Yeah,
because again and the humans like creating this and saying
(19:35):
that thing of it there. If you draw these symbols
in this order, that's what that is. So that leopard like,
that's and then the word leopard like. Yeah, it's just
all fascinating. 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. Yeah,
what's the science? Uh? What was it called? When you
(19:58):
study that linguists? Is it just linguistics? I'm pretty sure
I could have been a linguist if I had only
known what it was called. I just realized happy thing
that would have dumped them. What's that thing called? Yeah?
I could have been good at that? Yeah, yeah I couldn't.
It was on the tip of my tongue. So um,
(20:19):
I guess we can talk about the the fm R
I and the m R I. Obviously, the Wonder Machine
figures in pretty big when it comes to this kind
of thing, and in the mid nineties is about when
the fm R I came on the scene. With dyslexia
and studies with dyslexia once they one of the problems
was little kids. They're like, oh, we can't throw them
(20:39):
in there, that they will explode their brain. And then
they're like, oh no, the fm r I machine is
fine for kids. We tested it out on some bad
kids and they were fine, and so they started putting
children in there. Um, because you could obviously do this
at any age, but it's important for school aged children,
um to like figure out what's going on in their brains. Well,
(21:00):
that's one of the reasons why that's the sample population
is because it takes years for dyslexia to be prominent.
Every kid has problems learning, reading, and writing at first,
but then as other kids progress and this one kid doesn't,
but there are otherwise bright same socioeconomic opportunities and all
(21:23):
that stuff. Um, that's when it becomes possible that they
have dyslexia. But by that time a couple more years
have gone by, right, So you're not you're not testing
for dyslexia on babies. You have to wait until it
basically manifests itself. Yeah, And of course with the f
m R I they I think there was some hope
(21:44):
that it could Like you mentioned earlier, just be like, well,
there it is, but you know it wasn't. 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. 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
(22:05):
other studies too. There's um left hemisphere areas, the ventral
occipito temporal region, the temporal parietal reagion, and the inferior
frontal cortices which have to do with language processing, but
also visual processing of language too. Yeah. So again they
(22:25):
think that the basis of all of this is that
when you're hearing sounds, when somebody's holding up a piece
of bread that has been dried through heat and says toast,
you're hearing toast, and you can learn to write T
O A it's a little confounding, and then st over time,
(22:46):
maybe the first few times you write t O E
S T, it doesn't matter. You're going to learn to
write T O A S T and you can write
it down and then someone else can read it. And
they think of toast with dyslexia you're not hearing to
your your you, and you certainly can't extrapolate something that
you're not hearing correctly into words and letters. Yeah, yeah, Okay,
(23:09):
it's a good way to put it. The tost analogy there,
you got, Uh, there is a genetic component. Um, 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 on right, And it's I think
(23:30):
it's just correlated. It's not necessarily the cause. It's it's
like people who have who have been shown to have
dyslexia have these this set of genes that are doing this. Yeah,
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
(23:52):
were on the right track even way back then, so
not bad. And then even still though with this new
understanding of like, ok, 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 um?
(24:15):
Or is that the structure of a brain with dyslexia,
because we know that your brain changes when you read,
when you learn to read. They they've done studies in
the mri I with um illiterate adults who have learned
to read. So they do a scan of them while
while they cannot read, and then they scan them again
while they can read, and then look for differences in
(24:36):
the brain. And there are structural differences that take place
in the brain, which makes sense because it makes you think.
So in alliterate 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 a hundred hundred and fifty years. That's
a new constructure. So it makes sense that the brain
(24:59):
would be neuroplastic like that in that respect, because that's
a new thing we've all started to try to do
to alter our brains. Yeah, and that's where the practice
part comes in, which we'll get too 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.
(25:19):
You're you're just um, you're strengthening, you're creating new neural
connections and the strengthening those pathways. And the fact that
it all comes down to apparently patients and practice and
that like it's saying, like these kids with dyslexia are
going through the same thing that every kid does with
with learning to read and write and spell, it just
(25:42):
takes them way longer. The fact that generations of kids
with dyslexia were just abandoned by the school system because
of a lack of patients is really what it comes
down to. Is beyond sad patients and resources, I think,
and that's part of it. Sure, Yeah, I just don't
want to sound like we're saying and like teachers just
were impatient about it, all right, It's like, uh, it
(26:04):
was complex and still very sad. Yes, that teachers have
to buy their own school supplies still gets to me
every year. The fact that we're like living with this
as a country, like that's just become normal to us,
is it's embarrassing. It's just a mark of shame on
our country. If you ask me, all right, let's take
(26:25):
a break. No I'm gonna go, I'm gonna give you
your cat of nine tails so we couldn't flog each other.
I realized, I'm I sound really forceful in this episode.
Do I feel like I'm sounding forceful? Do I sound forceful?
Do I? Well? That did? All right, We'll be right
back everyone. Al Right. So, like you said earlier, there
(27:13):
is no cure for dyslexia. There is treatment and they
even put that in quotes. Um, but you shouldn't think
of it as a disease cure type of thing. It's
practice and patients. Yeah, and those are the two strategies
that we will say it one more time for the
(27:34):
tenth time. Patients and practice. Uh, it's you have to
have that patience there as a parent, as a teacher,
as someone with dyslexia. UM, I know it's frustrating, but
the more patient you are give yourself time, teachers can.
And then there are programs now where students can get
(27:55):
extra time to take tests and things like that. And
I think even officially like with the S A T
and stuff like that. Yeah, UM, there are programs where
you are not to put it a disadvantage. There's um,
the individuals with disabilities Education Improvement Act of two thousand four,
the Idea Acts or idea um IT. It specifies UH
(28:16):
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
assistant working with you. Um. 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. Yeah.
(28:38):
I wonder if that's across the board. UM. Yeah, I
think that schools probably have specific funding for IDEA stuff.
I mean, like when 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
(28:58):
schools supposedly not allowed to spend it on anything but
that stuff. So yeah, probably if you get a diagnosis
of dyslexia, it's pretty sweet um and a huge relief
because all of a sudden, it's just like a brand
new world. You're taken away from the dumb kids table,
like Howard Schultz was, UM, and all of a sudden,
(29:19):
you have your own your own one on one UM
reading and spelling lessons that you just didn't have before. Yeah.
The other, like we said, is practice. Uh, and over time,
you know, you can learn to read UM and you
make those new neural pathways and and it's just it's
(29:40):
it's hardening to know that if you have this patience
and you put in the time, it is something that
can be overcome if everyone like works together, right, and
if you can learn to read even as an adult,
You're 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's going to be very slow.
But it's not like you'll know ever read a book
or something like that. But I saw one woman describing
(30:03):
her condition as an adult, and she said she was
very proud to be at like a seventh grade reading
level now as as an adult, which is like you
can navigate through life as with a seventh grade at
a seventh grade reading level pretty easy. Um. The problem
comes when you don't ever you've never gotten any help
and you were basically in a literate adult because of dyslexia. Yeah,
(30:27):
they have technology now can help out there what they
call assist of listening devices because sometimes if you have
someone to ear reading something out loud while you're reading along, UM,
sort of like a teacher and an app UM like
that one on one experience that can really really help.
UM seeing a transcription sometimes of what someone's saying, a
(30:49):
real time transcription. Yeah, so all these apps and devices
are really helping things along. So it's it's like a
brand new world for kids with dyslexia compared to like
last century or even a few decades ago. You know. Yeah,
the one thing I didn't quite get, what's this thing
that you said from Sir Jim Rose. I didn't fully
get what this guy was saying. He was part of it.
(31:11):
So he's not saying this, he's he's uh, he's definitely
all into dyslexia. UM. But there is a a thread
um that of of experts in childhood education, psychology, UM,
childhood cognition who who suspect that there's no such thing
as dyslexia, that those earliest neurologists and ophthalmologists and doctors
(31:36):
who who named it and made it a thing, we're 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
suffer from an inability to learn to read. And so
(31:57):
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 there's or else. No
one has dyslexia, and it's just an inability to learn
to read. Most experts say dyslexia is a thing, which
means then the debate is, okay, doesn't have anything to
(32:18):
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 UM who are having trouble
learning to read? Why differentiate they're both having trouble learning
(32:42):
to read. Start attacking the problem with both of them.
And there was this one Australian UM expert who basically said, like, yes,
dyslexia is a thing. It is his own thing, 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
see an um an inability to learn to read, go
(33:06):
after that. Don't say, well as a dyslexia. Let's test
the kids intelligence. It doesn't matter. Focus on learning. How
I'm teaching them how to read and apparently interventions. There's
this guy named, uh Julian professor Julian Um. What's his name,
Chuck Lennon Sands, Yes, Julian Sands in boxing Helena he
(33:28):
makes He has a big soliloquy about whether or not
dyslexi is a myth. I can't remember the guy's last name,
but um. I get the impression that parents of children
with dyslexia or not a big fan of this guy,
but he's He's basically said, um, we're diverting a lot
of funding away from kids who know how to who
don't know how to read, just because they don't they
(33:49):
supposedly don't have a high I Q UM, Let's treat
all the kids. So that's the idea of whether it's
a myth, not that dyslexia doesn't exist, although I think
some people suspected it didn't for a while it now
people believe it does, but not necessarily that it's just
intelligent upper middle class kids who have dyslexia. It's just
an inability to read for the same reason. Interesting, that's
(34:12):
the basis of it. It's still up in the air,
and it's a really touchy subject, very touchy subject, um
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. But your kid has it, and you know
your kid has it. I can't imagine why it must
(34:34):
feel like to have some expert going like there's no
such thing as dyslexia. You know. It is very touchy
and rightfully so. Uh Well, Finally, there's this whole notion that, um,
if you have dyslexia, then you may excel in other areas. Um,
you may be more creative, or you may be more
prone to be, like um, an entrepreneur, perhaps because you
(34:57):
think outside of the box. Yeah, I mean there's a
long list of people, like, you know, famous creative types
that have dyslexia, get the Christie. Did you know that one?
I didn't, but I didn't either that. You know, I
didn't just make it up. I learned there's 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.
(35:20):
Maybe that it might, I don't know. I just don't
see the value in that. Well it's saying like, look
at this guy, this guy, this lady. Maybe I guess
so she'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't achieve.
Just stick to a kid. Now. I get all that,
and that's valid. You're questioning the cult of celebrity. Yeah,
(35:42):
that's what it was. That just sort of bugs me.
But no, there is benefits. I'm sure if some kids
like Tom Cruiz has dyslexia and look at him, may
may I have had some questions about Zanix and its
value myself. Oh goodness. Uh. There have been some studies
though over the year. It may or may not support this.
Like um supposedly, if you have dyslexia, you may be
(36:05):
UM quicker to find Um, something in your peripheral vision.
Maybe you can like mc escher style drawings or the
impossible images hidden images, you might see those quicker or
more easily find patterns in in noise, like you could
be a great data analysts perhaps, And they think like
(36:27):
and this makes total sense, But the problem is as
its anecdotal at this point, but it makes total sense
that yes, you're 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 is going to compensate
with other things, is going to possibly excel at other stuff,
just because it's structure different If your brain is structured differently,
(36:48):
which we know that's the case, if you do not
read or write, Uh, you would expect that it would
manifest itself in real world behaviors and traits. Well. Yeah,
and the first thing I thought was like, yeah, totally,
Like if your vision impaired, you you hear things better.
Well supposedly that's a myth. Well I looked it up. Um,
there are studies where if you were vision impaired, you
(37:10):
are better at pinpointing like location of sound and certain sounds.
But it's not you can't hear something two miles away. Yeah,
it's not as cut and dry. It's just can't hear
there better because like your ears developed better. You know,
you remember that guy who can echo locate. He's visually impaired,
and he's like he uses clicks or something like that
like a bat. He basically taught himself to echolocate. Really amazing.
(37:33):
The first thing I thought about was the guy with
the ear in his arm? What was his name? Stell Arct?
What's great, oh man, that you and I like go
back and forth. I'm remembering the guy's name. Last time
we brought him most and I didn't remember his name,
and you rattled it right at stell Arc between us,
stell arc is going to live forever, like the trans
human is to you. But then that last thing about
(37:54):
being entrepreneurial or um maybe a corporate executive. They did
do a study in two thousand nine that found there
was a anecdotal evidence of over a representation in those fields.
But then that's the thing too, where they're like, maybe
they were just better at overcoming adversity and that stayed
on through their whole life to where it wasn't just dyslexia,
(38:16):
but like and nothing would keep them down. So they excelled, right,
they learned how to how to try harder than their peers.
So yeah, even if that is the case, great, sure,
But the point is it's still anecdotal, so you have
to be careful with saying like, oh, yeah, people with
dyslexia are way better at this, or they're they're more
likely to be entrepreneurs. Just hasn't been settled. Um, But
(38:40):
I think the overall point of this episode is if
you are if you do have dyslexia, Um, there is
plenty of hope. Do you 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 calumnist or Agatha Christie
Ye or John Irving. I saw his six alexia, John Oving. Yeah,
(39:03):
Richard Branson, that was really good. Ozzy Osborne, For God's sake,
look at that guy fumbling around the house. He's successful
despite himself. Um. If you want to more about dyslexia,
you can learn all about it on the internet. And
since I said that it's time for listener mail, I'm
gonna call this sid and Marty Croft email. This guy
(39:26):
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 his he's his relation to
the person that we kind of called out as the
guy who ruined Schoolhouse Rock. Okay, wasn't he an exact Yeah? Yeah,
But the second half of this is uh, speaking of
(39:49):
unbelievable stories, guys, I thought it. You'd be jealous to
know that I grew up hanging out on the sets
of all the SidD and 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 Lost. She was Nashville
on the Captain Cool and the Kong Show, which wrapped
(40:10):
around the Saturday Morning cartoons. I remember that 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. That's the s Yeah, you are dy.
You know how they got their name? They threw a
(40:31):
dart at a map and it landed on Bay City, Michigan.
Because they're like Scottish, aren't they? I think so? I
think they are. I remember my sister. Uh, 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 my sister's age, and they would sit around.
(40:52):
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 and kle and they would spend the record around
and close their eyes and stop it with their finger
and like they didn't make out with that picture. Yeah,
they had to like kiss that picture or whatever. I
hope your sister doesn't listen to this. It's great. The
(41:13):
seventies man so innocent. I love the seventies. So Basicity
Rollers came to his birthday party. They called the cops. Uh.
She went on. 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, all the women's
voices on Celebrity Deathmatch, hosting a game show called Rodeo Drive,
playing Joan Rivers on Family Guy, being in The Catskills
(41:37):
on Broadway for two years. Too much more to mention, guys,
except also she went on the road with Tim Conway
and Harvey Corman for a number of years posing is
Carol Burnett, and my little brother ended up engaged to
Harvey Corman's daughter, but it didn't work out anyway. I
love the show, guys. If I can never be a resource,
let me know that is from Keith or l Keith.
(41:58):
That was amazing. You remember Celebrity Deathmatch? Yeah, big shout
out to your mom too. Yeah, and up to your
mom's Keith. Uh. 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 um welcomeness here
at stuff you should know that that's gonna end up
being a crummy T shirt. Uh. If you want to
(42:20):
get in touch with this, you can hang out on
Stuff you Should Know dot com and check out our
social links there. I have a website called the Josh
Clark Way dot com. You can get in touch with
me there, and you can get in touch with me
Chuck and Jerry and everybody else here at Stuff. You
should know by sending an email to Stuff podcast how
stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands
(42:43):
of other topics. Is that how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and 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? How are you? I'm doing
(00:23):
pretty good man, just you know, hanging out over here. Yeah,
ready to wrap. I thought this is pretty cool. I'm
surprised that we had not discussed this yet because it's
right upart alley totally very stuff you should know type show. Um,
and I think it's an interesting uh you know, I
(00:44):
guess it's labeled a learning disorder most most definitely it's
a specific learning disorder according to the US government. Yeah.
I always just have a hard time, what you know,
knowing whether or not to like almost aid affliction them, like,
is that an affliction? I don't even know. 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
(01:06):
a specific learning disability that um 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
there's a basis to the brain that leads to this
situation where otherwise um bright and um yep and intelligent
(01:32):
students have what they call unexpected difficulty learning to read
and that it afflicts them their entire life. But there's
a lot of questions that's surround the definition. And one
of the problems with dyslexia research is that that's that's
that's not the official definition. There's about as many definitions
(01:53):
as there are studies of dyslexia. Yeah, this one from
Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity made sense to me
that as far as just sort of a simple way
to say it, uh, 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, um, and you should be
(02:16):
a better reader than you are, but you're not. So
why what gives? Yeah, So there's um, there's there's a
lot too that though, right, Like, there's this idea that
if if we know enough about the brain and we
have things like m r S 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.
(02:39):
But there's a confounding problem that they've run into and
dyslexic read 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, UM,
or if the brain structure there's is actually dyslexia. Right,
(03:03):
So they're having trouble with it. I'll explain it better later. No,
but I know what you mean. Well, good as long
as you do. But it also counts if like the
million or so people listening to this also do uh, hey, everybody,
dyslexia is very um studying it and understanding it and
UM learning how to teach children with dyslexia is very
(03:24):
important because up until semi recently, I'm just gonna go
say recently, if you were had dyslexia and you are
a student, UM, you might have been called stupid or
dumb and you might have been Yeah, you might have
been put at a separate table and said, well you
go here because we you can't keep up. UM this
(03:46):
one guy, man, this one really hit home or not
hit home, but UM hit you in the bread basket
in the bread basket, which is like home um pull it.
Pulletzer Prize winner Philip Schultz was diagnosed later in life,
and he said, growing up in the nineteen fifties, he
he said, basically he was placed in what he called
the dummy class. Three children in his class were separated,
(04:09):
put at a table in the corner. The teacher didn't
talk to them much. And essentially one day, like the
principle was coming around and she said, here these books,
pretend to read them, right, the principles coming Yeah. Man,
that is just tough. But there's something really significant about
that that that was a column written by a guy
(04:29):
named Philip Schultz who was a Pulitz Surprise 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, and more and more
research has kind of gotten to the root of their
(04:51):
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 as a child and
(05:12):
into adulthood. 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 were teachers, and uh, even back
in the day when you know, let me just say this, Uh,
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
(05:35):
uh would force 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. 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 um as far as like reading
and spelling and writing lessons go um uh, potentially risking
(06:01):
like slowing down the rest of the class who are
learning at a normal clip. Or do you take this
guy with dyslexia, 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.
(06:22):
It's a problem, and they had no idea how to
how to grapple with it for almost all of the
twentieth century and multiple generations of kids with dyslexia suffered
as a result. Yeah, it's really sad. Um. There are
a lot of symptoms for dyslexia, key symptoms, uh, and
these are very important because there is no blood tests,
there is no there's no even I mean, there are
(06:44):
a lot of testing they can do, but that there's
no standardized, specific tests that will really nail it down, right,
So so keep that in mind. There's no there's no
official definition of dyslexia, and there's no specific tests to
suss out dysleke, right, two big problems. Yeah, so you
gotta look at this collection of symptoms. Um. The first
(07:05):
obvious one is slow reading and accurate reading. Difficulty sounding
out words, UM, difficulty pronouncing longer words with multiple syllables,
which we'll get to that in a bit. UM. Inability
to read or speak made up nonsense words, which I
thought was interesting, poor short term memory, for verbal information,
(07:26):
whether it's written or spoken spoken. Uh, poor spelling, like
really poor spelling, to where you sometimes can't even tell
what the words they're trying to spell are, right, not
not just like you know, like using an F instead
of a pH or something like that. Yeah, And we
should also point out too, that is it's very much
an incorrect notion that if you have dyslexi you just
(07:46):
transpose letters or spell things backwards. That's what I thought
for most of my life 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. Totally made up. It's not totally made up,
but it's so such a such a just a one
(08:07):
component of dyslexia that it might as well just be
an urban legend. Yeah, totally um. 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 with directions directionally, you might have issue
(08:29):
with your budgets or money items, or you might not
can tell time, very well, frustrated, anger, difficulty planning things.
It's not just limited to reading issues. And then in
real life you, um, you might read something and have
very little recollection of what you just read. Um, you
(08:50):
you will probably have problems giving presentations, finding the right word,
recalling words, that kind of thing. Um. When you do read,
and when you learn to read, you will be reading
slower than anybody else, even reading at your reading level. Um,
you just do it more slowly. And then as an adult,
a lot of people are like, oh, good god, I'm
(09:12):
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
in order the same thing at every restaurant, and um,
if 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
(09:32):
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,
and we understand the treatment of it too. Yeah, and
as far as how many people have it it's it's
tough to get UM because of all these reasons we're
talking about to have to get a good number that's reliable.
(09:53):
But anywhere between five and fifteen to seventeen percent, it
looks like UM would is sort of it's not the
biggest range in the world. But they don't really know, no,
they have 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 UM. And then there's
a lot of people who do know they have dyslexia
in are either ashamed of it or have just set
(10:16):
up their life to where they don't have time or
room to go be diagnosed and then go learn to
overcome it. There's just like, whatever, I have this thing,
this issue where I'm slower at reading than other people. UM. So, yeah,
it's probably very much underreported and underestimated how many people
in the population have at Yeah, and we're talking mainly about,
(10:38):
almost exclusively about developmental dyslexia, which is, you know, the
kind we mostly think about. We're not talking about acquired dyslexia,
which is can happen as a result of an injury um,
so just want to point that out. 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,
(11:27):
so Chuck. The first time the word dyslexia was used
was in eight 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 um sounding out words from a head
(11:51):
injury or say a lesion on your brain, something like that.
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 um
neurologists and optimologists working in the nineteenth century, No, this
(12:14):
is a this is a there's a neurobiological basis to this. Yeah.
And they called it early on um 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, um word blindness, and they it was a
German who who coined that term, and they called it
vart blind height. Can you say that that's good? Okay,
(12:38):
you would do it only better than well, I would
put on some dumb voice. But that's perfect pronunciation. You
said that it's a w right, Yeah, and you said
it as a va perfect Okay, click my heels together
and said it checks out, Dorothy. Um. So they called it,
like you said, up into the sixties, congenital word blindness. Uh,
(12:59):
there a lot of people in the late eight d
or not a lot, but a handful of people studying
the stuff. Henschelwood and were the two big ones. Yeah,
and they were optimologists and a doctor um Henschelwood was
the optimologist and they and then there were also neurologist,
a man named Samuel Orton and uh they they it's
(13:20):
interesting to look back because they were sort of on
the right track with how they what they thought was wrong. Yeah.
Word blindness also as a term, is not that not
that far off? Yeah? I mean it really does a
good job describinting the thing because they're saying, like there's
some condition that these people have specifically because there are
otherwise totally intelligent. They're just they have a problem with words,
(13:43):
with seeing words and recognizing them like everybody else can. 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 printing,
widespread literacy. Yeah, newspapers and books and street signs exactly,
(14:06):
menus like you're saying in a restaurant. Yeah, Like like
everywhere there's the printed word and all of this. 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 um, all of a sudden,
people who had dyslexia suddenly became apparent. Whereas before this
(14:27):
it wouldn't have been a parent because there was no
way for dyslexia to manifest itself. People didn't 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 to learn to read and write or part of
like the aristocracy. Now it became democratized in public schooling
became widespread, and so as a result, dyslexia became a
(14:49):
thing for the very first time. It's actually a relatively
new condition that was born out of the modern era. Yeah,
or if you were a kid back then then you uh,
they were trying to teach your reading. You could and
you were you were just they were like, all right, well,
I guess he's not a reader, so get out to
the factory of the field and don't worry about it.
But the that was what Morgan, like w Pringle Morrigan
(15:11):
and James Henchelwood were doing was they were the first
ones to say, wait, 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. This is a specific learning disability, right. Uh.
(15:32):
Samuel Orton, the neurologists I mentioned, he created the Orton
Society in nineteen forty nine. Um, they were researchers and teachers, uh,
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. Um, but it really took until the like
(15:54):
the nineteen seventies. That was a book written by McDonald
Critchley called The Ayslexic Child, And that's when things really
started to come to the forefront more. 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 here are the symptoms and the
signs of dyslexia, and let's let's take it seriously in
(16:17):
the general education system. Yeah. And one of the interesting
things that they learned, uh, 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 uh
(16:40):
phonological sounds. Italian has twenty five 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. Yeah,
like thinking about this, so that short E sound you
(17:03):
can spell it ai as in said EO is in leopard,
You is in Barry, I E is in friend. Okay,
it is tough. But what you're doing is when you're
when you're spelling those things, you're you're encoding a sound.
A phoneeme is what it's called. And like you said,
(17:23):
in English, we have forty phonemes. And when you spell,
when you read, your encoding and decoding a phoneme. And
we have attached phone emes onto specific things out in
real life. Leopard, right, if 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,
(17:45):
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 that is the basis of your
condition is you have trouble sorting through phonemes. You have
trouble um with what's called phonological awareness, where you hear
(18:06):
in part as two separate distinct sounds that you can
learn to spell and learn to write. You you can't
sort them sometimes they run together. It's a it's a
problem on the very basis of reading, writing, spelling, the phonology.
You have trouble. Your brain has trouble processing it and
(18:29):
sorting it. That's the basis of dyslexia. So if you
are a kid with dyslexia in in learning English with
as difficult as it is, where there's all these different
rules for the same phoneme, it's gonna be way harder
than it isn't something like Italian, like you're saying, Yeah,
And as a result, as you would imagine, learning a
second language if you have dyslexia is really tough. But
(18:50):
they have found that Italian is can almost be like
a therapy, a training like jam camp for learning 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 UM a little more
easily with the expectation that the rules are structurally the same.
(19:13):
But they're just different for English than they are for Italian.
In nuance, but ultimately they're getting across the same stuff. Yeah,
the the whole concept of language and um and symbols, e,
letters and words, it's just fascinating to me, endlessly fascinating. Yeah,
because again and the humans like creating this and saying
(19:35):
that thing of it there. If you draw these symbols
in this order, that's what that is. So that leopard like,
that's and then the word leopard like. Yeah, it's just
all fascinating. 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. Yeah,
what's the science? Uh? What was it called? When you
(19:58):
study that linguists? Is it just linguistics? I'm pretty sure
I could have been a linguist if I had only
known what it was called. I just realized happy thing
that would have dumped them. What's that thing called? Yeah?
I could have been good at that? Yeah, yeah I couldn't.
It was on the tip of my tongue. So um,
(20:19):
I guess we can talk about the the fm R
I and the m R I. Obviously, the Wonder Machine
figures in pretty big when it comes to this kind
of thing, and in the mid nineties is about when
the fm R I came on the scene. With dyslexia
and studies with dyslexia once they one of the problems
was little kids. They're like, oh, we can't throw them
(20:39):
in there, that they will explode their brain. And then
they're like, oh no, the fm r I machine is
fine for kids. We tested it out on some bad
kids and they were fine, and so they started putting
children in there. Um, because you could obviously do this
at any age, but it's important for school aged children,
um to like figure out what's going on in their brains. Well,
(21:00):
that's one of the reasons why that's the sample population
is because it takes years for dyslexia to be prominent.
Every kid has problems learning, reading, and writing at first,
but then as other kids progress and this one kid doesn't,
but there are otherwise bright same socioeconomic opportunities and all
(21:23):
that stuff. Um, that's when it becomes possible that they
have dyslexia. But by that time a couple more years
have gone by, right, So you're not you're not testing
for dyslexia on babies. You have to wait until it
basically manifests itself. Yeah, And of course with the f
m R I they I think there was some hope
(21:44):
that it could Like you mentioned earlier, just be like, well,
there it is, but you know it wasn't. 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. 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
(22:05):
other studies too. There's um left hemisphere areas, the ventral
occipito temporal region, the temporal parietal reagion, and the inferior
frontal cortices which have to do with language processing, but
also visual processing of language too. Yeah. So again they
(22:25):
think that the basis of all of this is that
when you're hearing sounds, when somebody's holding up a piece
of bread that has been dried through heat and says toast,
you're hearing toast, and you can learn to write T
O A it's a little confounding, and then st over time,
(22:46):
maybe the first few times you write t O E
S T, it doesn't matter. You're going to learn to
write T O A S T and you can write
it down and then someone else can read it. And
they think of toast with dyslexia you're not hearing to
your your you, and you certainly can't extrapolate something that
you're not hearing correctly into words and letters. Yeah, yeah, Okay,
(23:09):
it's a good way to put it. The tost analogy there,
you got, Uh, there is a genetic component. Um, 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 on right, And it's I think
(23:30):
it's just correlated. It's not necessarily the cause. It's it's
like people who have who have been shown to have
dyslexia have these this set of genes that are doing this. Yeah,
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
(23:52):
were on the right track even way back then, so
not bad. And then even still though with this new
understanding of like, ok, 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 um?
(24:15):
Or is that the structure of a brain with dyslexia,
because we know that your brain changes when you read,
when you learn to read. They they've done studies in
the mri I with um illiterate adults who have learned
to read. So they do a scan of them while
while they cannot read, and then they scan them again
while they can read, and then look for differences in
(24:36):
the brain. And there are structural differences that take place
in the brain, which makes sense because it makes you think.
So in alliterate 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 a hundred hundred and fifty years. That's
a new constructure. So it makes sense that the brain
(24:59):
would be neuroplastic like that in that respect, because that's
a new thing we've all started to try to do
to alter our brains. Yeah, and that's where the practice
part comes in, which we'll get too 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.
(25:19):
You're you're just um, you're strengthening, you're creating new neural
connections and the strengthening those pathways. And the fact that
it all comes down to apparently patients and practice and
that like it's saying, like these kids with dyslexia are
going through the same thing that every kid does with
with learning to read and write and spell, it just
(25:42):
takes them way longer. The fact that generations of kids
with dyslexia were just abandoned by the school system because
of a lack of patients is really what it comes
down to. Is beyond sad patients and resources, I think,
and that's part of it. Sure, Yeah, I just don't
want to sound like we're saying and like teachers just
were impatient about it, all right, It's like, uh, it
(26:04):
was complex and still very sad. Yes, that teachers have
to buy their own school supplies still gets to me
every year. The fact that we're like living with this
as a country, like that's just become normal to us,
is it's embarrassing. It's just a mark of shame on
our country. If you ask me, all right, let's take
(26:25):
a break. No I'm gonna go, I'm gonna give you
your cat of nine tails so we couldn't flog each other.
I realized, I'm I sound really forceful in this episode.
Do I feel like I'm sounding forceful? Do I sound forceful?
Do I? Well? That did? All right, We'll be right
back everyone. Al Right. So, like you said earlier, there
(27:13):
is no cure for dyslexia. There is treatment and they
even put that in quotes. Um, but you shouldn't think
of it as a disease cure type of thing. It's
practice and patients. Yeah, and those are the two strategies
that we will say it one more time for the
(27:34):
tenth time. Patients and practice. Uh, it's you have to
have that patience there as a parent, as a teacher,
as someone with dyslexia. UM, I know it's frustrating, but
the more patient you are give yourself time, teachers can.
And then there are programs now where students can get
(27:55):
extra time to take tests and things like that. And
I think even officially like with the S A T
and stuff like that. Yeah, UM, there are programs where
you are not to put it a disadvantage. There's um,
the individuals with disabilities Education Improvement Act of two thousand four,
the Idea Acts or idea um IT. It specifies UH
(28:16):
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
assistant working with you. Um. 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. Yeah.
(28:38):
I wonder if that's across the board. UM. Yeah, I
think that schools probably have specific funding for IDEA stuff.
I mean, like when 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
(28:58):
schools supposedly not allowed to spend it on anything but
that stuff. So yeah, probably if you get a diagnosis
of dyslexia, it's pretty sweet um and a huge relief
because all of a sudden, it's just like a brand
new world. You're taken away from the dumb kids table,
like Howard Schultz was, UM, and all of a sudden,
(29:19):
you have your own your own one on one UM
reading and spelling lessons that you just didn't have before. Yeah.
The other, like we said, is practice. Uh, and over time,
you know, you can learn to read UM and you
make those new neural pathways and and it's just it's
(29:40):
it's hardening to know that if you have this patience
and you put in the time, it is something that
can be overcome if everyone like works together, right, and
if you can learn to read even as an adult,
You're 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's going to be very slow.
But it's not like you'll know ever read a book
or something like that. But I saw one woman describing
(30:03):
her condition as an adult, and she said she was
very proud to be at like a seventh grade reading
level now as as an adult, which is like you
can navigate through life as with a seventh grade at
a seventh grade reading level pretty easy. Um. The problem
comes when you don't ever you've never gotten any help
and you were basically in a literate adult because of dyslexia. Yeah,
(30:27):
they have technology now can help out there what they
call assist of listening devices because sometimes if you have
someone to ear reading something out loud while you're reading along, UM,
sort of like a teacher and an app UM like
that one on one experience that can really really help.
UM seeing a transcription sometimes of what someone's saying, a
(30:49):
real time transcription. Yeah, so all these apps and devices
are really helping things along. So it's it's like a
brand new world for kids with dyslexia compared to like
last century or even a few decades ago. You know. Yeah,
the one thing I didn't quite get, what's this thing
that you said from Sir Jim Rose. I didn't fully
get what this guy was saying. He was part of it.
(31:11):
So he's not saying this, he's he's uh, he's definitely
all into dyslexia. UM. But there is a a thread
um that of of experts in childhood education, psychology, UM,
childhood cognition who who suspect that there's no such thing
as dyslexia, that those earliest neurologists and ophthalmologists and doctors
(31:36):
who who named it and made it a thing, we're 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
suffer from an inability to learn to read. And so
(31:57):
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 there's or else. No
one has dyslexia, and it's just an inability to learn
to read. Most experts say dyslexia is a thing, which
means then the debate is, okay, doesn't have anything to
(32:18):
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 UM who are having trouble
learning to read? Why differentiate they're both having trouble learning
(32:42):
to read. Start attacking the problem with both of them.
And there was this one Australian UM expert who basically said, like, yes,
dyslexia is a thing. It is his own thing, 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
see an um an inability to learn to read, go
(33:06):
after that. Don't say, well as a dyslexia. Let's test
the kids intelligence. It doesn't matter. Focus on learning. How
I'm teaching them how to read and apparently interventions. There's
this guy named, uh Julian professor Julian Um. What's his name,
Chuck Lennon Sands, Yes, Julian Sands in boxing Helena he
(33:28):
makes He has a big soliloquy about whether or not
dyslexi is a myth. I can't remember the guy's last name,
but um. I get the impression that parents of children
with dyslexia or not a big fan of this guy,
but he's He's basically said, um, we're diverting a lot
of funding away from kids who know how to who
don't know how to read, just because they don't they
(33:49):
supposedly don't have a high I Q UM, Let's treat
all the kids. So that's the idea of whether it's
a myth, not that dyslexia doesn't exist, although I think
some people suspected it didn't for a while it now
people believe it does, but not necessarily that it's just
intelligent upper middle class kids who have dyslexia. It's just
an inability to read for the same reason. Interesting, that's
(34:12):
the basis of it. It's still up in the air,
and it's a really touchy subject, very touchy subject, um
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. But your kid has it, and you know
your kid has it. I can't imagine why it must
(34:34):
feel like to have some expert going like there's no
such thing as dyslexia. You know. It is very touchy
and rightfully so. Uh Well, Finally, there's this whole notion that, um,
if you have dyslexia, then you may excel in other areas. Um,
you may be more creative, or you may be more
prone to be, like um, an entrepreneur, perhaps because you
(34:57):
think outside of the box. Yeah, I mean there's a
long list of people, like, you know, famous creative types
that have dyslexia, get the Christie. Did you know that one?
I didn't, but I didn't either that. You know, I
didn't just make it up. I learned there's 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.
(35:20):
Maybe that it might, I don't know. I just don't
see the value in that. Well it's saying like, look
at this guy, this guy, this lady. Maybe I guess
so she'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't achieve.
Just stick to a kid. Now. I get all that,
and that's valid. You're questioning the cult of celebrity. Yeah,
(35:42):
that's what it was. That just sort of bugs me.
But no, there is benefits. I'm sure if some kids
like Tom Cruiz has dyslexia and look at him, may
may I have had some questions about Zanix and its
value myself. Oh goodness. Uh. There have been some studies
though over the year. It may or may not support this.
Like um supposedly, if you have dyslexia, you may be
(36:05):
UM quicker to find Um, something in your peripheral vision.
Maybe you can like mc escher style drawings or the
impossible images hidden images, you might see those quicker or
more easily find patterns in in noise, like you could
be a great data analysts perhaps, And they think like
(36:27):
and this makes total sense, But the problem is as
its anecdotal at this point, but it makes total sense
that yes, you're 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 is going to compensate
with other things, is going to possibly excel at other stuff,
just because it's structure different If your brain is structured differently,
(36:48):
which we know that's the case, if you do not
read or write, Uh, you would expect that it would
manifest itself in real world behaviors and traits. Well. Yeah,
and the first thing I thought was like, yeah, totally,
Like if your vision impaired, you you hear things better.
Well supposedly that's a myth. Well I looked it up. Um,
there are studies where if you were vision impaired, you
(37:10):
are better at pinpointing like location of sound and certain sounds.
But it's not you can't hear something two miles away. Yeah,
it's not as cut and dry. It's just can't hear
there better because like your ears developed better. You know,
you remember that guy who can echo locate. He's visually impaired,
and he's like he uses clicks or something like that
like a bat. He basically taught himself to echolocate. Really amazing.
(37:33):
The first thing I thought about was the guy with
the ear in his arm? What was his name? Stell Arct?
What's great, oh man, that you and I like go
back and forth. I'm remembering the guy's name. Last time
we brought him most and I didn't remember his name,
and you rattled it right at stell Arc between us,
stell arc is going to live forever, like the trans
human is to you. But then that last thing about
(37:54):
being entrepreneurial or um maybe a corporate executive. They did
do a study in two thousand nine that found there
was a anecdotal evidence of over a representation in those fields.
But then that's the thing too, where they're like, maybe
they were just better at overcoming adversity and that stayed
on through their whole life to where it wasn't just dyslexia,
(38:16):
but like and nothing would keep them down. So they excelled, right,
they learned how to how to try harder than their peers.
So yeah, even if that is the case, great, sure,
But the point is it's still anecdotal, so you have
to be careful with saying like, oh, yeah, people with
dyslexia are way better at this, or they're they're more
likely to be entrepreneurs. Just hasn't been settled. Um, But
(38:40):
I think the overall point of this episode is if
you are if you do have dyslexia, Um, there is
plenty of hope. Do you 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 calumnist or Agatha Christie
Ye or John Irving. I saw his six alexia, John Oving. Yeah,
(39:03):
Richard Branson, that was really good. Ozzy Osborne, For God's sake,
look at that guy fumbling around the house. He's successful
despite himself. Um. If you want to more about dyslexia,
you can learn all about it on the internet. And
since I said that it's time for listener mail, I'm
gonna call this sid and Marty Croft email. This guy
(39:26):
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 his he's his relation to
the person that we kind of called out as the
guy who ruined Schoolhouse Rock. Okay, wasn't he an exact Yeah? Yeah,
But the second half of this is uh, speaking of
(39:49):
unbelievable stories, guys, I thought it. You'd be jealous to
know that I grew up hanging out on the sets
of all the SidD and 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 Lost. She was Nashville
on the Captain Cool and the Kong Show, which wrapped
(40:10):
around the Saturday Morning cartoons. I remember that 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. That's the s Yeah, you are dy.
You know how they got their name? They threw a
(40:31):
dart at a map and it landed on Bay City, Michigan.
Because they're like Scottish, aren't they? I think so? I
think they are. I remember my sister. Uh, 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 my sister's age, and they would sit around.
(40:52):
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 and kle and they would spend the record around
and close their eyes and stop it with their finger
and like they didn't make out with that picture. Yeah,
they had to like kiss that picture or whatever. I
hope your sister doesn't listen to this. It's great. The
(41:13):
seventies man so innocent. I love the seventies. So Basicity
Rollers came to his birthday party. They called the cops. Uh.
She went on. 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, all the women's
voices on Celebrity Deathmatch, hosting a game show called Rodeo Drive,
playing Joan Rivers on Family Guy, being in The Catskills
(41:37):
on Broadway for two years. Too much more to mention, guys,
except also she went on the road with Tim Conway
and Harvey Corman for a number of years posing is
Carol Burnett, and my little brother ended up engaged to
Harvey Corman's daughter, but it didn't work out anyway. I
love the show, guys. If I can never be a resource,
let me know that is from Keith or l Keith.
(41:58):
That was amazing. You remember Celebrity Deathmatch? Yeah, big shout
out to your mom too. Yeah, and up to your
mom's Keith. Uh. 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 um welcomeness here
at stuff you should know that that's gonna end up
being a crummy T shirt. Uh. If you want to
(42:20):
get in touch with this, you can hang out on
Stuff you Should Know dot com and check out our
social links there. I have a website called the Josh
Clark Way dot com. You can get in touch with
me there, and you can get in touch with me
Chuck and Jerry and everybody else here at Stuff. You
should know by sending an email to Stuff podcast how
stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands
(42:43):
of other topics. Is that how stuff Works dot com
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