Creativity is a natural dyslexic trait, and a critical part of your organization’s collective genius
Published on 18 July 2024 • Written by Dr Lisa Colledge
Creative higher education courses appeal to dyslexics, where we find a higher proportion than the up-to-20% in the general population.
That’s because dyslexics are naturals at being original. They are skilled at ‘holistic visuo-spatial processing’, which is extracting the meaning from a scene instead of focusing on localized details. Their brains are custom-built to retain rich memories in their consciousness, where they can be retrieved, instead of storing them so they become part of the daily auto-pilot; their brains contain more long-range connections than we’d expect, meaning that distant and seemingly unrelated memories can be recombined in novel ways.
Organizational cultures that welcome and enable this skillset of dyslexics benefit from their originality of thought. But it is just one part of the cognitive mix that is needed to thrive in our changing environment: other kinds of brains specialize in behaviors like evaluating ideas and executing them effectively.
They key to being ready to respond to change — whether a new environment thousands of years ago, or a modern disruptor such as covid or generative artificial intelligence (genAI) — is in building a working culture that enables and attracts a mix of cognitive styles.
Three key takeaways
Dyslexic people are naturally drawn to creative courses of study and professions because they can use their innate skills in original thinking.
Dyslexic people are significantly better at extracting and understanding the message when looking at something new, than they are at focusing on details. Their brains are structured differently, to retain context-rich memories within reach of their consciousness, and to be able to recombine seemingly distant concepts in novel ways.
In human society or in a team, other cognitive specializations are needed to evaluate these novel ideas, and to execute them so they bring value. The key to being ready to respond to change is to have an organizational culture that enables whatever cognitive diversity you already have to contribute their best, and to enrich your cognitive mix by attracting more different kinds of brains.
Creativity attracts dyslexics. To share just a few of the statistics in Helen Taylor and Martin David Vestergaards’ paper (reference at the end):
In higher education, a study of foundation year students at London’s Central St Martins, University of the Arts found that 75% had dyslexia.
A separate study across multiple British universities found that 28% engineering students self-identified as dyslexic compared to 5% law students.
This also holds in business, with a study reporting that 35% entrepreneurs in the United States were dyslexic, 22% extremely so, compared to estimates of between 5–20% in the general population.
These findings are remarkable not only for highlighting a dyslexic trait, but also for positioning it as an advantage instead of taking the more common perspective of dyslexia as a problem. They led Helen Taylor, working with Brice Fernandes and Sarah Wraight, to develop a theory that explains why such a high level of dyslexic traits persist in human society.
Their paper considered the high prevalence of dyslexia from the perspective of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, which states that characteristics and behavioral traits are retained only if they confer an advantage in the fight for survival. Up to 20% people with dyslexia in the general population indicates that it confers a significant survival advantage. The associated challenges with reading and writing are too recent in our evolution to have played any role as a selection pressure: it took until 1950 for half of the general population to become literate. In this article I’ll share some of the evidence showing that the advantage of dyslexic traits is finding original solutions to problems.
What are the dyslexic traits that promote creativity?
One of the strongest drivers of innovation is novelty in combining existing experiences and ideas, in being able to detach them from their original context and use them in new ways. If you are faced with a new situation — whether a new environment thousands of years ago, or a new modern disruptor such as covid or generative artificial intelligence (genAI) — then coming up with new ideas is a huge advantage to your ongoing ability to thrive.
People who have dyslexic traits are particularly good at exploring in new ways, both physical situations, or their own memories.
Dyslexics have superior visuo-spatial processing skills
What do you see when you look at an image? Do you tend to focus on details in one part of the image, and then move to another part, or do you scan it to get an overall impression? There are benefits associated with both approaches, and one way to find out your style is to see how long it takes you to identify whether an image is impossible. An impossible image is one in which all details make sense locally, but that just doesn’t work when you look at the whole picture; the artist Escher created many impossible images such as the continuous staircase below where all four sides seem to go upwards.
Escher’s impossible continuous staircase. From https://www.faena.com/aleph/eschers-impossible-objects-an-invitation-to-image-the-possibility-of-impossibility
Researchers reduce the variables they need to correct for in their studies by using simpler images, more like Escher’s impossible cube, below.
Catya von Karoli found that dyslexics are significantly faster at detecting impossible figures, without any loss of accuracy. Dyslexics have enhanced peripheral vision.
Dyslexic traits are associated with an “enhanced ability to process visual-spatial information globally (holistically) rather than locally (part by part)”.
Dyslexics excel at recombining their memories in new ways
Dyslexics are very good at remembering the gist of things, but not so strong at recalling precise details. They tend to have enhanced ‘episodic memory’ which is about encoding the context of past experiences such as the time and environment in which they occurred. Dyslexics also retain more tasks in their conscious memory, rather than locking them into their sub-conscious so that they become automated, like playing an instrument or reading.
Their focus on context, the greater retention of memories in the conscious mind, and the focus on meaning rather than exact details, are in part what underlies the natural creativity of dyslexics and attracts them to engineering instead of law. Dyslexics have been shown to have superior:
Originality: in generating new ideas.
Accuracy: in predicting future outcomes.
Fluency: in their ability to find multiple solutions to a problem.
Flexibility: ease of switching between categories in which memories are stored.
Can’t anyone learn this?
To an extent yes. We can all become better at any behavior when we learn about it and put ourselves in situations where we can practice it. But this behavior comes naturally to dyslexics; originality places little demand on their energy and focus, so they tend to be better at it for longer.
Imaging of dyslexic brains shows that they are genuinely different and appear custom-built for this kind of activity: they are structurally, developmentally, and anatomically distinct, also differing in cellular organization, and the patterns of neuronal activation, from non-dyslexic brains. Dyslexic brains have more long-range connections and global integration, in line with the ease of combining ideas that seem distant, or at first unrelated.
So how does this all fit together to make humans so successful?
Dyslexics are great at holistic visuo-spatial processing, and at finding novel ways of recombining rich information that they keep available in their memories. In a team they are fantastic idea generators, but they are not naturally good at focusing on local pieces on information and at remembering things precisely, so they might struggle, for instance, to evaluate all the ideas they generate according to insights within a set of data.
Emily and Manuel Casanovas’ imaging research showed that dyslexic brains are the opposite of autistic brains which are strongly connected over short-distances with relatively few long-range tracts. Behaviorally this leads to the challenges in social integration and communication that are characteristic of autism, but a specialization in focusing on detail and rational decision making that complements dyslexic strengths.
Now we can start to see how these diverse specializations in cognitive style give a group of humans the survival advantage that Charles Darwin said must be conferred by any features that have been retained over time. Helen Taylor, Brice Fernandes and Sarah Wraight developed the new theory of Complementary Cognition to describe this: when faced with unpredictability and change, human success required so many different types of behavior that it would take too much time and energy to switch between different thinking modes, and in any case they couldn’t all fit into one brain without our skulls becoming too large to be born — clearly, another solution was needed!
Evolution’s solution to making humans so superbly adapted to change is in two parts:
Diverse cognitive styles, that enable our brains to specialize in how they work.
Making us a social species so we each share our skills with the group, and benefit from others’ skills, when they are needed.
What does this mean for my organization?
The best way to be successful at thriving in the face of chance is to recreate the two-part solution that evolved over millions of years. Make sure that your organizational culture enables our social nature to emerge and rewards it when it does, so that any cognitive diversity that you already have in your organization can flourish, and so that you attract a stronger cognitive mix over time.
In our modern working environments, where focus has turned more to individual than group success, people tend to feel threatened by difference and look to themselves first. That means that the culture we want won’t just happen on its own, and needs to be consciously designed and implemented. The characteristics of this culture, that allows every employee to bring what they naturally do best to the collective genius, are known and can be designed into your culture by a skilled cultural change expert.
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References
Helen Taylor, Brice Fernandes and Sarah Wraight (2022) ‘The Evolution of Complementary Cognition: Humans Cooperatively Adapt and Evolve through a System of Collective Cognitive Search’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 32(1), pp. 61–77.
Helen Taylor and Martin David Vestergaard (2022) ‘Developmental Dyslexia: Disorder or Specialization in Exploration?’ Frontiers in Psychology 13, article # 889245.
Catya von Karoli, Ellen Winner, Wendy Gray and Gordon Sherman (2003) ‘Dyslexia linked to talent: Global visual-spatial ability’, Brain and Language 85 pp. 427–431.
Emily Casanova and Manuel Casanova (2010) ‘Autism and dyslexia: A spectrum of cognitive styles as defined by minicolumnar morphometry’, Medical Hypotheses 74, pp.59–62.
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