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

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0:00Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
0:11Here's the moment of truth: Anybody in this audience have dyslexia?
0:14Show of hands.
0:15Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
0:17Some more. Thank you.
0:19That's almost a fair assessment.
0:21We've got about 20% of the general population has dyslexia.
0:25That's one in five people.
0:27And I think that dyslexia is most commonly understood
0:31as this reading issue,
0:33you know, we have a tendency of flipping our b's and d's and our q's and g's,
0:37and that's, you know, I think that's a fair assessment,
0:40at least in the symptomatic department.
0:44But I want to take this opportunity
0:45to speak a little bit more in depth about the neuroscience of dyslexia.
0:50So, we have this outer layer of our brain called the cortex.
0:54And we all know that we have - or maybe we don't know -
0:56but we have these little things called minicolumns, okay?
0:59And these minicolumns serve as the telephone poles, if you will.
1:05What strings together on these minicolumns are axons.
1:08Okay?
1:09Now, people with autism, for example,
1:12have axons that are extremely closely located in proximity to each other,
1:18and as a result, their axon lengths are very, very finite and short,
1:21and as a result they are able to do these incredibly detailed,
1:25highly specific patterns and behaviors and skills, right?
1:30Well, dyslexics are on the other side of that spectrum;
1:32we have our minicolumns that are spaced very, very far apart.
1:36As a result, our axon lengths are significantly longer.
1:39And this actually lends to some significant cognitive advantages.
1:43We have an ability to look at a situation
1:47and identify seemingly disparate pieces of information
1:50and blend those into a narrative, or a tapestry,
1:53that makes sense to us that most people can't see.
1:57So this translates into an exceptional level of success
2:01in four major vocational paths.
2:04That's entrepreneurship, engineering, architecture and the arts.
2:09I just want you to please remember that, as it comes up later in this discussion.
2:14Dyslexia comes with a cost though, okay?
2:17We have an incredibly difficult time doing what's called phonetic decoding.
2:24Okay, that's the most complex word I'm going to use,
2:26and I hope you're impressed by it.
2:28Phonetic decoding is essentially our ability
2:31to identify these squiggly lines,
2:34translate those lines into a sound in our mind
2:36and then string those sounds together to compose a word.
2:40For dyslexics,
2:41that takes five time more energy than a normal brain.
2:46So, to give you a little bit of a historical context on dyslexia,
2:49I'll go back and start off
2:54with the first nine-tenths of human existence.
2:59Societies were largely based on apprentice models, right?
3:03From hunter and gatherers down to the trades in more recent times,
3:08people learned by observing and then doing kinesthetic learning.
3:12Now, this happens to be the wheelhouse for dyslexics;
3:15this is our prime opportunity to learn.
3:19Then there was this little twist in history, okay?
3:22It was called the Industrial Revolution.
3:24And what happened during the Industrial Revolution
3:26is the society said, "Okay, we've got this new form of economy.
3:29What we need to do is educate the masses
3:32to become effective worker bees in these factories."
3:36Now, this dovetailed historically
3:38with the importation of the printing press from Europe.
3:40And so everyone was incredibly excited that they had this newfound technology
3:44that would enable us to embed knowledge into a format
3:49that could then be scaled and distributed on a national level.
3:53Now, this served society tremendously well,
3:56except for the fact that at that very moment,
4:00you essentially locked the door on 20% of the population, right?
4:04Those of us with dyslexia.
4:06So, what does the dyslexic experience feel like?
4:12Of those that raised their hands, we certainly know,
4:14but I'll illuminate it for the rest of you.
4:16I ask you to take a stroll back
4:19to those sepia-toned images of your 7, 8, 9-year-old years,
4:24where school was sort of this montage
4:27of recess and nap time
4:33and snack time;
4:34the world was a really good place, right?
4:36And then, all of a sudden, at one point,
4:39they kind of tightened the screws a bit,
4:40and said, "We're going to introduce our first benchmark of intelligence."
4:44They didn't put it that way; they said, "We're going to learn how to read."
4:48And all of a sudden,
4:49for those of us with dyslexia, our world changed overnight.
4:53We realized, looking at our peers,
4:55that what everybody else was doing effortlessly,
4:58we had an incredible time trying to do.
5:01And we actually not only failed on day one,
5:04but we failed on day two and three and four, and so on,
5:07and the years started to compound
5:08where we were exposed to this level of failure
5:11that became so commonplace
5:13that we started to wear this shroud of shame.
5:18There's a psychologist named Dr. Gershen Kaufman.
5:22Dr. Kaufman studies shame.
5:24Dr. Kaufman says that people who cannot read
5:28or who have difficulty learning how to read
5:30feel the same level of shame as people who have engaged in incest.
5:37So you can imagine what it's like -
5:39again, you see that in yourself, you know, many, many years ago -
5:42and you realize that after a while, you're burdened with this shame,
5:46and then you get this reinforcement,
5:48negative, albeit,
5:50where you're walking down the hall, and you hear things like,
5:53"That guy Dean. Kid's so dumb he can't even read." Right?
5:57Or the best one is the teacher-parent conference
6:01where they're like, "You know, Dean's a smart kid,
6:03but if he just tried harder.
6:05I think he's a little bit lazy."
6:07Okay?
6:08And so what happens
6:10is that you formulate this malignant self-esteem;
6:15you start to believe - no matter how strong your personal resolve may be -
6:21you start to believe what everyone is telling you.
6:25So it should come as no surprise:
6:26you transition into middle school, then high school,
6:29thinking, "Okay, who am I going to be?"
6:31We all remember that. Horrible experience, right?
6:33Trying to define who we were going to be in our cult, our pack, our community.
6:39And we knew that we're not going to be the smart kid.
6:41I mean, albeit the wrong assessment,
6:44but we knew we weren't going to be the smart kid.
6:46Maybe we were the gifted jock,
6:47but chances are we looked at the kids,
6:50after school, smoking reefer on the bleachers,
6:53or the kids throwing rocks through glass
6:55or somebody maybe even getting involved in a little bit of gang involvement.
6:59And we'd think to ourselves they've got a very low barrier to entry;
7:02I can be that guy; that's very easy.
7:05And so we naturally gravitate towards those identities.
7:10And statistically, it's a very sad story.
7:17You know, 35% of all dyslexics drop out of high school,
7:21and 50% of all adolescents involved in drug and alcohol rehabilitation
7:26have dyslexia.
7:28Another whammy is 60% -
7:30in fact, the professionals say it's more like 70%,
7:34but I think that's outlandish -
7:35the people that work in the juvenile detention system
7:38say that 70% of all juvenile delinquents
7:42have dyslexia.
7:45So,
7:46that is a very strong and depressing narrative, obviously.
7:53But we all have heard - I heard an earlier speaker talk about Einstein -
7:57we've all heard how Einstein was dyslexic.
8:00JFK, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo DaVinci,
8:03Richard Branson, Charles Schwab.
8:05I mean the laundry list is endless, right?
8:07In fact, dyslexics, when they are fully empowered
8:10and they recognize that innate intelligence,
8:13represent 35% of all entrepreneurs.
8:17They represent 40% of all self-made millionaires.
8:22And you know those rocket scientists down at NASA?
8:25One out of two of them is dyslexic.
8:28My favorite, because I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
8:31is this easy-to-get-into school called MIT -
8:36they call dyslexia the "MIT disease."
8:40So, I've kind of toiled with this notion
8:45of why it is that my people - right? -
8:49suffer this huge delta in outcomes.
8:53And about a year-and-a-half ago,
8:56I found myself in a learning-disability conference -
8:59which is the worst name you could think of -
9:04and I was listening to these professors, and they were really impressive.
9:07They had, you know, three or four acronyms behind their last names,
9:10and they were sitting there saying the way we need to teach dyslexic learners
9:14is through two things.
9:16We need to teach them
9:17social/emotional learning executive functioning methodology.
9:20Okay? That's code word for sequencing and time management
9:24and emotional intelligence.
9:26And I sat there, like you all did,
9:28and I was just getting a little hot under the collar.
9:30Like, man, what they don't get
9:32is that adding another discipline to an already frustrated student
9:38is like, "Alright, kids, you headed off to the Gulag?
9:40Here's an 800-pound sledgehammer,
9:42called social/emotional learning executive function.
9:45Take this. It's really going to help when you get there."
9:47Makes absolutely no sense.
9:49So I was frustrated, and I went into a conference breakout session
9:53that was hosted by the Carroll School, which is up in Lincoln, Massachusetts,
9:57K through 8, dyslexic only.
10:00And the head of the school, brilliant guy named Steve Wilkins, was so smart.
10:04He said, "I'm not going to talk to a room full of educators.
10:07Let me put my kids up there."
10:08So, I remember this one eighth-grader,
10:11this gangly little dude, he went up, he's all nervous,
10:16standing in front of a room like this.
10:18And he reaches into this backpack,
10:20and he pulls out this size-11 basketball high top,
10:25and on the heel, he's got this like erector set attached, right?
10:28and this long cord leading out of it.
10:31And he explains to everybody that this is his prototype
10:35for a shoe that enables him to charge his cellphone while he walked.
10:39And everyone is like, "That's really good, man, right?
10:44Yeah, there's some technical issues, right? but that's details."
10:48But the beauty was that the moment this kid's presentation ended,
10:53every arm in the place shot up, right?
10:55And all these very impressed educators going, "How'd you think of that?
10:59That's so creative."
11:00And I watched this kid - literally -
11:03this little 8th-grader, like, blossom into this deity.
11:08That kid was going to walk out of that presentation hall,
11:12and he was never ever going to believe that he was stupid or lazy or indolent.
11:17In fact, the kid is probably, five years from now,
11:20going out to Palo Alto and giving Zuckerberg a run for his money.
11:23Right? He's going to displace Zuckerberg.
11:25This kid was so empowered.
11:26And I thought to myself, "Here's the answer."
11:30Here's the answer.
11:32What we have to do
11:33is we have to take these students who are so disenfranchised,
11:39so frustrated, so thirsty for positive reinforcement
11:42and introduce them to that cognitive skill set they have,
11:46which is a direct result of the construction of their brains.
11:49As I said earlier, entrepreneurship, engineering, architecture, the arts -
11:53what we need to do is take those subject matters, those vocations,
11:56distill them to an age-appropriate middle school level,
12:00and then once we've got these learners hooked,
12:02we can embed it with that social/emotional learning
12:05and executive functioning methodology
12:06because I can attest that once you've got a captive dyslexic,
12:12they are ravenous; they are thirsty;
12:15they've built up this moxie and this grit,
12:17and then, all of a sudden,
12:19you're revealing something that they're better at against their peers -
12:22this is a brand new message.
12:24And so I'm in Cambridge, like I said, the Saudi Arabia of academics,
12:30and I went to the best institutions:
12:32I went to Harvard School of Education, Tufts University, the Carroll School,
12:35and I said this is what I want to build.
12:37They said, "We're down." Said I was brilliant. Nobody's done that.
12:40Not brilliant - I hope they said that's brilliant.
12:43They said, "We're interested."
12:45(Laughter)
12:46A little artistic liberty, I guess.
12:49Still working out some issues from my youth.
12:51(Laughter)
12:52But the beauty was they got on board,
12:55and then I was faced with the question,
12:57"Okay, how do I avoid the mistake of the traditional educational path?"
13:02Right? How do I avoid text as that barrier to entry?
13:06So I hunted around, and it turns out that Harvard, MIT and Stanford University
13:12have created something called edX.
13:15edX is a state-of-the-art internet platform
13:19where they provide their MOOCs - their massively open online curricula.
13:23And because these three universities have the GDP of a small country,
13:27each one of them,
13:28they said part of building this and part of our social responsibility
13:31is we'll open source our software,
13:33which means that anybody can utilize this state-of-the-art technology
13:37to create their own MOOCs.
13:39So, I found a company that works between me, as the content provider,
13:43and the software,
13:45and we determined
13:49that I could actually offer every single one of my lesson plans
13:54through a variety of modalities.
13:57I could offer my lesson plan through a video presentation;
14:01I could offer it through an audio presentation
14:03or a graphic or a pictorial representation,
14:07which enables that dyslexic learner to access the information
14:12without having to stumble over text as that barrier.
14:18Now, I don't want to ever be mistaken for saying
14:21that dyslexics don't have to learn how to read; they absolutely do.
14:24But the point is this:
14:25if we can get to these kids when they're in middle school,
14:28we can access or reveal to them what their inherent capacities are
14:32before, as my friend Ben Foss - another friend in the field - says,
14:36"Before the cement of their personality is solidified,"
14:40we can, theoretically - and I hope to prove this -
14:45we can take these kids,
14:47empower them in such a way
14:49that we can not only reduce attrition rates
14:51and reduce drug and alcohol and incarceration rates,
14:55but, better yet, is we can give birth to these kids;
15:01they can access within themselves a new narrative, an empowered narrative,
15:06where they can go out,
15:08and they can join the ranks of those famous dyslexics that I listed earlier,
15:13but more importantly,
15:14so these individuals can become self-actualized,
15:18satisfied, content, confident human beings.
15:23And I'll end it on this:
15:25There are a lot of problems facing today's society.
15:31I think the previous speaker spoke about the environment riddled with problems.
15:37Some of the most creative, innovative minds
15:41are at this moment atrophying behind bars.
15:47And that's all a result of a system
15:49that insists upon the most archaic form of educational medium - text.
15:55So, I hope I'll get invited back in five years,
16:00and I'll be able to explain to you -
16:02no, better yet - I'll be able to put up a panel of my students -
16:05that's non-TEDx, but let's say -
16:07put up a panel of my newly empowered, little, dyslexic brothers and sisters
16:11and let them show you what it is they've invented,
16:15or what they are going to do to solve some sort of environmental problem.
16:19So, I'm so grateful to have had this opportunity to speak to you all,
16:23to hopefully tell you a little bit more
16:27about this dyslexic potential that we're trying to unlock.
16:30So I thank you so much for being here.
16:32(Applause)

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