For many, dylsexia is seen as the bain of their lives, a learning disability which impairs them from performing simple tasks that other people take for granted. When comparing dyslexic children with others at school it is often said that they are deficient in the basic skills of numeracy and literacy. While numercacy  can be defined as the ability to reason with numbers and other mathematical concepts it also encompasses things like measurments and concepts of distance. Literacy on the other hand refers to basic reading and writing skills. However there is a third major skill which is often ignored in modern schooling: Graphicacy. Graphicacy  is the ability to generate and interpret information in a graphical or visual way.

Dyslexia sufferers are often deficient in literacy but extremely strong in visual thinking. In fact one of the causes of Dyslexia according to Ron Davis, is the rapid development of  visual thinking thinking skills at a young age. Visual thinking involves the right side of the brain for visual processing. This particular part if the brain is associated with creativity, intuition and emotions. A highly developed right brain involves the processing of information in a way that can merge, intermingle, perceive and conceptualize all of this information. So while this highly developed visual thinking works well for collating information in the 3D world but not so much in the 2D for tasks such as understanding letters and words.

Children with Dyslexia often grow up stigmatized by their condition and often move through life with a sense of inferiority never being able to “measure up” to the baselines set by the masses in numeracy and literacy. However  I would argue that the educational system is fundamentally flawed in using only these metrics to evaluate a child in school. While the ability to read, write and count are fundamental to living in todays society they are given far too much importance as way of measuring potential. Often people that suffer from dyslexia are far more talented than anyone can imagine.
With an abundance of curiosity, creativity and intuition dyslexics are able to conceptualize complex problems. They have a special form of mastery which means once they learned and understood something visually and spatially, it is understood on a very deep level. This is evident in many of the famous and highly creative geniuses the world has ever known. These include Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Leonardo da Vinci.

Albert Einstein was never held back because of his dyslexia but had the genius to come up with the theory of relativity conceptualizing time and space together.  Leonardo de Vinci on the other hand excelled in his abililty design in 3 dimensions and conceptualize futuristic concepts that were way beyond his time. Would any of this have been possible with a highly developed thinking capabilities? i think not.

In his book In the Mind’s Eye: Creative Visual Thinkers, Gifted Dyslexics, and the Rise of Visual Technologies, Second Edition (2009). Thomas G West talks about the increasing automation of numeracy and literacy tasks by computers. He illustrates an increasing need for more complex pattern recognition as we emerge into the information age where there is more data and stimulai than we know what to do with. Making order out of the chaos is where the visual thinking capabilities of the dyslexic come into their own. The ability to conceptualize, spot patterns and perform out of the box thinking are skills and assets that the dyslexic person has inherently. Never let it be said again that dyslexia is a curse because it is truly a gift, not only to the individual but to humanity as a whole….

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