Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Dyslexia Works

Episode Date: March 16, 2024

For a learning disability that everyone seems to know about, dyslexia is maybe the most commonly misunderstood and controversial cognitive difficulty there is. Some people think it’s a gift, some people think it doesn’t even exist. Learn more in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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One of the best shows of the year, according to Apple, Amazon, and Time, is back for another round. We had a big bearer of a man, who was called Mel Evans, who was on roadie, and he was coming back on the plane. And he said, will you pass the salt and pepper? And I misheard him.

I said, what? Sergeant Pepper. Listen to season two of McCartney, a life of lyrics on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there everybody, Chuck here. Picking out a Saturday episode, a classic stuff you should know, curated and handpicked by me to you, Valentine, if you will.

And this one is from March 2019, and it's about dyslexia. And this one hits close to home for me now. And I enjoyed going back and re-listening to it so I could relearn myself. So I hope you do as well. And it's called How Dyslexia Works. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. 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 pretty good, man. Just, you know, hanging out over here.

Yeah? Ready to rap. Although this is pretty cool. I'm surprised that we had not discussed this yet, because it's right up our alley. Totally. Very stuff you should know type show. And I think it's an interesting, you know, I guess it's labeled a learning disorder.

Most definitely. It's a specific learning disorder according to the U.S. government. Yeah, I always just have a hard time knowing whether or not to, like almost at affliction, then I'm like, is that an affliction? I don't even know. I think anybody with dyslexia and anybody, any expert in the field would say it's a learning disability. It's a specific learning disability that 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 bright and...

Capable. Yep. And intelligent students have what they call unexpected difficulty learning to read and that it afflicts them their entire life. Yeah. But there's a lot of questions that surround that definition. And one of the problems with dyslexia research is that that's not the official definition. There's about as many definitions as there are studies of dyslexia research is that that's not the official definition. There's about as many definitions as there are studies of dyslexia.

Yeah, this one from Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity made sense to me though as far as just sort of a simple way to say it, an unexpected difficulty in reading in an individual who has the intelligence to be a much better reader. So in other words, like this isn't adding up, all the tools are there, and you should be a better reader than you are, but you're not. So why? What gives? Yeah.

So there's a lot to that though, right? Like there's this idea that if we know enough about the brain and we have things like MRIs and stuff like that, so you would think that by now, since maybe the 90s or whatever, we would have positively identified what it is. But there's a confounding problem that they've run into in dyslexia research, and we'll get into it more later, but they haven't figured out if what they're looking at is the changes that would come from not reading as much or if the brain structure they're seeing is actually dyslexia.

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 mean. Well, good, as long as you do, but it also counts if like the million or so people listening to this also do. Hey everybody. Dyslexia is very, studying it and understanding it and learning how to teach children with

dyslexia is very important because up until semi-recently, I'm just going to go say recently, if you had dyslexia and you were a student, you might have been called stupid or dumb. And you might have been put at a separate table and said, well, you go over here because you can't keep up. This one guy, man, this one really hit home, or not hit home, but. Hit you in the breadbasket. In the breadbasket, which is like home. Sure. Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Schultz was diagnosed later in life, and he said growing up in the 1950s,

he said basically he was placed in what he called the dummy class. Three children in his class were separated, put at a table in the corner. The teacher didn't talk to them much. And essentially one day, like the principal was coming around and she said, here are these books, pretend to read them. Right. The principal's coming. Yeah, man. That is just tough. But there's something really significant about that. That was a column written by a guy named Philip Schultz, who was a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Yeah. 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. Yeah. And more and more research has kind of gotten to the root of the problems with dyslexia, but we have found that with patience 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 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 even back in the day when you know, let me just say this, teachers back then didn't have the same tools that they have today and

they didn't have an understanding of dyslexia. So if they had students that weren't keeping up and would force 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 as far as like reading and spelling and writing lessons go, potentially risking,

like slowing down the rest of the class who are learning at a normal clip, or do you take this guy with dyslexia or this girl with dyslexia and put them in a special needs class that may address their reading and writing, but they're going to get so far behind their classmates in every other subject that they're normally proficient at. It's a problem and they had no idea how to grapple with it for almost all of the 20th

century and multiple generations of kids with dyslexia suffered as a result. Yeah, it's really sad. There are a lot of symptoms for dyslexia, key symptoms, and these are very important because there is no blood test, there is no, there's no, even, I mean, there are a lot of testing they can do, but there's no standardized specific test that will really nail it down. Right, so keep that in mind. There's no official definition of dyslexia. And there's no specific test to suss out dyslexia. Right. Two big problems.

Yeah. So you've got to look at this collection of symptoms. The first obvious one is slow reading, inaccurate reading, difficulty sounding out words, difficulty pronouncing longer words with multiple syllables, which we'll get to that in a bit. Inability to read or speak made up nonsense words, which I thought was interesting. Poor short-term memory for verbal information, whether it's written or spoken. 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 just like using an F instead of a P-H or something like that.

Yeah, and we should also point out too that it's very much an incorrect notion that if you have dyslexia, you just transpose letters or spell things backwards. That's what I thought for most of my life. Yeah. That dyslexia was people, they spelled things backwards and that was that. And that they also read backwards and that they could train themselves to read things backwards. Right. Totally made up. I mean, it's not totally made up, but it's so, such a, just a one component of dyslexia

that it might as well just be an urban legend. Yeah, totally. And then what this can lead to, it's not just like, oh, I have trouble reading, like that spills out into all aspects of life, whether it's your self-esteem or you might have problem with directions, directionally, you might have issue with your budgets or money items, or you might not can tell time very well. Frustrated, anger, difficulty planning things. It's not just limited to reading issues. And then in real life, you might read something and have very little recollection of what you just read. You will probably have problems giving presentations,

finding the right word, recalling words, that kind of thing. When you do read and when you learn to read, you will be reading slower than anybody else, even reading at your reading level. You just do it more slowly. And then as an adult, a lot of people are like, oh good God, I'm done with school. Let me just go off and find a job

that doesn't require any reading or any writing and I will be fine. I will go to restaurants and order the same thing at every restaurant. And if this routine that I've developed to mask my dyslexia is ever interrupted, I will flip out and try to keep it under control, but I will seem a little awkward socially during instances like this. There's ways you can carve out a life for yourself, but you don't have to because now all these reasons we're talking about, tough to get a good number that's reliable, but anywhere between 5 and

15 to 17 percent, it looks like, which is sort of, well, it's not the biggest range in the world, but they don't really know. No, they have no idea, because there's a couple of problems. One, there's a lot of people out there who don't realize they have dyslexia. And then there's a lot of people who do know they have dyslexia and are either ashamed of it or have just set up their life to where they don't have time or room to go be diagnosed and then go learn to overcome it. They're just like, whatever, I have this thing, this issue, or I'm slower at reading than other people. So, yeah, it's probably very much

under-reported and underestimated how many people in the population have it. Yeah. And we're talking mainly about, almost exclusively about developmental dyslexia, which is, you know, the kind we mostly think about. We're not talking about acquired dyslexia, which is, can happen as a result of an injury. Right. So just wanted 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.

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Be sure to tune in to season two of the Martha Stewart podcast. Listen and subscribe to the Martha Stewart podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All that sitting and swiping, our backs hurt, our eyeballs sting. That's our bodies adapting to our technology. But we can do something about it.

We saw amazing effects. I really felt like the cloud in my brain kind of dissipated. There's no turning back for me. Make 2024 the year you put your health before your inbox. And take the Body Electric Challenge. Listen to Body Electric from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Chuck, the first time the word dyslexia was used was in 1872 by an ophthalmologist named Rudolf Berlin who coined the term dyslexia. But the case that he was describing was a case of acquired dyslexia where you can develop

the symptoms of dyslexia, trouble reading, trouble writing, trouble sounding out words from a head 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 neurologists and ophthalmologists working in the 19th century, no, there's a neurobiological basis to this. Yeah, and they called it early on in the 19th century and I guess even in the early 20th century,

well actually they called it that up until the- The 60s. Yeah, the 60s, word blindness. And there was a German who coined that term and they called it Varte-Blindheit. Can you say that? That's good. Okay, you would do it way better than me. Well, I would put on some dumb voice, but that's perfect pronunciation.

Okay. You said that it's a W, right? Yep. And you said it is a V. Perfect. Okay. I didn't click my heels together when I said it. It checks out, Dorothy.

So they called it, like you said, up until the 60s congenital word blindness. There were a lot of people in the late 1800s, not a lot, but a handful of people studying this stuff. Yeah, Hinshelwood and Morgan were the two big ones. Yeah, and they were an ophthalmologist and a doctor. Hinshelwood was the ophthalmologist. And then there were also neurologists, a man named Samuel Orton. And it's interesting to look back because they were sort of on the right track

with what they thought was wrong. Yeah, word blindness also as a term is not that far off. Yeah. I mean, it really does a good job describing the thing because they're saying like there's some condition that these people have specifically because they're otherwise totally intelligent. They have a problem with words, 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. Worldwide spread literacy? Yeah, newspapers and books and street signs and menus, like you were saying, in a restaurant. And 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 19th century, at least in the United States and in the West and Europe, all of a sudden people who had dyslexia suddenly became apparent. Whereas before this, it wouldn't have been apparent

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 learn to read and write or part of like the aristocracy. Now it became democratized and public schooling became widespread. And so as a result, dyslexia became aized and public schooling became widespread. And so as a result, dyslexia became a thing for the very first time. It's actually a relatively

new condition that was born out of the modern era. Yeah. Or if you were a kid back then and you, they were trying to teach you to read and you couldn't, you were just, they were like, all right, well, I guess he's not a reader. Right. So get out to the factory of the field. Right. And don't worry about it. But that was what Morgan, like W. Pringle Morgan and James Hinchelwood 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 generally slow. This is a specific learning disability. Right.

Samuel Orton, the neurologist I mentioned, he created the Orton Society in 1949. They were researchers and teachers trying to figure out like, all right, we know this is a problem. Now, how do we go about teaching kids like this? And that eventually led to the International Dyslexia Association. But it really took until the, like the 1970s, there was a book written by MacDonald Critchley called The Dyslexic 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. And here are the symptoms and the signs of dyslexia, and let's take it seriously in the general education system. Yeah, and one of the interesting things that they learned, they have learned over the years, is part of the problem, at least in the case of English, is that it's a really tough language to learn. Extraordinarily tough. And it matters. If you have dyslexia, when compared to Italian, it says English has over a thousand ways to spell.

It's a basic set of 40 phonological sounds. Italian has 25 speech sounds and only 33 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, think about this. So, the short E sound, eh, you can spell it A-I as in said, E-O as in leopard, U as in berry, I- AI as in said, EO as in leopard, U as in Barry, IE as in friend. Okay. English is so tough.

It is tough, but what you're doing is when you're spelling those things, you're encoding a sound, a phoneme is what it's called. And like you said, in English, we have 40 phonemes. And when you spell, when you read, you're encoding and decoding a phoneme, and we have attached phonemes 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? This is all spectacular that we can do this, but it's a totally human construct. If you have dyslexia, you're the ground problem that is the basis of your condition is you have trouble sorting through phonemes.

You have trouble with what's called phonological awareness where you hear le and pard as two separate distinct sounds that you can learn to spell and learn to write. You can't sort them. Sometimes they run together. It's a problem on the very basis of reading, writing, spelling, the phonology. You have trouble, your brain has trouble processing it and sorting it. That's the basis of dyslexia. So if you are a kid with dyslexia in learning English with as difficult as it is, where there's all these different rules for the same phoneme, it's going to be way harder than it is in something like Italian like you were saying.

Yeah, and as a result, as you would imagine, learning a second language if you have dyslexia is really tough. But they have found that Italian can almost be like a therapy. A training camp for learning. It's really interesting. Yeah, because you learn, oh, there's rules with certain things, but these are really basic rules and they make sense. So maybe now I can learn English a little more easily with the expectation that the rules are structurally the same, but they're just different for English than they are for Italian in nuance,

but ultimately they're getting across the same stuff. Yeah, the whole concept of language and symbols, e-letters and words, It's just fascinating to me, endlessly fascinating. Yeah, because again, I don't want to harp on this. And like the humans like creating this and saying that thing over there, if you draw these symbols in this order, that's what that is. See that leopard? Like that's, and then the word leopard, like it's just all fascinating to me. 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, what's it called when you study that? Linguistics. Is it just linguistics? I'm pretty sure. I could have been a linguist. Oh, yeah? If I had only known what it was called.

Yeah. I just realized halfway through that one, a dumb dumb, I saw them like, 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 I guess we can talk about the fMRI and the MRI, obviously. The wonder machine figures in pretty big when it comes to this kind of thing.

And in the mid-'90s is about when the fMRI came on the scene with dyslexia and studies with dyslexia. One of the problems was little kids, you know, like, oh, we can't throw them in there. That thing will explode their brain. And then they're like, oh, no, the fMRI 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. Because you could obviously do this at any age, but it's important for school-age children

to, like, figure out what's going on in their brains. Well, that's one of the reasons why that's the sample population is because it takes years for dyslexia to be prominent. Right. Every kid has problems learning, reading and writing at first. Sure. But then as other kids progress, and this one kid doesn't, but they're otherwise bright, same socioeconomic opportunities and all that stuff,

that's when it becomes possible that they have dyslexia. But by that time, a couple more years have gone by. Right. Right? Yeah. So you're not testing for dyslexia on babies. Right. You have to wait until it basically manifests itself.

Yeah, and of course with the fMRI, I think there was some hope 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 other

studies too. Right. There's left hemisphere areas, the ventral occipitotemporal region, the temporoparietal region, and the inferior frontal cortices, which have to do with language processing, but also visual processing of language too. So, again, they 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, that's a little confounding, and then S-T over time, maybe the first few times you write TOEST. It doesn't matter. You're going to learn to write TOAST and you can write it down and then someone else can read it and they think of toast. Right. With dyslexia, you're not hearing toast. And you certainly can't extrapolate something that you're not hearing correctly into words and letters. Yeah, yeah.

Okay? That's a good way to put it. The test analogy. There you go. There is a genetic component. You are likely, if you have dyslexia, 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 I think it's just correlated, it's not necessarily the cause. It's like people who have been shown to have dyslexia have this set of genes that are doing this. Yeah, but like I said earlier what's interesting is those early doctors weren't super far off. It does have to do with visual processing of this linguistic information. And they were on the right track even way back then. So, not bad. And then even still though with this new understanding of like, okay, this brain region looks like this, this brain region looks like that, this is the sign of a dyslexic brain. There's still the question, is this the result of going years and years without reading? Or is that the structure

of a brain with dyslexia? Because we know that your brain changes when you read, when you learn to read. They've done studies in the MRI with illiterate adults who have learned to read. So they do a scan of them while they cannot read, and then they scan them again while they can read, and then look for differences in the brain. And there are structural differences that take place in the brain, which makes sense, because it makes you think, so an illiterate adult,

is that the normal structure of the brain? And an adult that can read, is that an abnormal structure? Because think about it, we've only been doing that for 150 years. That's a new construct. So it makes sense that the brain 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 to more, but it's interesting that, and it sounds simple, but the better, if you have dyslexia, the better you get at reading and writing, the better you will get at reading and writing. Exactly. You're just, you're strengthening, you're creating new neural connections and

strengthening those pathways. And the fact that it all comes down to apparently patience and practice, and that it's saying these kids with dyslexia are going through the same thing that every kid does with learning to read and write and spell, it just takes them way longer. The fact that generations of kids with dyslexia were just abandoned by the school system because of a lack of patience is really what it comes down to is beyond sad to me. Yeah, patience and resources, I think.

That's part of it, sure. Yeah, I just don't want to sound like we're saying like, teachers just were impatient about it all. It's like, it was complex and still very sad. Yes. The fact 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, it's embarrassing. It's just a mark of shame on our country, if you ask me.

All right, let's take a break. No. I'm going to go, I'm going to give you your cat of nine tails so country, if you ask me. All right, let's take a break. No. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna give you your cat of nine tales so we can flog each other. I realize I sound really forceful in this episode, do I? I feel like I'm sounding forceful, do I? Sound forceful? No, I think you're great. Do I?

Well, that did. All right, we'll be right back, everyone. If you want to level up your marketing and business knowledge, then look no further than the Marketing School podcast hosted by Neil Patel and yours truly Eric Su. It is the number one marketing podcast in the United States and number 15 on business in the United States. And it has amazing guests such as Alex Hermosy, Layla Hermosy, Cody Sanchez. We pull in these amazing interviews with other people that are not only great marketers, but actual operators.

And the icing on the cake is Neil and myself were also operators as well. So we share learnings from the trenches. We share secrets that we otherwise wouldn't be sharing with other people. And we also share other advantages that will help you get ahead of your competition. So all you have to do is listen to marketing school every weekday on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Martha Stewart and we're back with a new season of my podcast. This season will be even more revealing and more personal with more entrepreneurs,

more trailblazers, more live events, more Martha, and more questions from you. I'm talking to my cosmetic dermatologist, Dr. Dan Belkin, about the secrets behind my skincare. Walter Isaacson, about the geniuses who changed the world. Encore Jane, about creating a billion dollar startup. Dr. Elisa Pressman, about the five basic strategies to help parents raise good humans. Florence Fabricant about the authenticity in the world of food writing.

Be sure to tune in to season two of the Martha Stewart podcast. Listen and subscribe to the Martha Stewart podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All that sitting and swiping, our backs hurt, our eyeballs sting, that's our bodies adapting to our technology, but we can do something about it. We saw amazing effects. I really felt like the cloud in my brain kind of dissipated.

There's no turning back for me. Make 2024 the year you put your health before your inbox. And take the Body Electric Challenge. Listen to Body Electric from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So, like you said earlier, there is no cure for dyslexia. There is treatment, and they even put that in quotes. But you shouldn't think of it as a disease cure type of thing. No, no. It's practice and patience. You have it for life.

Yeah, and those are the two strategies that we will say it one more time for the tenth time. Patience and practice. You have to have that patience there as a parent, as a teacher, as someone with dyslexia. I know it's frustrating, but the more patient you are, give yourself time. Teachers can, and there are programs now where students can get extra time to take tests and things like that. And I think even officially, like with the SAT and stuff like that, there are programs where you are not put at a disadvantage.

There's the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004, the IDEA Act, or IDEA. It specifies dyslexia as a specific learning disorder. And when you have a diagnosis of dyslexia, the whole world opens up to you. You all of a sudden have your own personal teacher's assistant working with you. Hopefully. You have all sorts of resources that just weren't available to you before, that are being funneled

directly toward helping you learn to read faster. Yeah, I wonder if that's across the board. Yeah, I think that schools probably have specific funding I wonder if that's across the board. Yeah, I think that schools probably have specific funding for idea stuff. I mean, like when Congress comes up with an act like that, they fund it. And then they fund it out of it. Like those huge omnibus budgets have funding for that. And that goes to the school.

And school's supposedly not allowed to spend it on anything but that stuff. Gotcha. 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 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. And all of a sudden you have your own one-on-one reading and spelling lessons that you just didn't have before. Yeah. The other, like we said, is practice. And over time, you know, you can learn to read. And you make those new neural pathways. And it's heartening to know that if you have this patience and you put in the time,

it is something that can be overcome if everyone works together. Right. And if you can learn to read even as an adult, you're not going to learn to read necessarily proficiently. I think you can if you really, really practice, if you put your mind to it. It's going to be very slow, but it's not like you'll never read a book or something like that. But I saw one woman describing her condition as an adult, and she said she was very proud to be at like a seventh grade reading level now as an adult, which is like you can navigate through life at a seventh grade reading level pretty easy. The problem comes when you've never gotten any help, and you are basically an illiterate adult because of dyslexia.

Yeah, they have technology now can help out there, what they call assistive listening devices, because sometimes if you have someone in your ear reading something out loud while you're reading along, sort of like a teacher in an app, like that one-on-one experience that can really, really help. Seeing a transcription sometimes of what someone's saying can really help. A real-time transcription. Yeah. So all these apps and devices are really helping things along these days. It's like a brand new world for kids with dyslexia compared to like last century. Oh, yeah.

Or even a few decades ago, you know? Yeah. The one thing I didn't quite get was this thing that you sent from Sir Jim Rose. I didn't fully get what this guy was saying. He was part of it. So he's not saying this. He's definitely all into dyslexia. But there is a thread of experts in childhood education, psychology, childhood cognition, who suspect that there's no such thing as dyslexia. Really? That those earliest neurologists and ophthalmologists and doctors who named it and made it a thing were wrong.

And that really an inability to read transcends any level of intelligence. It's disconnected from intelligence. That no matter whether you are of high intelligence or low intelligence, you can suffer from an inability to learn to read. And so if you have dyslexia and you are of high intelligence, the kid next to you who has low intelligence and can't read also has dyslexia. Or, 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, does it have anything to do with intelligence? And if it doesn't have anything to do with intelligence, then all of these resources that are being diverted to these kids who are of high intelligence,

but are having trouble learning to read, is really doing a disservice to the kids of low intelligence, and I'm making air quotes here everybody, who are having trouble learning to read. Why differentiate? They're both having trouble learning to read. Start attacking the problem with both of them. And there was this one Australian expert

who basically said, yes, dyslexia is a thing, it is his own thing, it has a neurobiological basis, it's not made up, it's not a myth, but let's treat first and then diagnose later. If you see an inability to learn to read, go after that. Don't say, well, is it dyslexia? Let's test the kid's intelligence. It doesn't matter.

Focus on learning how, on teaching them how to read. And apparently, interventions, there's this guy named Julian, Professor Julian, what's his name, Chuck? Lennon? Sands? Yes, Julian Sands, in Boxing Helena. He has a big soliloquy about whether or not dyslexia is a myth.

I can't remember the guy's last name, but I get the impression that parents of children with dyslexia are not a big fan of this guy. Right. But he's basically said, we're diverting a lot of funding away from kids who don't know how to read, just because they supposedly don't have a high IQ.

Let's treat all the kids. So that's the idea of whether it's a myth. Not that dyslexia doesn't exist, although I think some people suspect that it didn't for a while. Now people believe it does, but not necessarily that it's just intelligent upper middle class kids who have dyslexia.

It's just an inability to read for the same reason. That's the basis of it. It's still up in the air and it's a really touchy subject. Very touchy subject. And rightfully so. 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 what it must feel like to have some expert going like, there's no such thing as dyslexia. You know? Yeah, yeah, thanks a lot. It is very touchy and rightfully so.

Well, finally, there's this whole notion that if you have dyslexia, then you may excel in other areas. You may be more creative or you may be more prone to be like an entrepreneur perhaps. Yeah, because you think outside of the box. Yeah, I mean, there's a long list of people like, you know, famous creative types that have dyslexia. Agatha 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 that. It'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 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 made it. Maybe, I guess so. She's not a street sweeper. You don't have to look forward to a life of shoveling horse manure because you have dyslexia.

You can achieve, just stick to it, kid. No, I get all that, and that's valid. Oh, you're questioning the cult of celebrity? Yeah, that's what I was, that just sort of bugs me. But no, there is benefits. I'm sure if some kid was like, Tom Cruise has dyslexia? And look at him. I have had some questions about Xanax and its value myself. Oh, goodness. There have been some studies though over the years

that may or may not support this, like supposedly if you have dyslexia you may be quicker to find something in your peripheral vision, maybe you can like MC Escher style drawings or the impossible hidden images, you might see those quicker or more easily. Yeah. Find patterns in noise. Sure. Like you could be a great data analyst perhaps?

And they think like, and this makes total sense, but the problem is it's anecdotal at this point. Right. But it makes total sense that yes, the same senses that you are using to read and write, if you don't know how to read and write, your brain is going to compensate with other things, it's going to possibly excel at other stuff, just because it's structured differently. If your brain is structured differently, which we know that's the case, if you do not read or write, you would expect that it would manifest itself in real world behaviors and traits. Well, yeah, and the first thing I thought is like, yeah, totally, like if you're vision-impaired, you hear things better. Well, yeah, and the first thing I thought is like, yeah, totally, like if you're vision-impaired, you hear things better. Well, supposedly that's a myth.

Well, I looked it up. There are studies where if you are vision-impaired, you are better at pinpointing like location of sound and certain sounds, but it's not as. You can't hear something two miles away. Yeah, it's not as cut and dry. It's just like you hear better. You can't hear something, yeah. Because like your ears develop better.

You know, if you remember that guy who can echolocate? 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. The first thing I thought about was the guy with the ear in his arm. What was his name? Stellarck.

Stellarck. What's great? Oh man, I love that. You and I like go back and forth on remembering the guy's name. Last time we brought him up, I didn't remember his name and you rattled it right out. Stellar. Between us, Stellar is going to live forever like the transhumanist he is. But then that last thing about being entrepreneurial or maybe a corporate executive, they did do

a study in 2009 that found there was anecdotal evidence of Oprah representation in those fields. But then that's a 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 but like nothing would keep them down. So they excelled. Right. They learned how to try harder than their peers. Yeah. So, yeah. Even if that is the case, great.

Sure. But the point is, is it's still anecdotal, so you have to be careful with saying like, Oh yeah, people with dyslexia are way better at this. Right. Or they're more likely to be entrepreneurs. It's just, it hasn't been settled yet. Yeah. But I think the overall point of this episode is, if you are, if you do have dyslexia, there is plenty of hope. Do not give up hope. Whether 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 columnist. Or Agatha Christie. Yep. Or John Irving I saw has dyslexia. John Irving? Yeah. Richard Branson. That was really good. Ozzy Osbourne, for God's sake.

Look at that guy. Sure. Fumbling around the house. He's successful despite himself. If you want to know 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 going to call this Sid and Marty Croft email. This guy wrote in to email us about a personal connection he had to the Schoolhouse Rock episode.

I'm not gonna read that half of the letter because I don't want to further embarrass the family. But his relation to the person that we kind of called out is the guy who ruined Schoolhouse Rock. Oh, okay. Wasn't he an exec? Yeah. But the second half of this says, speaking of unbelievable stories, guys, I thought you'd be jealous to know that I grew up hanging out on the sets of all the Sid and Marty Croft shows because my mom was on a bunch of them.

I used to have lunch with the Slee Stacks and throw around big foam boulders from Land of the Lost. She was Nashville on the Captain Cool and the Kong show which wrapped around the Saturday morning cartoons. I remember that. Mm-hmm. That also led to the music group, the Bay City Rollers, showing up to my birthday party.

What? When I was like five, it caused such a big mom scene the police had to come That's the s a yeah, you are day. Why not? You know how they got their name they threw a 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 But 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 basically

my sister's age. And they would sit around, this is my big memory of the Bay City Rollers, there was one of their albums that had each of their pictures sort of in a dart board like fashion and a circle and they would spin the record around and close their eyes and stop it with their finger. They had to make out with that picture? Yeah, they had to kiss that picture or whatever.

Oh, I hope your sister doesn't listen to this. It's great, the 70s man, so innocent. I love the 70s. So, Bay City Rollers came to his birthday party, they called the cops. 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.

Wow. All the women's voices on Celebrity Deathmatch. Cool. Hosting a game show called Rodeo Drive, playing Joan Rivers on Family Guy. Wow. Being in the Catskills on Broadway for two years. Too much more to mention, guys.

Except also, she went on the road with Tim Conway and Harvey Korman for a number of years. Posing as Carol Burnett. My little brother ended up engaged to Harvey Korman's daughter. Wow. But it didn't work out. Wow.

Anyway, love the show guys. If I can ever be a resource, let me know. That is from Keith Orell. Keith, that was amazing. You remember Celebrity Death Match? Yeah man. It was so great. Big shout out to your mom too.

Yeah. And to your mom's husband. Big ups to your moms, Keith. Yeah. Well, if you wanna brag on your mom because she's done some awesome stuff, we love hearing about that. Moms always have great welcomeness here

at Stuff You Should Know. That's right. That's gonna end up being a crummy t-shirt. If you wanna get in touch with us, you can hang out on stuffyoushouldknow.com and check out our social links 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 stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. One of the best shows of the year, according to Apple, Amazon and Time, is back for another round. We had a big bear of a man who was called Mal Evans, who was on roadie, and I was coming back on the plane and he said, will you pass the salt and pepper? And I misheard him.

I said, what? Sergeant Pepper. Listen to season two of McCartney, a life of lyrics on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Beauty Translated Season 3 is coming soon with what? A second host? I'm Carmen Laurent, and this season I am joined full time by world renowned Janie Danger. Janie, what are we talking about in season three? We're talking about life, Carmen. Beauty Translated is about the many fragmented lives spreading across this rich tapestry of the trans experience.

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