Dyslexia: Is It Closely Lined to Creativity?

Good news for those who can spell, the answer is no. It appears that more dyslectic people simply elect to work very committedly in the non-linguistic creative professions.

To be successful, dyslectic people actually have to work harder to overcome their linguistic challenges.

Fortunately, the best predictor of anyone's performance is not their IQ or personality, it is the amount of time one spends on a particular task.

Dyslexia is hereditary and, fortunately, one can learn to live with even severe dyslexia. A dyslectic person may not be well suited for teaching English or working as an editor in a publishing house, however, it does give them a distinct advantage in other creative professions.

Having struggled with reading and writing, the dyslectic person has failed early and often, thereby teaching them to persevere.

As Winston Churchill, another famous dyslectic and creative individual, noted: "Never give up - -never, never, never give up."

Advantages
What then are the advantages, if any, of being dyslexic in overcoming challenges? The early age confrontation of apparently insurmountable challenges teaches the dyslectic person to persevere in the face of difficulty and failure.

Solutions
They learn early to look at problems from multiple angles and use other skills to succeed.

Dyslectic people often colour-code information to aide their learning, using three-dimensional drawings to solve algebra problems and come up with intricate mnemotechnical cues to improve retention.

Working on small creative tricks to overcome challenges may help make them better prepared to solve problems.

It has been said that "luck is when opportunity meet preparation" and dyslectic people could thus appear to be "luckier" problem solvers.

Are people who are actually good at spelling be at a disadvantage? 
Since reading, writing and arithmetic are given a high priority in most school systems and IQ and other standardised tests favour people with linguistic skills, perfecting what one is being rewarded for can narrow one's development in other areas where there was also the possibility to excel.

One of the secrets to life is to avoid repeatedly chastising oneself over what is not done well.

A dyslectic may never become the best speller; however, a person can live happily with being mediocre in this area and simply delegate the more demanding writing tasks.

Being content with being average in one area, dyslectics are freed up to invest the over 10,000 hours required to become an expert in another area.

They can then leverage their inborn abilities and turn those abilities into a strong competitive advantage in an area in which they excel.

The Creative Economy may be the fastest growing segment of the Western World and creativity is now, more than ever, the source of this progress.

By encouraging people early on to find and grow their unique natural abilities to innovate and appreciating them for what they create, rather than for what they consume, we will have created yet another novel way of spelling success.

Credit this article to Soren Petersen

Kids Learn to Flex Their Cultural Muscles

Preschool kids angling for a reward display social skills that may, on a grander scale, turn human cultures into cauldrons of change and innovation.

Groups of 3- to 4-year-olds, but not clusters of chimpanzees or capuchin monkeys, solved progressively more complex tasks in a puzzle box by employing three key social strategies, say zoologist Rachel Kendal of Durham University in England and her colleagues.

First, children who solved a task taught struggling peers what to do. Second, kids often copied what others did. And finally, task solvers frequently shared stickers they received as rewards with kids who hadn’t yet earned stickers.

This package of social behaviours characterized four- or five-person groups in which at least two kids solved a three-stage puzzle and most of the rest reached stage two, Kendal’s team reports in the March 2 Science.

Chimps and capuchins in groups of eight to 32 rarely got beyond stage one of the same puzzle, the researchers say. No evidence of teaching or sharing of food rewards appeared in these primates. Chimps copied others at the first stage but not at higher stages.

“The stark contrast in skills supporting cultural ability between children and both chimps and capuchins was surprising,” Kendal says. Her study is the first to use the same task to explore social learning in different species.

Previous studies of children’s problem-solving in groups have similarly focused on teaching, imitation and sharing, remarks anthropologist Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

These behaviors critically enable human cultures to make rapid advances in knowledge and technology, he says. Further research needs to untangle precisely how this process works, Henrich adds.

Children’s puzzle-box successes may reflect other human mental specialties, such as reasoning with language and inferring others’ intentions, suggest psychologist Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and anthropologist H. Clark Barrett of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a commentary published in the same issue of Science.

In Kendal’s study, participants reached chutes containing stickers or food first by moving a sliding door to the left or right, then by pushing either of two buttons to move the door further in the same direction, and finally by turning a dial using one of two colored holes, releasing the door to slide still further.

After 30 hours, only one chimp mastered the puzzle box, but the strategies didn’t spread. After 53 hours, no capuchins cracked all three tasks, and only two solved two tasks.

After 2.5 hours, five of eight kids’ groups contained at least two individuals who had conquered the puzzle box, with most remaining kids in those groups solving two tasks.

TEDxLondon - Sir Ken Robinson - YouTube

Sir Ken Robinson, PhD is an internationally recognized leader in the development of education, creativity and innovation. He is also one of the world's leading speakers with a profound impact on audiences everywhere. The videos of his famous 2006 and 2010 talks to the prestigious TED Conference have been seen by an estimated 200 million people in over 150 countries.

He works with governments in Europe, Asia and the USA, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies and some of the world's leading cultural organizations. In 1998, he led a national commission on creativity, education and the economy for the UK Government.

All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education(The Robinson Report) was published to wide acclaim in 1999. He was the central figure in developing a strategy for creative and economic development as part of the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, working with the ministers for training, education enterprise and culture.

The resulting blueprint for change, Unlocking Creativity, was adopted by politicians of all parties and by business, education and cultural leaders across the Province.