Okay, so Vincent in the last segment was talking about some of the serious and negative psychological and emotional impacts that dyslexia can have. But ... now we're going to turn to some of the positive aspects of the constellation. And It is important to remember that we're not trying to invalidate the seriousness of the reading issues here but just to also point out that there can be areas where people with dyslexia can excel more than the typical population in terms of proportions. And actually there's a study that suggests that strengths in being able to visualize things in three dimensional space is potentially a strength. That's higher represented amongst people with dyslexia than in the general population. And this in turn, is meaning that, for example, 'The Economist' reported in 2012 that, in certain professions that value 3D representational skills, such as architecture, companies are sometimes actively recruiting people with difficulties like dyslexia. Professor Stein ... is going to talk about (the) relationships between creativity and dyslexia. >> Now I'm interested in why it is that dyslexics have these exceptional talents. What is it in the brain that allows them to have these talents? And this is still a theory, but I think more and more people are becoming to believe it. Dyslexia wouldn't be so common if it didn't carry advantages, and what I'm interested in is why does it carry these advantages? What's the brain change or difference that makes dyslexics so good at holistic visual-spatial processing? And the argument, although it's not proven it seems highly likely, is that it is a result of the, as it were, the relative weakness of the dyslexic's left hemisphere. What happens to most of us during schooling is that the left hemisphere, which happens to be slightly advantageous at timing things becomes more and more specialized, at linear sequencing. So it starts off with auditory sequencing. If I said, the word 'dog', what happens is the left hemisphere can parse it into 'd' - 'o' - 'g'. And that is something that is essential; it's called, phonology. It's essential if you're going to match those sounds with the letters D-O-G. And so the left hemisphere becomes specialized at this sort of linear kind of sequencing as opposed to holistic kind of approaches which the right hemisphere is good (at). Now that means that during normal education non-dyslexics get only the right hemisphere specialized for this holistic activity but the left hemisphere is now specialized for this linear kind of sequencing. And that linear sequencing by the way, is not a natural kind of thing because in the wild, the world doesn't have linear sequencing. You have trees that are more or less symmetrical. You have bushes that are more or less symmetrical. It doesn't matter which side the stalk of a tree is but it does matter which side the stalk of an 'a' is (or an o) or a 'q' versus a 'p'. And so you have to train the left hemisphere to do all this linear sequencing. And what that does is force out of the left hemisphere its ability to do holistic kinds of processing. So the advantage that dyslexics have is a consequence of the fact that they don't do that specialization so much. And so the left hemisphere is still quite good at visual-spatial processing. So they have both hemispheres to do it, other than only one and that's why they turn out to be such good artists, etc.
