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