Free The Dyslexic Advantage by Brock L. Eide

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    Eventually Lance grew tired of working for someone else, so in 1993 he set up shop on his own, and he’s never regretted it. You can sense the enjoyment he still finds in his work when he describes how he tackles each project. He begins each new job from scratch rather than modifying previous projects, and he remains involved through every step of the manufacture, installation, testing, and fine-tuning of the electronic panels he creates.
    Lance credits much of his design skill to his ability to mentally envision his projects in fully constructed form. As he reads his clients’ proposals he envisions all the components he’ll need coming together to form a three-dimensional blueprint in his mind, and he can manipulate these components at will. He told us that one of the things he most enjoys about his work is when he nears the completion of a project and he can finally see in the real world the creation he first envisioned in his mind.
    Lance also credits his success to the fact that his slow reading and poor procedural memory always forced him to adopt a hands-on rather than book- or rule-focused approach. Although by age thirty Lance’s reading had improved to the point where he could read for pleasure, he still reads slowly enough that he prefers to learn about new electronic parts and devices by interacting with them, rather than reading a manual or prospectus. As a result, he’ll often find new uses for the equipment that are better than the task they were designed for.
    We’ve shared Lance’s story with you because, as you’ll soon see, Lance is a perfect example of a dyslexic individual who excels in Material reasoning, the M-strengths in MIND.

Material Reasoning: A 3-D Advantage
    M-strengths are abilities that help us reason about the physical or material world—that is, about the shape, size, motion, position, or orientation in space of physical objects, and the ways those objects interact.
    M-strengths consist primarily of abilities in areas that can be termed spatial reasoning , which has often been recognized as an area of special talent for many individuals with dyslexia. However, as we’ll show in the next few chapters, dyslexic individuals with prominent M-strengths typically possess outstanding abilities in some areas of spatial reasoning but not others. In particular, the kind of spatial reasoning at which they excel involves the creation of a connected series of mental perspectives that are three-dimensional in nature—like a virtual 3-D environment in the mind.
    This type of “real-world” spatial ability can be phenomenally valuable for the individuals who possess it. While M-strengths receive little emphasis or nurturing in most school curricula, they play an essential role in many adult occupations. Designers, mechanics, engineers, surgeons, radiologists, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, builders, skilled artisans, dentists, orthodontists, architects, chemists, physicists, astronomers, drivers of trucks, buses, and taxis, and computer specialists (especially in areas like networking, program and systems architecture, and graphics) all rely on M-strengths for much of what they do.
    In the coming chapters, we’ll look in detail at the nature and advantages of M-strengths and at the key mental processes underlying them.

CHAPTER 8
    M-Strengths in Action
    A s an infant Max was late to start talking, and when he finally began to speak it was in a language all his own: ma was water, dung gung was vacuum cleaner, and wow wow was pacifier. When he started preschool at age three and a half, Max’s mother remembered, he had difficulty “catching on to things that the other kids seemed to simply absorb. He never learned the songs or rhymes, couldn’t remember the names of the other kids, and could rarely retell what happened during the day.” In first grade he went to a Montessori school, but “he didn’t ‘discover’