I was listening to Dr Maryanne Wolf talk about reading and dyslexia, and one line made my eyes spring open and my eyebrows lift.
She talks about what she calls the reading brain, and here’s the bit that stopped me. Our creative brain, the one built for curiosity and problem solving, came first. The reading brain developed thousands of years after that. It’s only a few thousand years old. Our brains were never built for it. There’s no single centre for reading in the brain, and no gene for it either.
So when a brain approaches reading differently, that’s not a fault, it’s just the original brain still doing what it’s always done, finding its own way through.
Her colleague Gordon Sherman has a word for this, cerebral diversity. I love that.
That means it’s not a flaw in the system! It’s the system itself, being naturally different from person to person, the same way it’s always been.
And here’s the part that really got me. The same wiring that makes reading harder for some people often shows up as real strength elsewhere, spatial thinking, pattern recognition, the kind of brain behind a huge number of entrepreneurs, artists and architects, Leonardo da Vinci included. Same brain. Just pointed in a different direction.
Dr Wolf put it simply. “This is a fantastic brain. It can learn. Our responsibility is to figure out how that brain learns best.”
That’s the whole job, right there. Not deciding someone’s doing it wrong, just finding how their own mind actually works, so learning finally makes sense to them.
She said something else that every parent in my world needs to hear. It’s not the child’s fault they’re learning to read differently. It’s ours, because we haven’t worked out yet how each child learns best.
I think about this every time a parent sits in front of me, worried their child is somehow not good enough.
This matters because once a parent sees their child through this lens instead of through the lens of deficit, the whole picture flips. The question stops being what’s wrong with my child, and becomes how does that brain actually work, and what does it need.
That’s where real progress starts.
