Brock & Fernette Eide

Doctors Brock and Fernette Eide are leading experts in the fields of dyslexia and neurolearning. They are the authors of the internationally best-selling book The Dyslexic Advantage. They also co-founded the non-profit Dyslexic Advantage, a leading resource on the strengths associated with dyslexia and one of the world’s largest online dyslexia communities. Here are a few projects they have been working on recently.

Over the last few years, we’ve been involved in putting together a revised and updated edition of The Dyslexic Advantage, which was released in February 2023. And we’ve included about half of the book with new material. It has 18 new extensive interviews with dyslexic people and several recent interviews with researchers in dyslexia and these talents.

But a funny thing happened on the way to producing this new edition, as we discovered that what we had seen as four separate strengths were not as separate and distinct as we thought. And like the blind people encountering the elephant in the old story, it seems like what we found is that rather than all of the mind strengths being different, they’re all other aspects or manifestations of the same big cognitive elephant. An elephant whose job is to mentally simulate or make models of the world using systems connected to episodic memory.

And if you know what kind of mind you have and who you are, you’ll begin to know what you should do. Because with dyslexia, the key to success is not fixing your weaknesses but building upon your strengths.

We continue to explore and support a new approach to thinking about dyslexia. Instead of asking what’s wrong with the dyslexic mind, we should be focusing on what the dyslexic mind is for. And what the dyslexic mind seems to be for is reasoning about the world using simulation of physical and conceptual worlds, whether real or imagined.