Howard Gardner received some questions from an Italian PhD student/stage director on the nature of artistic genius in performers and a possible link to dyslexia. The responses from Howard Gardner and also Ellen Winner, a psychologist with an expertise in this area, respond below.
From Fiorenza Ippolito
I am an opera stage director and a doctoral student in Spain. I am working on a research project involving your studies to define talent and what we might call the "artistic mind" in artists and performers.
We investigated the need to have an audience and asked ourselves the below questions.
Why do some people feel more comfortable with the following:
Using an avatar or persona
Individuating different perspectives at the same time (a character, stage director, composer, audience member, oneself)
Building coherent units between different sectors to communicate an idea
Understanding and expressing sensations, emotions, or feelings on stage using these methods:
a) emotional memory - experienced or known situation (application of emotion)
b) impulsive reactions (application of de-control)
c) images for each word (application of mental images visualized without control)
Might dyslexia or other learning differences make a difference? Is an artistic genius usually dyslexic, and if so, could the genius be to see things that others do not see?
If we identify a series of talents necessary for actors, is there an area of the brain that is related to the need to communicate to an audience?
Is there a mind or similar for overcoming the difficulties of a disability that we can apply to non-disabled people and operate exchanges in intuitively understandable languages without the need for adaptations?
Thank you very much for being the person who has been able to see beyond the normal. I am dyslexic and I belong to the generation of those who have been considered scholastically unintelligent and evaluated as "mentally retarded" experiencing school failures. Thank you for giving me the possibility to be an intelligent person.
Howard Gardner’s Response
Thank you for your very thoughtful letter. You are raising very good questions, and have some promising “hunches.”
I am no longer working in the area of the arts. Your thoughts are plausible BUT it is too easy to claim that artists/actors are better or worse in some areas than non-artists and non-actors. For one thing, many kinds of people become actors, for many reasons. And one can succeed or fail as an actor in many different ways. Nor do we necessarily have good tests for the various kinds of abilities/disabilities that actors/non-actors have or lack. So, in many ways, it is still the “Land of Anecdotes.”
If you were my student, I would encourage you to focus on one kind of artist or actor, and see whether in individuals with that profile, there are consistent strengths or weaknesses in 1-2 other cognitive areas.
As an example from another domain, I happen to be quite musical. I am also good in languages but terrible in visual-spatial thinking and in bodily-kinesthetic expression (except for playing the piano or typing this note). But are these regular correlations? I very much doubt it—and you could only answer that question by looking at a few dozen musically-gifted persons and a few dozen individuals who are quite non-musical, and see whether there are convincing correlations.
If you were successful in answering this question (let's say that musicians happen to be good at learning languages but poor at solving mazes), you would then have a model for how to study this kind of question. In any event, I wish you good luck with your studies...and your artistry!
I have passed on your letter to my wife, Ellen Winner, who is an excellent researcher in this area, and her thoughts are below.
FROM ELLEN WINNER
There’s some evidence that actors have (and also develop) more perspective-taking and empathy (on paper and pencil tests) than non-actors. Actors suppress their own identities when taking on characters. Please refer to the articles here and here.
Thus far, there is no evidence that people with dyslexia are superior in any domain compared to those without dyslexia. However, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence of people with dyslexia showing high talent in visual-spatial areas. Therefore, we can at least say that dyslexia does not work against talent in visual-spatial areas; one can have both talent in visual-spatial areas and dyslexia.
This case study does show that actors dissociate (click here.) My former doctoral student, Maria Eugenia Panero, also has some evidence that actors are more hypnotizable, have more dissociative traits, and experience flow and empathy during performances.