The "visual gist"

This morning I came across an interesting NYT article on dyslexia. It said, in part.

Quote:

The latest findings on dyslexia are leading to a new way of looking at the condition: not just as an impediment, but as an advantage, especially in certain artistic and scientific fields.

.........

But a series of ingenious experiments have shown that many people with dyslexia possess distinctive perceptual abilities. For example, scientists have produced a growing body of evidence that people with the condition have sharper peripheral vision than others.

........

Mr. Geiger and Mr. Lettvin’s findings, which have been confirmed in several subsequent studies, provide a striking demonstration of the fact that the brain separately processes information that streams from the central and the peripheral areas of the visual field. Moreover, these capacities appear to trade off: if you’re adept at focusing on details located in the center of the visual field, which is key to reading, you’re likely to be less proficient at recognizing features and patterns in the broad regions of the periphery.

The opposite is also the case. People with dyslexia, who have a bias in favor of the visual periphery, can rapidly take in a scene as a whole — what researchers call absorbing the “visual gist.”

Just for kicks, I looked up a list of famous dyslexics. I wasn't surprised to find a lot of inventors, artists, actors, musicians and entrepreneurs but I was surprised to find quite a few writers and journalists: Agatha Cristie, Hans Christian Anderson, John Irving, and Terry Goodkind, to name a few of the more famous ones.

Maybe I'm just misinformed about the nature of dyslexia but it seems odd to me that someone who has a hard time reading would choose writing as a profession.

So now I'm rethinking the idea of "visual gist" in relation to writing and wondering about the process of writing. When someone sits down to write, do you think they mostly know how the story will unfold before they start writing? Would this somehow be their "visual gist"? How might this peripheral vision enhance their writing ability?

Any thoughts?

The latest findings on dyslexia are leading to a new way of looking at the condition: not just as an impediment, but as an advantage, especially in certain artistic and scientific fields.

All I can say is I think of my mind basically like a computer; one with an enormous memory capacity, yet is horribly inefficient at locating it.

I was also thinking about this peripheral means of viewing the world, and wondering if it's related to non-visual observation. Not only am I consistently amazed by what others don't see, but what they don't smell or hear, especially while they are engaged in something. It's almost as though there's a 'peripheral observation' mentality. Or maybe I'm just hyper-observant.