Dyslexia as a Strength: Biologist Ben Kilham Shares His Story
Image courtesy Kilham Bear Center
Dyslexia and Systems Thinking
Ben Kilham is a bear biologist who, for decades, has “studied wild black bears in a vast tract of Northern New Hampshire woodlands. At times, he has also taken in orphaned infants–feeding them, walking them through the forest for months to help them decipher their natural world, and eventually reintroducing them back into the wild. Once free, the orphaned bears still regard him as their mother. One of these bears, now a 20-year-old female, has given him extraordinary access to her daily life, opening a rare window into how she and the wild bears she lives among carry out their daily lives, raise their young, and communicate. Kilham’s unique findings now interest bear researchers worldwide.”
His dedication to black bears has made him such an expert that China asked for his help with the giant panda, a collaboration that inspired the IMAX documentary “Pandas.” To link to the trailer, click here.
Ben's work with bears, however, is just part of his story. Ben is dyslexic, which, for years, kept him from pursuing an advanced degree. As a result, his work and rare insights into the social and emotional lives of bears went largely unpublished. With the support of wildlife preservationist George Schaller (whose story is also included in the Story Preservation 4-12 Learning Lab), Ben enrolled in a doctorate program at Drexel University where he completed his course of study and now holds a Ph.D in Environmental Science. In a review of Ben’s book In the Company of Bears, Brock and Fernette Eide, authors of The Dyslexic Advantage write, "Kilham perfectly exemplifies how much the world has to gain from the exceptional insights of dyslexic individuals, who often possess a special talent for finding order hidden in the complex patterns of the real world."
From Ben’s SPI recording:
“When the time came that I was studying bear I was interested in their behavior, and bear behavior - or the behavior of any animal - is invisible. You make an observation and you have to relate it and eventually build a mechanism or system. [The world is comprised of systems] and the nice thing about them is they all have pieces, they are all interrelated and they all have to work in the end. I realized that my observations - even though sometimes it was only one - it was not a quantitative data collection gathering in a narrow window over a short period of time [the way] science likes to do it, but it was a gathering of lots of different observations over a period of time and then connecting them to each other. My mind automatically connects things. It figures out where they go and what the relationships are. The more observations you get the more accurate your outcome is.”
To listen to a track from Ben’s recording, click here. His full recording is in the SPI 4-12 Learning Lab / Humanities / Miscellaneous.
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