You’re Not Scattered in Meetings. Your Brain Sees Too Many Connections at Once.
Last updated:
You had the idea. A good one. Then you opened your mouth in the meeting and it came out sideways, looping back on itself, three thoughts braided into one, and you watched the person across the table tilt their head and lose the thread. So the next time an idea arrived, you let it go and said nothing. If you have spent years deciding this means you are disorganized or not quick enough, here is something worth sitting with: the wiring that tangles your words is the same wiring that handed you the idea nobody else in the room had.
TL;DR
Dyslexic thinkers often see many connections to a topic at once, a pattern researchers Brock and Fernette Eide call interconnected reasoning, so landing on one linear point is harder than it looks.
Ordering thoughts out loud runs on working memory, a notepad of roughly four chunks (Nelson Cowan); in dyslexia the verbal load and the central executive run tighter, so the order drops on the way out.
Going quiet in a meeting is usually working-memory overload, not a shortage of ideas.
The reliable fix is to externalize: sketch the messy thoughts on paper, order them there, then speak from the sketch, which is cognitive load theory (John Sweller) in action.
One point at a time, and speech-to-text, both lower the load when turning a mental picture into words.
FROM THE VIDEO
Key moments from The Dyslexic Adults Podcast with host Natalie Brooks:
Big-picture thinking as a view from a plane window, seeing every connection at once. Watch at 01:42
The coaching client who saw the perfect connection in a meeting and chose to stay silent. Watch at 02:54
The fix in action: sketch your thoughts out first, then order your point. Watch at 05:34
Common questions
Why do my thoughts come out jumbled when I speak?
Often it is working-memory overload. Seeing many connections at once and trying to order them live overflows the brain’s short-term notepad, so the sequence drops on the way out. Moving the ordering onto paper before you speak takes the load off.
Is big-picture thinking a real dyslexic strength or a nice story?
It is documented. Researchers Brock and Fernette Eide describe interconnected reasoning, the ability to see how ideas link, as a recurring pattern in dyslexic thinkers. It is a strength earned alongside the struggle, not a replacement for it.
Does a dyslexia diagnosis tell me how to fix this?
A diagnosis names where you are; it rarely hands you a daily plan. A screener or report is a starting point, not the whole answer. For formal accommodations at work or school, or if a vision, hearing, or medical cause is suspected, a professional evaluation is the route.
What is the single most useful thing to try first?
Externalize before you speak. Take ten seconds to sketch the messy cloud of thoughts in a margin, order them on paper, then talk from the sketch rather than from memory. One point at a time keeps the notepad from overflowing.
Picture looking down from a plane. Fields, towns, roads, tiny cars threading between them, all in view at once. That wide frame is close to how a dyslexic mind holds a topic. Where someone else lands on one tidy point, you light up five connected ones at the same moment. Researchers Brock and Fernette Eide, who spent years studying dyslexic thinkers, gave this pattern a name: interconnected reasoning, the knack for seeing how ideas, events, and examples link together that sits at the core of their Dyslexic Advantage work. It is a genuine strength, and it is worth being honest about where it comes from. The dyslexia coach Natalie Brooks puts it plainly: she will not hand you the word superpower. Strengths like this one are forged through years of the struggle, not handed over in place of it. The wide view is real. So is the weight of holding it. Brooks opens the episode with a confession a lot of adults will recognize: she read a twenty-page diagnostic report cover to cover and came away knowing the label without learning much about herself. A report tells you a name. It rarely tells you what your own mind is actually doing in the moment it tangles.
Author Quote"
The wiring that tangles your words is the same wiring that handed you the idea nobody else in the room had.
"
Laura LurnsLearning Success Expert
"Dyslexic strengths are not the absence of difficulty. They are trade-offs of a different pattern of brain organization." Brock and Fernette Eide, The Dyslexic Advantage
Your working memory is a post-it note, not a whiteboard
Here is the part nobody explains. Seeing all those connections is one job. Lining them up into reason one, reason two, reason three is a second, harder job, and your brain runs it on working memory, the short-term notepad that holds information while you use it. That notepad is small for everyone, roughly four chunks at a time in the research of memory scientist Nelson Cowan, and in dyslexic minds the verbal side of it tends to run tighter still. Brain-imaging studies point to two overlapping loads: the phonological loop that juggles sounds and words, and the central executive that steers attention across the whole scene. So when you try to hold the wide picture, every linked element, and the correct order at the same time, the notepad overflows and an idea trips on the way out. That is not a character flaw. It is a capacity limit doing exactly what capacity limits do. Natalie Brooks tells the story of a client who kept seeing the perfect connection mid-meeting, felt the overload of explaining it cleanly, and chose silence over the scramble. If you have been that quiet person in the room, you were not out of ideas. You were out of notepad.
Key Takeaways:
1
A wide net, not a flaw: Dyslexic minds connect more elements to a topic at once, a real strength that carries a real cost.
2
Overload, not a blank: Going silent in a meeting is working memory overflowing, not running out of ideas.
3
Put it on paper first: Externalizing thoughts before you speak frees the capacity that ordering them in your head steals.
Stop ordering it in your head. Put it on paper first.
Dyslexic thinkers tend to hold ideas as pictures, and turning a picture into a straight line of words is the bottleneck, which is why words sometimes feel like the enemy. The fix is not to force your brain to do the linear part live, on the spot, while everyone watches. The fix is to move that work off the notepad and onto the page. Cognitive scientist John Sweller showed that the mind frees up enormous capacity the moment you stop asking it to store and arrange information at once. So borrow what worked for that coaching client: before you speak, take ten seconds to sketch the messy cloud of thoughts in a margin, let it be ugly, then draw the one bridge from where the room is to your point. Speak from the sketch, not from memory. A few moves that lower the load:
Externalize first. Bullet the idea on a sticky note or your phone before the meeting reaches the topic, so the ordering is already done when it counts.
One point per card. Trying to deliver five linked ideas at once is what overflows the notepad. Land one, then offer the next.
Speak it before you write it. When the bottleneck runs the other way, on the page, talking the idea aloud or into speech-to-text gets it out in your own order, ready to tidy afterward.
There is a quieter payoff here too. The page does not overflow the way the notepad does, so the more you trust paper with the ordering, the more attention is left over for the connections themselves, the part you were good at all along. Over enough repetitions the bridge from picture to spoken point gets shorter, because the brain is rehearsing the move, not white-knuckling it. None of this shrinks the wide view that makes your thinking worth hearing. It hands the wide view a way out.
Author Quote"
If you have been that quiet person in the meeting, you were not out of ideas. You were out of notepad.
"
You have spent enough years being told you are scattered, slow, or somehow not leadership material, when the truth runs the other way: you saw more than the meeting did, and nobody taught you how to get it out. I am bad at explaining myself was never a description of who you are. It is a prediction you started making after enough rooms went quiet, and every time you sketch your point and say it cleanly, you rewrite that prediction. The skills underneath this, working memory and the way attention holds a sequence, are trainable, and Brain Bloom is built to strengthen exactly those cognitive foundations. And ordering thoughts rarely travels alone. Most adults who wrestle with it also notice it in focus, in reading speed, or in turning a mental picture into a written page, which is why All Access hands you the whole toolkit instead of one piece of it.
Is Your Child Struggling in School?
Get Your FREE Personalized Learning Roadmap
Comprehensive assessment + instant access to research-backed strategies
