Can someone explain how dyslexia showed up in humans? Was it something that developed when we created written languages? If it existed before written languages how would one know if they had it?
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Well, the whole definition of dyslexia is, as far as I know, that you can’t read words properly, so before there was a written language even if someone had it they’d never know. Since the affliction was only discovered in 1881 it’s impossible to say how long it existed before that date, though, because no-one would have recorded it as a specific problem.
Dyslexia is certainly not just written language based but is about the order of items and processing that: so directions is one North South East West, dates, many other kinds information that must be structured in a particular way. People may have been affected by the condition at any point in human development.
It could be the other way around. That the human mind evolved in to a more calculator mode of operation with the advent of civilisations due to farming, and the need for complex societal interactions and war. Those communities that had less of the computer brained were disadvantaged and more likely to be wiped out or enslaved.
I say that in part because dyslexics often have wonderful capabilities, such as a friend who can lie in bed and see her day more clearly than when she experienced it.
Dyslexia is just an aspect of your brains pattern recognition abilities that is deficient from the average human baseline. As society has evolved, and the ability to read becomes more critical for normal functioning, this deficiency can now be regarded as a disability.
So it’s likely that dyslexia existed in humans for the entirety of human history, and probably some animals have dyslexia, but have no practical method of exposing it.
Dyslexia is just an inability to parse certain types of pattern recognition in the brain. It can be struggling to parse symbols such as letters or numbers, but can also be down to forming grammatically correct sentences, due to the difficulty in parsing grammatical rules before speaking. Others may lack an inherent sense of rhythm, and may struggle to keep a beat. Just like people who are slow to do this, there are people that are *above* the average baseline, and are very good at pattern recognition.
The thing is, dyslexia is difficult to pin down because it’s a disability that hinders a very specific human activity. A lot of people with dyslexia, are otherwise perfectly intelligent, and in fact can be above baseline on other things. (Anecdotally there are a lot of articles on how kids with reading dyslexia are more likely to be very good spatial knowledge, good at spotting outliers in a pattern, and seeing the bigger picture). So even if dyslexia was a problem for things in the wild, it seems at the very least, humans and animals have tended to specialize in other areas to overcome any of the more subtle symptoms of dyslexia. In modern society though, you can’t really do that. Everyone needs to be literate. Which means you have to be able to read. We need to accept that our mediums for doing this need to adapt to the reader, not the other way around. This means dyslexia friendly fonts, logical rule based syntax, and a general acceptance that language comprehension is *not* innate for all humans.
>Can someone explain how dyslexia showed up in humans?
Dyslexia exists in other species besides humans?
Dyslexia is what’s called a symptomatic diagnosis – that is to say, it’s defined by the problem it causes, and not by how it comes about.
The defining symptom for dyslexia is difficulty reading – as such “dyslexia” would not be a useful term in a world without written language, no-one can read or write if there’s no concept of writing.
**But** – everything that *causes* dyslexia will have existed prior to the advent of writing.
* There were people who had trouble with resolving thin lines.
* There were people whose eyes focused at points a millimeter apart, making their vision very slightly off when it comes to small differences in things.
* There were people who have a disconnect between processing of sight and sound.
* There were people for whom different colours of light resolve slightly differently, meaning that if there were something in black and white made up of fine lines it’d be slightly blurred.
* And there’s a bunch more possible causes…
All of those people would be diagnosed with dyslexia in the modern world – but in the environment they lived in, with no such thing as writing, that dyslexia didn’t exist.
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To use an analogy – imagine in 2025 someone invents a brain-computer interface, and it works for 99% of people, but couldn’t work on people whose nerves fire slightly differently, or who have extra-hard bones, or slightly more conductive muscles. It would rapidly become a major part of everyone’s life, except for the 1% of people who couldn’t use it.
After a century of society adapting to the BCI, people who couldn’t use it would come to be considered disabled – so there’d be a new disorder, which we might call “dyscomputia”.
It’s always been around, it’s just the environment and task we’ve dinner in the past didn’t really draw attention to it much.
As mentioned by others dyslexia is an assortment of challenges to our pattern recognition in our brain.
Ability to see small differences, distinguish orientation similarities like p b d q quickly and with ease.
If you had one of these problems in the past it might show in a number of ways.
You dislike and struggle with tasks requiring fine lines, like weaving, tapestries, embroidery, etc so you avoid it. Or it takes a bit longer. Or you get a headache after a bit.
Or you use more vibrant colors with bolder lines, your taste and style adapting to this little peculiarity in how you see things.
Why this is? It’s hard to pin down for any one person back then. As there was such a variety of subtle ways it manifested.
And it’s not necessarily a hindrence either. My uncle is dislexic, with the orientation pattern challenge. He struggles to automatically tell p b q d apart for example. Especially typed. Which makes sense. They are functionally the same shape, just mirrored or rotated.
But he believes that for the exact same reasoning, he is able to spot a four leaf clover in a whole bed of clover at glance. It’s actually bewildering seeing him do it. They just…stand out, plain as day he says, regardless of the angle he views them at.
He notices similar things when he’s sorting small components, he can pick out all of a type rapidly, even if they’re rotated or flipped.
It only becomes a problem with the specific task of reading. Otherwise it’s just a knack/quirk/preference.
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