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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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”.
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