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?

Question

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?

In: 55

Answer 1

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.