Video #25: The Evolutionary Advantages of Dyslexia

In this video I explore the big question: why is this disorder [dyslexia] still in the gene pool? One clear reason is that for most of the 300,000 years that humans have been around, reading written words did not exist. There were no remedial reading specialists in prehistoric times! On the other hand, there were other things that the dyslexic brain did really well that nature could have selected for preservation and replication of the relevent genes, including peripheral vision (having eyes in the back of your head), 3-D spatial intelligence, global or ”fuzzy” perception, big picture thinking, and facility with drawing and other artistic tasks. We know that dyslexics are often better than neurotypicals at these tasks, and so we can speculate that perhaps these were adaptive traits enabling dyslexics to be more successful hunters or gatherers, or perhaps better storytellers of the group, or communicators of pictures showing in a pictograph manual ”how to hunt successfully”! 🙂