According to a new study published this week, as much as 20% of the global population could be better explorers.
A team of Cambridge scientists published research in the journal Frontiers of Psychology that raises the possibility that dyslexia, which affects one in five people around the world, could help the human species adapt and ensure future success.
Helen Taylor said in a statement accompanying the paper that the deficit-centered view of Dyslexia isn't telling the whole story. A new framework is proposed to help us better understand the cognitive strengths of people with a learning disability.
According to the World Federation of Neurology, there is a disorder in children who fail to attain the language skills of reading, writing and spelling due to their intellectual ability.
Taylor's team thinks the condition may have an evolutionary upside, giving some individuals strengths at seeking out new information about the world instead of interpreting information that's already been mapped out.
They argue that this "explorative bias" may have been a factor in our survival.
If society viewed the cognitive parameters of the condition differently, the benefits would outweigh the challenges.
"We believe that the areas of difficulty experienced by people with dyslexia are caused by a cognitive trade-off between exploration of new information and exploitation of existing knowledge, with the upside being an explorative bias that could explain enhanced abilities observed in certain realm like discovery, invention and creativity," Taylor
Many cultures have looked at disability in a profoundly different way, and looking at the world differently can be a good thing.
Let's hope the research holds up so that we can use all that creativity as quickly as possible.
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