Research Suggests There's a Big Overlooked Benefit of Having Dyslexia

The modern world is made up of written words. It can feel like an obstacle for people with the reading disorder to survive.

The neurological condition that makes decoding text so hard could benefit individuals and their community in a world full of unknowns.

University of Cambridge psychologists Helen Taylor and Martin David Vestergaard reexamined the traditional view of developmental dyslexia as a disadvantage, suggesting its neurological characteristics could carry advantages.

They suggest that brains that find it hard to quickly interpret written words could find it easier to explore their environments for clues that improve decision making.

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.

It is difficult to turn a written word into a meaningful set of sounds.

Thought to affect between 5 and 20 percent of the population, it sets reading ability back by a year or so, interfering with ongoing opportunities to learn.

The knock on effect of this delay in a standardized education system can be profound, reducing confidence and self-esteem and potentially feeding into a slew of social problems

A lot of visual, linguistic, and attentional networks are created by reading. It's possible that something in a person's genes changes how these networks operate as a whole.

Due to the wide diversity of the world's population, and the fact that it is heavily influenced by our genes, evolution favored it.

The culture of reading and writing is quite recent. Our reliance on effective literacy skills is even more recent, which means that the effects of dyslexia on individual cognitive function would have been negligible until recently.

People who show signs of having a learning disability are better at global abstract and spatial reasoning than people who don't. They're better at predicting outcomes.

In a world that values ability to pull information from walls of text, this could be a way to cope. They don't think this is the case, though.

According to Taylor, there is an explorative bias that could explain enhanced abilities observed in certain areas like discovery, invention and creativity, because of the cognitive trade-off between exploration of new information and exploitation of existing knowledge.

Our minds are constrained by a tug of war called the exploration-exploitation trade-off. We need to be confident that the information we have is accurate and will result in a predictable outcome if we want to make a decision.

If we waited until we had better information, we could lose the meal or ourselves. We might not know why we made the decision if we act too quickly.

"Striking the balance between exploring for new opportunities and exploiting the benefits of a particular choice is key to adaptation and survival and underpins many of the decisions we make in our daily lives."

The ability to transform scratches into sounds in our heads would enhance those rapid decision-making skills that could make a life-or-death difference for our community.

The framework is indicative of a broader trend in pathology that views diversity as being influenced by pressures in a changing environment.

The significance isn't that a disorder is a superpower in disguise, but that we have control over most of the obstacles. Changing how we educate could be a much more effective cure than any pill or therapy.

The research was published in a psychology journal.