Myself, though it was only recently that I realized it.

Two of my family members have significant enough dyslexia that it interfered with their schooling and while I learned to read very young I tended to only find reading easy if it was based on learned word shapes.

Letter by letter was always very difficult, I did terribly in my required foreign language classes, I’d routinely get math questions wrong not because I made a mistake in calculation but because I copied the numbers from the board in the wrong order. And even today I will regularly mispronounce words I learned from reading, consistently switching around similarly sized letters in the middle even when I’ve read it thousands of times. And thank goodness for spell check.

So every so often people that know I can read and write in English well would make fun of the mispronouncing or my sucking at different languages not knowing I have a family history of dyslexia and likely have a biological basis for my difficulty.

But then last year I saw a paper about the possible benefits of this neurodivergence:

Areas of enhanced ability that are consistently reported as being typical of people with DD include seeing the big picture, both literally and figuratively (e.g., von Károlyi, 2001; Schneps et al., 2012; Schneps, 2014), which involves a greater ability to reason in multiple dimensions (e.g., West, 1997; Eide and Eide, 2011). Eide and Eide (2011) have highlighted additional strengths related to seeing the bigger picture, such as the ability to detect and reason about complex systems, and to see connections between different perspectives and fields of knowledge, including the identification of patterns and analogies. They also observed that individuals with DD appear to have a heightened ability to simulate and make predictions about the future or about the unwitnessed past (Eide and Eide, 2011).

• Developmental Dyslexia: Disorder or Specialization in Exploration?

I had a very successful career for some of the largest companies in the world focused on an interdisciplinary research based approach looking for patterns and trends in what was going to happen next in a particular subject domain.

It was honestly kind of crazy seeing the things I for decades considered my personal superpower helping me at what I applied myself to simply being the other side of the coin of the somewhat embarrassing difficulty I had with various aspects of language.

I was Rudolph after all.

In fact over the pandemic I got really into ancient history, which was always a field I enjoyed but had no interest in pursuing seriously academically given the language requirements, and it was wild reading research that regularly seemed to miss key details in reasoning and patterns. It made me realize that there’s a handful of subjects that are extremely inaccessible to dyslexics and that as a result these fields likely have a net deficit in the positive factors associated with that divergence in turn.