Scientists Say Dyslexics Are Integral For Our Species' Survival

Scientists Say Dyslexics Are Integral For Our Species' Survival

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I want to do a shout out to any kid
or any adult who has ever struggled with dyslexia, because
usually it starts in primary school where you feel you're
just stupid because you can't spell, or you can't read,
or the numbers swim in front of you, and then
your whole of your schooling is spent trying to find
a way to actually just get through. And certainly that
was my experience. But one of the things that I

(00:20):
learned really early on is that I then put myself
in a position where I didn't have to read a lot,
so I became a radio announside, and it manifests in
our studio with me making up words, which I don't
actually believe that I do. It's just that my brain
is searching for the correct word, and then often it
just combines words in the hope that no one will notice.
And I certainly did that on Friday when we were

(00:43):
talking about I still call the King the Prince. I
can't get around and calling him King Charles. I know.
But then there's a domino effect because then who's William? Yeah,
that's right, confusing, So now there's a queen consult. Oh, yes,
that's Camilla. She's a consult she yes, okay, I didn't
pick it up. Thank you for going with me, genius.
Queen consults, so she's someone who consults the queen. Well,

(01:04):
she consults with the king with the it's an improvement again, Yes,
she's taken the two words and absolent improvement because what
is because the real one is consort. Consort. This doesn't
make any sense in my brain. So I search for
the word that I think that would be the most useful, right,
So when this study came about, I was super excited.
It's been done out of the University of Cambridge and

(01:25):
basically they have discovered that dyslexias a dyslexics prove that
the human species can adapt and survive because the way
that normal people know, that's not fair. The way that
non standard people, non dislexics learn is they're very systematic
in what they do and they learn by rote. And
that's what our school system is based on. What happens

(01:47):
with dyslexics is we don't learn like that. We have
a much bigger picture of you, like my brain trying
to find a word because I don't actually know what
the real world did, and so the word is yes, okay.
So what these researchers in Cambridge have said is that
those people mean that we show that human beings can

(02:08):
adapt and that if we don't have both in our
world then we can't evolve because very systematic thinkers don't
often look for an alternative way of doing things where
dyslexics do. So what happens is you need both of
those things together, You need dyslexics and non dyslexics so
that we then have a bigger world picture, but we
know how to get there. To quote you, Robinov, sorry,

(02:29):
you've been ostracized in the past, and you have made
it starkingly obvious.