Question: why do some people have dyslexia

Ed Bracey answered on 6 Nov 2017:

Good question! We’re not entirely sure, but some scientists have shown that the parts of our brain that are important for reading are different in people with dyslexia. This seems to be genetic, i.e. the brains of people with dyslexia grow slightly differently from people without it.

Think about hair colour, only a few genes create all the different hair colours there are.

But to create a brain takes thousands of genes, and there are 8 billion human brains, all with slightly different genes, so they are all of them different.

So of course some will be better at reading than others. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t better at other things instead. Their brains are just different and people with different brains are extremely useful to society – the more different brains trying to solve difficult problems, the better!