For more than a hundred years, the world has treated dyslexia as simply a reading disorder. That definition has helped millions of children get essential support, but it has also blinded us to something much larger. Dyslexia isn’t only about reading. It’s about how people think. The neurologist Samuel T. Orton, who first described dyslexia in the early 20th century, never saw it as a single deficit. He noted that many of his patients—brilliant, curious individuals who struggled in a specific way with written words—also showed exceptional abilities in spatial reasoning, pattern recognition, and creative problem-solving. Orton viewed dyslexia as a distinctive cognitive profile, not a defect. Over the century that followed, research narrowed. In the 1980s, the “phonological deficit” model […]
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