According to a study by neuroscientists at the University of San Francisco, children with dyslexia show greater emotional responses than their neurotypical classmates.
Published in the international journal of cognition study, Cortex, the findings make for interesting reading. We’ve long known the correlation between people with dyslexia and greater creative abilities and thinking outside the box. But this new information links the idea of dyslexia to a heightened emotional reactivity as well.
The study found that children with dyslexia showed increased physiological and behavioural responses when they were watching emotionally evocative videos. This higher emotional reactivity was linked to stronger connectivity in the brain’s salience network. The salience network is a strange but vital part of the brain that identifies biologically and cognitively relevant events, and guides how we respond to them.
The results support the growing school of thought that dyslexia is much more than a reading difficulty. The idea that people with dyslexia have a greater emotional response as well as powerful creative skills contributes to the idea that dyslexia’s effects are more complex than we realise. Powerful strengths like innovation, creativity, and emotional reactivity are sought after in many careers like those in the arts, and we do tend to find a disproportionately large degree of people with dyslexia represented in the field.
It’s a compelling thought, the link between dyslexia and a whole range of emotional and creative superpowers. For a long time, the research landscape has been concerned with the ways in which dyslexia alters reading skills, so it’s exciting to now see it exploring the strengths of dyslexia too.
For a more in-depth breakdown of the cognitive side of the study, the UCSF write-up can be found on their blog here.