Wallace asked: > I'm wondering how many programmers are dyslexic? (Who ever > decided to use the word Dyslexia for Dyslexic people should be shot) > > I do think that we seem to see things in organised systems or > try to make everything fit into systems. Whether we are that > way inclined or not or we have created our own sub systems to > overcome our dyslexia, I'm not sure.
There is indeed relatively recent evolutionary psychology research pointing to a corelation between families with many engineers, programmers, mathematicians and physicists and physicists in their midst and the incidence of autistic spectrum disorders including dyslexia, dyspraxia, and aspergers. So there does appear to be a genetic basis underlying these. However, the latest autism research implies that it's not individual genes but collections of many separate genes that underly the many syndromes we collectively place under the 'autism' umbrella. Most of the implicated genes relate not to gross brain function (so the major brain structures are the same) but to the relative amounts of neural wiring and interconnection between different parts of the brain. The short version is that there is a limited amount of wiring and bandwidth and what gets favoured appears to determine a tradeoff between being orientated towards 'folk physics' (physical objects, interactions, abstract thought, narrowband detail focus, etc) and 'folk psychology' (relationships, social cues, emotions and empathy, parallel pattern matching, etc) I can point you at the research papers in question if you're interested. Cheers, Paul. _______________________________________________ NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi mailing list Post: delphi@delphi.org.nz Admin: http://delphi.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi Unsubscribe: send an email to delphi-requ...@delphi.org.nz with Subject: unsubscribe
