Jonah Lehrer on New Research About Autistics - WSJ.com: Those with dyslexia, meanwhile, are often better at peripheral perception and quickly grasping the gist of a scene, showing superior performance on a variety of visual tasks. This might explain the high number of artists and designers with the condition.
The larger lesson is that, according to the latest research, these "deficits" are actually trade-offs. What seems, at first glance, like a straightforward liability turns out to be a complex mixture of blessings and burdens.
For too long, we've assumed that there is a single template for human nature, which is why we diagnose most deviations as disorders. But the reality is that there are many different kinds of minds. And that's a very good thing.