Short answers, pulled from the story.
Rudolf Berlin, an ophthalmologist in Stuttgart, coined the term dyslexia in 1883 to describe a young boy who could see perfectly well yet could not learn to read or write despite having typical intelligence and physical abilities.
Neuroimaging studies have revealed that the brains of people with dyslexia often show less activation in the left hemisphere, specifically in areas like the inferior frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule, which are critical for language processing.
Specific genes such as DCDC2 and KIAA0319 on chromosome 6, and DYX1C1 on chromosome 15, have been identified as potential contributors to the condition of dyslexia.
A persistent myth surrounding dyslexia is that it involves seeing letters or words backwards, a behavior known as mirror writing, which is actually common in many children as they learn to read and write and is not a defining characteristic of the disorder.
The difficulty of learning to read is directly influenced by the orthographic complexity of a language, with deep orthographies like English and French posing greater challenges than shallow orthographies like Spanish, Italian, and Finnish.
Dyslexia affects 3 to 7 percent of the population and up to 20 percent with some degree of symptoms, making it the most common learning disability.