December 19, 2001: miswired
Sometimes, you can't recognize your deficencies until they've healed, can't see the wound till it's gone.
It's been that way for me. After integration, after finally being treated correctly for my thyroid disorder, I'm starting to realize that yes, indeed, there *was* something wrong with me as a kid. I was bright, no doubt about that. But there were things that were just plain hard for me.
Take memorization, for example. I don't memorize. Anything. Ever. I never have. I've never learned the times tables despite five years of work on learning them in math classes. (My math teachers, noticing that even though I didn't know my times tables I'd figured out the basic concepts of algebra more or less on my own, finally passed me off into higher math.) I don't memorize phone numbers--I store a base number in my head and an equation for working out the phone number from the base number. One of the hardest things I ever had to do in school was memorize a list of prepositions for English class. I managed it only by putting it to a rhythm and writing out the list over and over again until my hand learned the proper order for the words.
People who know me well know that you can never tell me anything verbally and expect me to remember it. When someone starts to give me directions to go somewhere, I have to grab a pen and paper, write down the directions, and then slowly repeat them back to the direction-giver. In situations where I can't write down the directions (say I've asked someone who's evidently busy for directions to the bathroom) I'll generally get the first step and a general sense of what direction I'm supposed to be heading, but nothing else. I can't review in my head the steps I was supposed to take to do something. If the directions are, "Go down the stairs, take a left, go right at the third corridor, and it's at the end of the hallway" all I will remember is that I have to go down the stairs.
I went to an audiologist for a hearing test, and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with my ears. I hear just fine, I just can't remember what I hear. I can be sure one moment that I've comprehended and retained whatever information has been imparted to me, and then next moment it's all a goopy mess inside my head.
There's also a sort of scary phenomenon that happens less often these days, but marked almost all of my social interactions when I was a child. I've never seen anything about this, so it may be unique to me. What happens is that someone will be talking to me, and what I hear is gibberish. I *know* they're speaking English, I could have understood them perfectly a moment before, but suddenly whatever part of my brain understands English is offline. It's as if I have a translator in my head that occasionally goes on the fritz.
The funny thing, though, is that if I stop the input and wait a few seconds, the general gist of what the other person was saying will come to me. Never their exact words, but something like, "Lunch. Desire. Time expression." (which is what my brain would translate "Do you want to go to lunch now?" to.) Before i figured out that I'd generally get the gist dropped into my head if I just paused for a couple of seconds, I'd constantly say, "What? Oh, never mind, I got it." after every single sentence. I've described it as "verbal dyslexia" because that's what it feels like to me.
I used to do experiments--when my translator was on the fritz, I'd repeat back to people what I heard them say and have them tell me if it was anything like what they said. The expressions on their faces when they realized that I wasn't simply mishearing a few consonants, I was actually hearing something completely different than what they said, were priceless.
For me, any situation where I'm going to have to comprehend speech fills me with a vague dread. Telephone conversations are awful. Meetings, especially long ones, are about sixteen different kinds of icky, especially if I'm expected to contribute. (I often have to ask people to repeat themselves when they ask me a question. Over the years, I've gotten good at covering for myself.) If I'm going somewhere, I always call ahead for directions or get directions from the Web so I can write the directions down. And when I'm asking directions, I pay more attention to the person's body language to get a "feel" for what direction they're telling me to go.
I've learned skills over the years to make up for it--I have excellent reading comprehension (and read very quickly), I write things down right away that I'm going to need to remember (appointments and things I need to do among them), I am often hyperorganized, I own two PDAs that beep and blink to tell me when I need to do things, I have better notetaking skills than I used to. (though I still never volunteer to take notes for anyone else.) I try to make sure, when I'm listening to someone, I can watch their mouth while they're speaking. There are still consonants I cannot distinguish at all out of context, mostly alveolar and labiodental consonants (I can't tell the difference between the voiced and unvoiced th, f, and v), but I can tell in context what the word is supposed to be. The Internet has been an utter godsend for me, because I can communicate in the mode that *I* do best in.
And, yes, I go looking for the lyrics of every song I want to enjoy. If I can't understand the lyrics, songs are just so much annoying noise.
I was talking to my mom about my early school years, and she said, "Well, yes, of course you have a learning disability. But it never held you back all that much, and they didn't know nearly as much about them back then as they do now."
And I finally have a name for what's wrong with my brain. I was investigating "face-blindness" when I came across a link for something called "central auditory processing disorder". I read the description of that kids with the disorder have problems with, and my jaw dropped. Everything from inability to follow verbal instructions, to inability to understand speech when there's any amount of background noise, to a dread of the telephone--all of it described me pretty much to a T. And I use a bunch of the coping strategies from the Web pages I've seen.
The only thing about me that appears to be completely atypical of regular CAPD is my reading comprehension. My guess is that because I taught myself to read about the same time I learned to talk, and because words on a page didn't have a random and frightening habit of changing every time I looked at them, I developed most of my language skills first as written language and only later as spoken language.
It's interesting to know, finally, the name for what's broken in my brain. As the years have gone by, listening comprehension has become easier, and I don't get word scramble nearly as often as I used to. It's still a problem, but I've compensated. I guess I'd be a success story, eh?
And as for "face-blindness"...well, yeah. Let's just put it this way--if someone changes their hairstyle, or buys a new coat, or if I see them out of context, I will not recognize them. At all. I don't recognize actors in movies, unless their hair color remains consistent. (Thank you, Steve Martin.)
For instance, look at these pictures of Tori Amos. I've been told that it's pretty evident that they're all Tori.
To me, those are all different people. They only resemble each other because they're all female and have the same approximate build.
I never realized before that people actually use something other than hairstyle and clothing to recognize people. I don't remember faces, at all. I cannot summon a picture of the faces of anyone in my family. I know what my mom's hair looks like, and what her hands look like, but her face? No idea. I can see them, they have meaning for me (people who are severely face-blind can't really even read emotions off of faces because faces have absolutely no meaning for them) but i don't use them to recognize people.
If I am face-blind, it's not severe--I do occasionally have social difficulties because of it, but nothing out of the ordinary. It's just weird to realize that I don't use the same identification clues as everyone else.
