4:21am November 4, 2014

Meaning-blind

A lot of online autistic people are at least partially meaning-deaf, some of the time. But it seems like in these venues, being meaning-blind is rarer.

Being meaning-blind is sort of like having visual agnosias. You see what’s around you but you can’t t put meaning to what you see. The visual agnosia most autistic people are familiar with is prosopagnosia, face blindness, inability to recognize faces.

But what I experience regularly is not just faces. I look around the room and I see colors and shapes and visual texture everywhere. But at my best it takes conscious effort and many cognitive spoons to actually understand the identities of the objects.

This means that for me vision is a backup sense. I am very tactile and kinesthetic. I would feel much safer with a white cane to make up for visual impairment (many doctors have listed me as low vision even though my corrected vision is reasonably acute), but I don’t feel like inviting more “you don’t really need that tool because you’re not conventionally blind” crap. Vision, for me, helps me not walk into things - sometimes. It gives me enough feedback about my environment that I can use it as a backup sense. But there are many days when I’m functionally blind. I use screenreaders on those days.

I also have other visual problems that create meaning-blindness. Everything fragments into pieces. Or worse, everything turns into pixels and I can’t see at all. The fragmenting is normal for me, the pixels happen during visual overload.

And I am so easy to visually overload. It takes very little to make the fragments smaller and smaller until the world is unrecognizable.

One thing Soma Mukhopadyay got right is that many autistic people forfeit all but one or two senses. For me, my best senses are olfactory and tactile/kinesthetic. Vision is my worst sense, hearing just behind, despite few actual acuity problems. Soma sees vision and hearing as the two best learning styles, but oh well. I use vision and hearing but mainly as backup senses or with a lot of effort.

I wonder how many people out there are not just meaning deaf but really meaning-deaf-blind or just meaning-blind.

My earliest memories involve the feel of a place. I was detached from body sensation so I felt places rather than directly experienced them in the normal way. I remember colors and patterns from an early age, but only sporadic ability to make sense of things. Even my hyperlexia involved decoding, not understanding. But mostly the visual world was a swirl of color, and I could lose myself in the colors and shapes, but I couldn’t see them as anything other than colors and shapes with rare exceptions, until I was maybe five. And even then, even now, it’s an exhausting struggle to use vision. Not all autistic people are visual, indeed, and for visual thinkers who are meaning-blind, they’re going to be thinking in things like colors and shapes, not pictures.