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10:32pm August 10, 2012

➸ codeman38’s tumblings: karalianne: Maybe it’s more an auditory attention thing? That’s common...

karalianne:

Maybe it’s more an auditory attention thing? That’s common in ADHDers, at least (that’s what the educational psychologist who did my last round of assessments said). So I have trouble understanding what people say because I have trouble paying attention to the sounds I’m supposed…

This may not be true for you. I don’t know. But my language processing sucks more than my auditory processing does. Of course at last testing (age 18) my auditory processing sucked bad enough for a diagnosis. But my language processing sucked far more, something I was only dimly aware of at the time.

Of course there’s something weird going on there beyond that. Because my visual processing sucks donkey balls. Like I was trying to read a book earlier. And the letters were glittering, swirling, zig-zagging, and dancing around, not to mention all sorts of weird in the white space.

But if I can read much at all, reading usually works better than hearing. There are exceptions. I use a screen reader during those exceptions. Also hearing music may work better than reading plain text.

It’s complicated. My bet is there are all kinds of things going on here that the so called experts don’t even understand. I mean a lot of the ways that sensory processing is dealt with in autism and learning disabilities is both far from direct experience and far from science. Most of it is guesswork created by observing things about us secondhand and making up theories.

And when you go both far from how it is directly experienced by the person in question, and far from what the science says, AT ONCE, it’s my observation that things get vague and murky and inconsistent with the reality real fast. Because both direct experience (real direct experience, not direct experience filtered through the words of professional theories) and science are likely to be way way way closer to reality than the guesswork professionals come up with to explain our apparent experiences. (And everything I experienced during CAPD testing smelled strongly of professional guesswork. There’s a distinct odor of fuzziness involved.)