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12:33am August 11, 2012

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

codeman38:

youneedacat:

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.

This is something I’ve been noticing as well… even when I have things in text, sometimes I just don’t get them. Like, my brain can’t make sense of the words.

But even then, it definitely helps to have the information in writing rather than in speech… because then I don’t have to deal with comprehending things with such a short auditory buffer, and I can actually go back and re-read stuff.

Come to think of it… that’s actually something they didn’t really test for today. I swear that back when I did the testing in elementary school, there was a fair amount of memory-type stuff involved, where I had to repeat back a lot of things in order. They didn’t really do anything like that beyond four-digit numbers and four-word phrases in the test today. And that’s where I think a lot of my issues lie.

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.

Yeah, I’ve had times when my visual processing gets all swirly and distorted as well and I start seeing weird halos and wavy stuff with the text. But it still seems like this is less frequent and milder than the auditory issues I have.

On the other hand, my visual processing is horrible when it comes to stuff that’s much more ‘layered’— lots of colors, no sharply drawn edges, etc. Real-world rather than text or cartoons. And doubly so if I have to add spatial judgment into the mix.

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.)

I really wish there were more research out there that actually investigated autistic sensory stuff first-hand. Or as first-hand as is actually possible for something that, by its nature, requires one’s own experience to truly understand. Because it really feels like this is something that’s horribly under-researched.

(I’m thinking in particular of stuff like that NY Times blog post a while back, which got linked in the Tumblr autism tags, which basically surmised that autistic people’s difficulty learning to drive had to do with difficulty reading social cues. And not, say, things like not being able to perceive speed and distance well. Or getting overloaded by heavy traffic.)

I’m not sure what I said came through as intended.

I meant that:

1. My language processing is worse than my auditory processing.

2. My visual processing is far, far, far, worse than my auditory processing.

and yet 3. I usually handle written language better than spoken language.

Which is weird.

I have only one explanation that makes much sense to me. Which is that written language stays in one place. So even though my visual processing really sucks, with time I can process it better than auditory.

This is borne out by the fact that my receptive processing of sign language is utterly dismal. Sign language, like spoken language, doesn’t stick around like written language does.

It’s also possible that it’s something related to the areas of the brain I’m processing these things in.

But I did not at all intend to suggest that my auditory processing is worse than my visual processing. It’s not. At all. I spend far more energy dealing with fucked up vision than any other sense.