10:46am July 23, 2013

➸ Yes, That Too: wondering

yesthattoo:

josiahd:

…does NLD actually make sense as a separate diagnosis, or is it just the new way to say “well, not AUTISTIC autistic. You know.“?

I don’t know. I have a friend who is diagnosed as NLD, and he doesn’t set off my aut-dar at ALL. It could be that there is a thing that is NLD that is…

Technically, you have NLD/NVLD if you have average or higher verbal ability and relatively poor spatial ability (and often co-occurring math disability and poor sense of time), correct?

Rourke, the guy who invented the term, noticed many such people *also* have social disabilities, and are detail-oriented even to a fault. Strong overlap with ASD there. So he thought of the whole thing as a syndrome. But if you think about it, there’s no reason why it has to be.

Like, is there any reason why everyone with spatial disability et al must also have social disabilities? I know of zero research suggesting a link between spatial ability and social ability, the way there is with, say, spatial ability and math or science ability. Spatial ability, math ability, and poor sense of time are all related in that they’re highly parietal-lobe dependent, but as far as I know that’s not how the “social brain” works.

Similarly, I don’t see why someone with good verbal abilities but poor spatial abilities couldn’t be a “big picture" style thinker, or even poor at details. In fact, I know people like this.

I sometimes wonder, in fact, whether people unlucky enough to have good verbal abilities and poor spatial abilities are branded socially incompetent or “unable to understand the big picture,“ whether these traits are true or clearly not.

But as far as I know, the research really hasn’t been done, and there hasn’t even been much clear thinking about the topic. Do you know of any research on high verbal-low spatial people trying to sort this out?

Have you ever met anyone with high verbal skills and spatial disability, but not social disability or extreme detail orientation?

I think NLD is literally any learning disability involving nonverbal skills of any kind. I don’t really like the term that much because of it. We don’t say "verbal learning disability”, we say dyslexia, hyperlexia, specific language disorder, developmental dysphasia, etc.

NLD can involve literally anything nonverbal. Like my performance IQ is higher than my verbal (although my highest and lowest scores on the whole test were both in performance), I have good spatial skills, and I still got diagnosed with NLD. Don’t quite remember why, maybe visual processing and social stuff? I have learning disabilities affecting both verbal and nonverbal areas, so I get confused about what counts as what.

Notes: