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catsidheI realised a good analogy for describing APD the other day.
OK, so the problem in my brain is filters. My filters don't work properly, filters which most people have, and don't even notice. But as it's in the auditory realm, it's difficult to describe what's going on, especially as I have always had this problem, and don't know what it's like to be able to do what most people take for granted. And I suspect that most people take it so much for granted that they won't understand the description either. But I think I can describe it if I translate it into the visual paradigm:
You and I can read. We can read quite quickly. When you're reading in the best of conditions, then it's just a page of text, printed crisply in a comfortable font size on clean white paper. You can keep up, then: no problems. So can I. It's easy. No distractions. You can even stay ahead: read so fast that the printer can't keep up, so you have lots of spare time to think while you're waiting for the next bit to be read.
But, the real world is never that clean. There is always background noise: the paper is never quite pristine. Sometimes the background just makes for a pleasant mottled pattern which does not degrade from the clarity of the text. Sometimes, however, it's distracting, a pattern of scribbles. It's like lines and splodges all over the page, and the text printed on top (or underneath). It's harder to read, now. Not necessarily impossible, but it takes more effort to decode.
Sometimes the problem is the text. Maybe the speaker mumbles (the font is small, or blurry, or the text fades in and out). Maybe his tone is distracting (the font size changes distractingly, or is confusingly laid out). Maybe the very pitch or timbre of her voice is annoyingly distracting (the whole thing is printed in Comic Sans, or antique Copperplate, or a child's scrawl).
And of course, there are combinations of the above. With that in mind, how quickly are you reading now? Still keeping up? How much effort is it taking?
But now we have the real kicker: filters. There are two people talking at once: one's speech is printed in blue, the other in red, but both are overprinted on the same page, as well as the background noise, as well as the blurred text and annoying fonts. BUT... the thing is, most people won't notice. Why? Because most people are gifted with filters. Like magic glasses which change colour, now red, now green, now blue. And they don't even notice they have them. Now, with two voices, they might not even notice a problem: they just set their filters and the unwanted text almost vanishes. Now they can keep up again. And when they want they can switch filters and review the other text. The truly magical thing is the Cocktail Party Effect: most people have a memory of the text even when it's filtered out: they can switch filters and actually have a bit of history there to refer to, happily contextualised. Two layers, three, four even.
Of course, even this can be overloaded. Enough text overlaid over text over text over text, and even filters can't extract what meaning is left.
And then there's people like me. We don't have working filters. What we see is the whole page, and we have to extract one coherent text from the messy chaotic layers. We make many more mistakes. We have to spend much more conscious mental effort on it, so that we get exhausted from it quickly. We get behind, still figuring out a word or sentence long after everyone else has moved on. We get very good at figuring out what's going on from the occasional clear word, or part thereof. And we get amazingly frustrated. Most people, with their filters, can listen to a conversation in the distance, and ignore people talking next to them. In visual terms, the closer text is in a bigger font, and the more distant conversation in faded ink, but the filters compensate for that. We, without filters, have to consciously decode the mess of scribbles and ink, to find the hidden layers we're interested in. In an environment with several people talking, every conversation is one layer of a palimpset, and we usually want one of the faded and mostly illegible layers underneath.
Most people have the filters work so automatically that they have plenty of mental capacity to think about what was said, reflect on it, understand it, think about their reply. We don't. All of our mental capacity is taken up by the struggle to read, leaving nothing for comprehension or reflection or reply. I can think about my reply or listen to you talk, I simply can't do both.
And we have to be able to read it in real time. No pausing and going back, no slow study to make sure that we have the correct reading, that we haven't read a word on the wrong layer, or completely read it wrong and got utterly the wrong meaning. And it's reading this text through a narrow window, fighting and struggling for one painful word at a time, hoping we catch the meaning before the window moves on forever and leaves us floundering behind, confused and embarrassed.
So that's why I can't hear you when you talk, although everyone else in the room has no trouble. That's why noisy parties make me uncomfortable at best, distressed and melting down at worst. This is why I have to retreat sometimes, to escape or put my fingers in my ears or put on headphones and turn it up.
It doesn't explain why I can't operate visually and auditorally¹ at the same time, why I can't hear you if I'm reading, why I can't watch TV if I'm trying to talk on the phone.
But no analogy is perfect.
[1] Vision/visual/visually are not complicated concepts: why are there not equivalents for sound? Audio/auditory/*auditorally. You know it makes sense. Now, of course, someone in comments will point out the exact word I'm looking for which can be found in a dictionary, and I'll look like a right twit. Such is life.
OK, so the problem in my brain is filters. My filters don't work properly, filters which most people have, and don't even notice. But as it's in the auditory realm, it's difficult to describe what's going on, especially as I have always had this problem, and don't know what it's like to be able to do what most people take for granted. And I suspect that most people take it so much for granted that they won't understand the description either. But I think I can describe it if I translate it into the visual paradigm:
You and I can read. We can read quite quickly. When you're reading in the best of conditions, then it's just a page of text, printed crisply in a comfortable font size on clean white paper. You can keep up, then: no problems. So can I. It's easy. No distractions. You can even stay ahead: read so fast that the printer can't keep up, so you have lots of spare time to think while you're waiting for the next bit to be read.
But, the real world is never that clean. There is always background noise: the paper is never quite pristine. Sometimes the background just makes for a pleasant mottled pattern which does not degrade from the clarity of the text. Sometimes, however, it's distracting, a pattern of scribbles. It's like lines and splodges all over the page, and the text printed on top (or underneath). It's harder to read, now. Not necessarily impossible, but it takes more effort to decode.
Sometimes the problem is the text. Maybe the speaker mumbles (the font is small, or blurry, or the text fades in and out). Maybe his tone is distracting (the font size changes distractingly, or is confusingly laid out). Maybe the very pitch or timbre of her voice is annoyingly distracting (the whole thing is printed in Comic Sans, or antique Copperplate, or a child's scrawl).
And of course, there are combinations of the above. With that in mind, how quickly are you reading now? Still keeping up? How much effort is it taking?
But now we have the real kicker: filters. There are two people talking at once: one's speech is printed in blue, the other in red, but both are overprinted on the same page, as well as the background noise, as well as the blurred text and annoying fonts. BUT... the thing is, most people won't notice. Why? Because most people are gifted with filters. Like magic glasses which change colour, now red, now green, now blue. And they don't even notice they have them. Now, with two voices, they might not even notice a problem: they just set their filters and the unwanted text almost vanishes. Now they can keep up again. And when they want they can switch filters and review the other text. The truly magical thing is the Cocktail Party Effect: most people have a memory of the text even when it's filtered out: they can switch filters and actually have a bit of history there to refer to, happily contextualised. Two layers, three, four even.
Of course, even this can be overloaded. Enough text overlaid over text over text over text, and even filters can't extract what meaning is left.
And then there's people like me. We don't have working filters. What we see is the whole page, and we have to extract one coherent text from the messy chaotic layers. We make many more mistakes. We have to spend much more conscious mental effort on it, so that we get exhausted from it quickly. We get behind, still figuring out a word or sentence long after everyone else has moved on. We get very good at figuring out what's going on from the occasional clear word, or part thereof. And we get amazingly frustrated. Most people, with their filters, can listen to a conversation in the distance, and ignore people talking next to them. In visual terms, the closer text is in a bigger font, and the more distant conversation in faded ink, but the filters compensate for that. We, without filters, have to consciously decode the mess of scribbles and ink, to find the hidden layers we're interested in. In an environment with several people talking, every conversation is one layer of a palimpset, and we usually want one of the faded and mostly illegible layers underneath.
Most people have the filters work so automatically that they have plenty of mental capacity to think about what was said, reflect on it, understand it, think about their reply. We don't. All of our mental capacity is taken up by the struggle to read, leaving nothing for comprehension or reflection or reply. I can think about my reply or listen to you talk, I simply can't do both.
And we have to be able to read it in real time. No pausing and going back, no slow study to make sure that we have the correct reading, that we haven't read a word on the wrong layer, or completely read it wrong and got utterly the wrong meaning. And it's reading this text through a narrow window, fighting and struggling for one painful word at a time, hoping we catch the meaning before the window moves on forever and leaves us floundering behind, confused and embarrassed.
So that's why I can't hear you when you talk, although everyone else in the room has no trouble. That's why noisy parties make me uncomfortable at best, distressed and melting down at worst. This is why I have to retreat sometimes, to escape or put my fingers in my ears or put on headphones and turn it up.
It doesn't explain why I can't operate visually and auditorally¹ at the same time, why I can't hear you if I'm reading, why I can't watch TV if I'm trying to talk on the phone.
But no analogy is perfect.
[1] Vision/visual/visually are not complicated concepts: why are there not equivalents for sound? Audio/auditory/*auditorally. You know it makes sense. Now, of course, someone in comments will point out the exact word I'm looking for which can be found in a dictionary, and I'll look like a right twit. Such is life.
Yep.
Date: 2011-02-02 08:24 am (UTC)Take your multi-hued conversations which can be followed by most people who discern by colour which text belongs to whom. Throw on some blobs and spatters and smears to represent background noise. Have the font faces vary, as you do, but also distort them somewhat where accents are heavy such that v, d, b "the" and other sound-alikes are all represented by one character.
Everyone's ability to follow this varies. Some will cope when there are twenty colours, badly marked pages, absurd variations in font size and clarity. Most will manage okay when there are a few nearby conversations clearly marked with colour, and not too much background jumble.
We who suffer auditory colourblindness, though, see the lines and free-floating snippets of text all running across each other without the key distinguishing feature of colour and really, really struggle to figure out what follows from what and which sounds are whose.
That's closer to my experience, anyway.
Wow!
Date: 2011-02-02 08:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-03 07:51 am (UTC)The visual/auditory thing... I think of that as circuit interference. There are some visual things I can do and carry on a conversation at the same time, such as kumihimo braiding or playing solitaire on the computer. The difference AFAICT is that those things are visual but not verbal. But reading, or watching TV, or playing Text Twist -- those are verbal things, they occupy the verbal circuitry, and there's not enough bandwidth to carry on a conversation at the same time. Much the same thing applies if I'm just thinking about something and somebody speaks to me; I miss at least the first few words because the verbal circuit was taken up by whatever I was thinking, and I have to ask them to repeat.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-03 09:33 pm (UTC)oh my goodness
Date: 2011-04-05 01:55 pm (UTC)But even having a heated discussion with my ex-husband was very difficult. He would get frustrated because I would seem to not absorb what he was saying. I also had problems formulating a response even when I did get what he was saying, but I guess the delay you refer to meant that I simply didn't have time to come up with a repsonse after spending all my available time just trying to comprehend what was being said by him! Thank you for helping make sense of something that, like you, I have always lived with and never known anything different.