Reflection: Where All of the Walls All Continually Change

Picture this: I go into a school to substitute teach. Someone in the office makes a gesture to show me which way the class is. I walk out of the office. A moment later, the person calls to me that I'm going in the wrong direction. Seems like I'm not paying attention, huh? Ah, no. A slight change in direction can disorient me. I can't look back and see the person who was doing the pointing -- there's now a wall separating us -- and so the gesture the person was making no longer has any meaning whatsoever to me. I can't place the gesture in in its proper orientation in space, I can't place the person in her proper orientation in space, and very likely I can't tell you which way which way the desk in the office was facing. I can still tell you where the office is -- I can still see the door if I turn around. But give me another minute, and a couple more turns, and I won't be able to where the office was. (I mean, where it is -- I know that things do have fixed locations in space, even though the world seems, spatially, "Just like a maze, where all of the walls all continually change".)

Yes, there are moments when that contributes to making a bit of a bad impression, or having some management troubles. Kindergartners, unlike, say, fourth graders, may be so meek that they won't tell me which way to walk down the hall even when I ask them to. But if we have to turn around ("Why are we going this way?") to correct a mistake, there may be some little issues. ("He got in front of me!" "I was there!")

Most of us aren't homing pigeons, but there are neurons that fire in our brain to help us record locations and find our way back. A normal human (like a normal mouse) will also show an ability to form cognitive maps or neural representations of place. They don't have to walk a path in a particular direction to understand it from that direction. And yet that ability can be missing -- even when cognitive/ reasoning skills are intact.

Reflection: Without Direction

I got on the bus the other day, rummaged through my purse for coins, and then instead of rotating my body forwards and dropping them in the coin box, I rotated my body backwards and almost dropped them on the meter. The bus driver noticed and laughed in a good-natured way, saying "This way". She probably thought I was new to Seattle or seldom rode buses. Oh no! But I wasn't psychologically disoriented either. I was spatially disoriented. The only way I can explain it was that bending slightly and then righting myself involved change of direction, and even that very slight change of direction could cause spatial disorientation. I no longer had a sense of which direction was which.

Would it blow people's minds to know that I've lived in the same apartment for years (and though I take the stairs instead of the elevator on a fairly frequent basis) I have no idea which staircase will take me to which part of the first floor? Outside I memorize routes to and fro while failing to connect the to with the fro. I don't have a sense that I'm transversing the same small area. When I turn a corner, once I get over the disorientation, I am simply walking forwards. Ask me how the forwards I'm walking now relates to the forwards I was walking a minute ago, and I may not be able to tell you.

The situation can't be explained by profound distraction. That also doesn't explain why I have the best memory for conversation of anyone I have ever met, (recording things that seem at the time to have no significance, and then reciting them years later) yet fail to remember basic visual information about my surroundings unless I explicitly narrate it to myself. (It can be embarrassing at moments, like the times when I rode home regularly with a co-worker and, when asked to fetch something from the car, realized I had no idea what the car looked like.) I've heard people who are autistic say that they struggle to recognize faces -- in some cases, they may recognize only a few people in the world by their face. Well, I have a much better memory for faces than cars!

My brother said he'd make phone calls to see about me getting the genetic test I feel I want. I want him to really buy into it

Reflection: Mirroring Abilities and Disabilities

My left hand is proud of its schoolwork and delighted with the comments and smiley face that the right hand left for it in red ink. (Do you see the title there in gold gel marker?)

Seriously, though, this relates to some issues that are important to me. I just put up a lens on Squidoo titled Neurological Disorders: Differing Abilities and Gifts. I've got some lenses featured on it that are my own, and also half a dozen that are by other Squidoo 'lensmasters'. (A lot of us do feature or link to each other's writings; it's a way of helping one another... and the site.)

I've read different statistics; I believe one thing I read said that Squidoo was one of the top 100 websites in the U.S. -- and it's very much in the black in these trying times. It can be a good thing to work not only to increase one's share of the pie, but the size of the pie -- especially when one finds many pages that are quality and that they believe in.

Among the premises of that page I just put up: that multiple anomalies tend to reflect an underlying condition, and that anomalous brain structuring may come with mirrored disability and giftedness (usually in a metaphorical sense... and not quite so graphic as what you see in the picture).

Reflection: Mirror Writing

I had wondered for a long time if a particular thing was normal... It's not that I really cared whether it was normal, but I was interested in what it could tell me. I don't think I'm a lot more adept with my right hand or my left, but my right likes to go right and my left likes to go left. Well, I learned a new phrase on Squidoo: "mirror writing". I came across a lens about it, written by an internet friend. I knew I had some proclivity at it, but wondered just how good I was. I put a pencil in just my left hand and wrote as fast as I could, just about as fast as with my right hand. A couple of the letters I actually thought I was making in the normal direction as I went along, but when I looked back, every single one of the 26 was mirrored.

Apparently if one can write easily and naturally with either hand but in opposite directions you're a "mirror writer". And mirror writing is yet another anomaly that sometimes happens on its own in an otherwise normal person, and sometimes occurs as part of neurological disorders that cause autism or mental retardation.

I figure there are people who have been defeated by me at Boggle who would be quite surprised to know that I would have trouble mirroring even the simplest gesture of someone who's facing me. I would see that their head was tilted, but determining which way and then telling my own body to do the same thing... that would be a major struggle. People assume someone who can read forwards, backwards, and upside down that must have at least a normal ability to differentiate one direction from another, but that's not always true. I will say that I am much better at such skills than when I was a kid.

Some people get frustrated that people see them as "dumb" because of their spatial skills. My problem was never that anyone thought I was dumb. No, they'd see me as so smart that there just had to be a psychological reason for everything. (If someone's IQ tests low and they're in adaptive PE because of coordination and spatial problems, people assume they don't get a driver's license because they don't have the skills. But if someone's IQ tests high and they're in adaptive PE because of coordination and spatial skills, people will see their not getting a driver's license as one more piece of evidence that they're cowering in fear of the world.)

I could be dead wrong on leads I follow, so I avoid saying too much. I will say that there are people who have a corpus callosum (the part that connects the hemispheres of the brain) that bends at an abnormal angle through the brain's language center, but fails to reach as far as the motion center at the base of the brain. There was one study of children with this disorder that found that the wider the bending angle the more over the top the storytelling behavior -- the more bent those children were on capturing an audience and hooking them. And that is but one example of a weakness that comes with a mirroring gift.