A way my mind seems to work differently
Sep. 9th, 2023 08:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerOne of the ways in which my brain seems to be different to other people's is that I find it much harder to learn a new thing to start with, and then much easier to end with.
Which is to say that if you ask me to remember a group of unconnected facts then absolutely none of them will sink in, and I will stare blankly at any tasks connected with it, unable to work out how to carry them out.
But once I work out *how* they are connected, and what the underlying system connecting them is, I then seem to be much more able to understand that system, and how to make it do things that others struggle with.
And so, for instance, I am terrible with names. Because names are a random collection of sounds with no meaning that connects them to a person, and so there's no way to connect the name to the person in my head. I just have to hear the name about 30 times before it finally sticks. (Or in the case of someone I've known, liked, and worked with for years up until 6 months ago, and then bumped into randomly at a bus stop I had to scroll back for months through WhatsApp messages until I found them.)
Or to give a more technical example - some people can memories 5 or 6 commands that they use all the time with Git, and then just churn them out when they need to use the particular piece of functionality they wanted. I absolutely cannot do that. I had to go and read multiple different explanations for what was happening under the surface until I understand what it was actually doing. And then making it do things was pretty trivial, I just had to find the command that would make it do what it was clearly designed to do.
There are clearly people out there like me, because otherwise people wouldn't be writing explanations aimed at, well, people like me. But I've never met anyone who's talked about thinking in that way. Which is a shame, because it used to stress me out a lot whenever I started learning anything new. I'd sit there in the class wondering how everyone was memorising all of these things, and feeling like I was an idiot who was never going to understand any of it, feeling horribly stressed that I would be found out. And then at some point it would click, and I'd whoosh ahead to doing better than everyone else. Except for those things that never clicked, of course.
One of the things that clicked with me very late was...people. And, specifically, myself. Which, I assume, is strongly connected to my autism. Lots of people seem to just memorise 753 arbitrary social rules and follow them. As I may have mentioned a few times above, I suck at that.
And so for a lot of my youth I felt like the world in general was a whirling cyclone of chaos. Things would happen, but not only did they make very little sense to me, I fundamentally didn't believe that sense could be made of them. I'd deal with the outside world enough to get what I needed, or when I was forced into it. And then I'd retreat back to the safety of a book, or a game - something which made sense, where you could tell why things were happening. Where, in the case of roleplaying games and computer games, there were nice hard rules about how the world worked, and what you could and couldn't do, and it was easy to understand wht was going on.
But at some point in my 20s, a collection of varying things I'd read over the previous decade started gluing themselves together into what you might call a theory of people. (There's absolutely no point me recommending any of them to other people, they're mostly wrong, out of date, or filled in gaps specific to me.)
The theory wasn't very good, it was full of stereotypes, and misapprehensions, and I doubt that more than a small percentage of it has survived to now. But once I had *a* theory of people, the world was no longer chaos - it was a thing I could examine, and make predictions about, and then take feedback from back to my theories when the predictions turned out to be badly wrong. It was something I could discuss, and argue about, and finesse whenever I had someone point out what utter nonsense I was talking. Until it became something which seems to work reasonably well most of the time (although I'm sure there is still wrongness lurking within).
However, even more than allowing me to understand the outside world, it made a massive difference to my understanding of *me*. At some point I realised that if my theories about people and how they acted were any good then they would also apply to me. And I changed from feeling like a being standing on the outside, observing to feeling like an inextricable part of what surrounded me. The change was so huge, internally, that I literally cannot explain what I was thinking before this point. In many ways it feels like I was not. I was reactive, and acting moment to moment, but I wasn't a mindful person making plans in the world to achieve things. My whole kind of consciousness changed, and the me from after that point can't make his thoughts fit inside the mind of the me from before that point - the two minds are such very different shapes. I have memories, but they're very much third-person "Here's what happened to that guy" type of memories.
Not that it was a single moment. I remember there being a period of at least a year, maybe longer, in my late 20s where I had a series of epiphanies. Not that any of them are that exciting, or that I have a good memory of any of them now - but there were so many moments where I realised that things that I believed just didn't match up with how the world actually was. Where it suddenly felt like the world fitted together in a different way to how it had a few moments before. It felt like I was working the kinks out of the tangled wires that made up my thought processes. And the mind at the end of that period felt quite different on the inside to the mind beforehand.
Which isn't to say that I haven't continued to find errors in my thinking - there was a very useful year of counselling I went through in my early thirties that helped me sort out a lot of things I was still carrying around. But it's (mostly) been a much smoother process since that point, and I can still put myself back in my shoes from anywhere past that point, and imagine what I was thinking, even if it was regularly something pretty stupid. It hasn't up-ended my world in quite the same way.
And, having had the recent autism diagnosis, I realised that this was something I'd just never talked about with anyone. Because it never seemed like it would be a useful thing to share, that it wouldn't connect with others at all. But I thought I'd give it a go, and see if it at least made sense to me when written down. And if it did, whether it made sense to anyone else.
Which is to say that if you ask me to remember a group of unconnected facts then absolutely none of them will sink in, and I will stare blankly at any tasks connected with it, unable to work out how to carry them out.
But once I work out *how* they are connected, and what the underlying system connecting them is, I then seem to be much more able to understand that system, and how to make it do things that others struggle with.
And so, for instance, I am terrible with names. Because names are a random collection of sounds with no meaning that connects them to a person, and so there's no way to connect the name to the person in my head. I just have to hear the name about 30 times before it finally sticks. (Or in the case of someone I've known, liked, and worked with for years up until 6 months ago, and then bumped into randomly at a bus stop I had to scroll back for months through WhatsApp messages until I found them.)
Or to give a more technical example - some people can memories 5 or 6 commands that they use all the time with Git, and then just churn them out when they need to use the particular piece of functionality they wanted. I absolutely cannot do that. I had to go and read multiple different explanations for what was happening under the surface until I understand what it was actually doing. And then making it do things was pretty trivial, I just had to find the command that would make it do what it was clearly designed to do.
There are clearly people out there like me, because otherwise people wouldn't be writing explanations aimed at, well, people like me. But I've never met anyone who's talked about thinking in that way. Which is a shame, because it used to stress me out a lot whenever I started learning anything new. I'd sit there in the class wondering how everyone was memorising all of these things, and feeling like I was an idiot who was never going to understand any of it, feeling horribly stressed that I would be found out. And then at some point it would click, and I'd whoosh ahead to doing better than everyone else. Except for those things that never clicked, of course.
One of the things that clicked with me very late was...people. And, specifically, myself. Which, I assume, is strongly connected to my autism. Lots of people seem to just memorise 753 arbitrary social rules and follow them. As I may have mentioned a few times above, I suck at that.
And so for a lot of my youth I felt like the world in general was a whirling cyclone of chaos. Things would happen, but not only did they make very little sense to me, I fundamentally didn't believe that sense could be made of them. I'd deal with the outside world enough to get what I needed, or when I was forced into it. And then I'd retreat back to the safety of a book, or a game - something which made sense, where you could tell why things were happening. Where, in the case of roleplaying games and computer games, there were nice hard rules about how the world worked, and what you could and couldn't do, and it was easy to understand wht was going on.
But at some point in my 20s, a collection of varying things I'd read over the previous decade started gluing themselves together into what you might call a theory of people. (There's absolutely no point me recommending any of them to other people, they're mostly wrong, out of date, or filled in gaps specific to me.)
The theory wasn't very good, it was full of stereotypes, and misapprehensions, and I doubt that more than a small percentage of it has survived to now. But once I had *a* theory of people, the world was no longer chaos - it was a thing I could examine, and make predictions about, and then take feedback from back to my theories when the predictions turned out to be badly wrong. It was something I could discuss, and argue about, and finesse whenever I had someone point out what utter nonsense I was talking. Until it became something which seems to work reasonably well most of the time (although I'm sure there is still wrongness lurking within).
However, even more than allowing me to understand the outside world, it made a massive difference to my understanding of *me*. At some point I realised that if my theories about people and how they acted were any good then they would also apply to me. And I changed from feeling like a being standing on the outside, observing to feeling like an inextricable part of what surrounded me. The change was so huge, internally, that I literally cannot explain what I was thinking before this point. In many ways it feels like I was not. I was reactive, and acting moment to moment, but I wasn't a mindful person making plans in the world to achieve things. My whole kind of consciousness changed, and the me from after that point can't make his thoughts fit inside the mind of the me from before that point - the two minds are such very different shapes. I have memories, but they're very much third-person "Here's what happened to that guy" type of memories.
Not that it was a single moment. I remember there being a period of at least a year, maybe longer, in my late 20s where I had a series of epiphanies. Not that any of them are that exciting, or that I have a good memory of any of them now - but there were so many moments where I realised that things that I believed just didn't match up with how the world actually was. Where it suddenly felt like the world fitted together in a different way to how it had a few moments before. It felt like I was working the kinks out of the tangled wires that made up my thought processes. And the mind at the end of that period felt quite different on the inside to the mind beforehand.
Which isn't to say that I haven't continued to find errors in my thinking - there was a very useful year of counselling I went through in my early thirties that helped me sort out a lot of things I was still carrying around. But it's (mostly) been a much smoother process since that point, and I can still put myself back in my shoes from anywhere past that point, and imagine what I was thinking, even if it was regularly something pretty stupid. It hasn't up-ended my world in quite the same way.
And, having had the recent autism diagnosis, I realised that this was something I'd just never talked about with anyone. Because it never seemed like it would be a useful thing to share, that it wouldn't connect with others at all. But I thought I'd give it a go, and see if it at least made sense to me when written down. And if it did, whether it made sense to anyone else.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 08:24 am (UTC)People-wise, I can manage one at a time. I shut down in groups, and I have no idea what is going on with electorates.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 08:53 am (UTC)We do make such assumptions about how our minds work- I'm colour/music synaesthetic and for decades I just assumed that was how everyone perceived and was really surprised to learn 'twas not so!
no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 10:00 am (UTC)I have the same feeling about computer languages, in fact. Syntax and semantics are interesting, especially in languages where they're doing something unusual (like Rust). But to get from "read the spec and understand the semantics" to actually writing nontrivial programs in the language, you also have to memorise a huge pile of standard library functions and their names and prototypes, and until you've done that, you code at a snail's pace because every other line you have to stop to look something up in the
phrasebooklibrary reference.no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 10:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 10:22 am (UTC)Yeah: I failed utterly with French because they started on grammar with the irregular verbs (so nothing was transferrable) and tried the teach-by-conversation route. On top of which I have poor memory retention for stuff I'm not hooked on -- probably some ADHD there as well as what I suspect is autism.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 11:19 am (UTC)This can be hard to get across. Once in a large airport where I was changing planes, I went to an information booth and asked for a map of the airport. Them: "Where is it you want to go?" Me: "I want to go where there's a map." They kept insisting they could tell me where to go, and I kept asking for a map.
I forget how this came out, but what I actually wanted - which I wasn't going to tell them, because then they'd pour at me a stream of words which I'd be unable to make any use of - was a map identifying all the eateries in the airport, so that I could decide where to eat based on the two factors of 1) how much I liked that cuisine, 2) how far away it was. I couldn't do that without a map.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 11:20 am (UTC)As someone who was recently diagnosed with both, that would not surprise me at all. In fact it makes a lot of sense.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 11:27 am (UTC)I did not get on with French because they failed to explain some basic stuff like j' actually being je. I much preferred German because that had rules and teachers explained those. I loved the sentence structure because it made sense.
When it came to maths, my teacher said I always did things the hard way. I never understood that. I'd swear I did it the way I was taught but I guess I didn't. I probably found another way that made more sense to me but she thought of as harder.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 11:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 12:28 pm (UTC)It is definitely easier if things are related or have some kind of mnemonic. Certainly when I was learning to read music, Every Good Boy Does Fine was extremely useful for reading the treble clef.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 01:40 pm (UTC)But as to the thinking...here's an anecdote for you. When I started at university to do a 3 year Joint Honours course I was directed to the Year Zero classes of a 4 year IT degree. I could not get to grips with unstructured BASIC and was despairing when they told me after 9 weeks - three quarters of the semester through - that I was on the wrong class and should have been doing the Year One IT classes. With three weeks of the semester to go I transferred to a class where the language was PASCAL, and got a first class mark in the exam at the end of the semester that was failed by over a quarter of the students sitting it.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 03:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 04:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 04:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 07:09 pm (UTC)The short one is that I feel like I'm the utter opposite when it comes to learning. I'm great at memorising, but, despite also being great at abstraction and pretty good at systematising, I'm MUCH better at the early stage of learning. I do better than most for quite a while.... Then everyone powers past me. Work, when I'm in "flow" often feels more like blindsight than skill. But maybe it's just the part of me that understands can't communicate - I think that's common enough.
I guess one difference is that am also talking about skills with physical components, not purely mental ones.
There are a good few exceptions too. Singing and songwriting for one (though NOT playing instruments, that I get stuck on)
One thing (that I'm sure you know) is your epiphanies happened at just the age when humans first get full emotional control (well, as close as that gets!). That must have helped.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 07:12 pm (UTC)Even Germans need lots of grammar teaching to get it right. Even as children. Which means, of course, there are also a lot of Germans who speak pretty ungrammatical German.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 07:13 pm (UTC)I have a reasonably decent memory, so I can retain details until the structure appears, but until then it is rote and I have no idea what is going on. As a tall kid (a brief glorious part of my life, remembered fondly), who was also super short-sighted, from the back of the room it took a while to discover the eyesight issue because I was memorizing what the teacher wrote on the board by the hand movements. So, with that kind of memory training I can usually barf out details, but use them? Hah.
Things that complicate things: I transpose numbers (never trust me for a sequence of numbers; just don't). And,I need to be looking at the speaker's lips to "hear" consonants.
So. As an example: although I have taken every in-house training course for Excel at every place I have ever worked, I still have no idea how to really use it. Honestly, most of the people I have worked for have not either, so I've been fine, since all they really wanted were tables similar to the ones that could be made in Word Perfect. But I know that Excel is a more powerful tool than that, and until I get a structure I can hang the rest of the information on, I'm gonna be stuck with tables.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 07:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 07:22 pm (UTC)I got none at all. Which was a pain in the ass when I came to learn German (at 45). Because I didn't know or understand any grammar terminology beyond noun, been, adjective. (My English grammar is pretty good- but instinctive - was totally learned from my compulsive and very prolific reading)
no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-10 08:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-10 08:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-10 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-10 01:28 pm (UTC)And our differences are fascinating!
no subject
Date: 2023-09-10 01:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-10 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-10 07:52 pm (UTC)But if you're staffing an information desk and I ask for a map then I expect "Here you go, is there anywhere specific I can mark on it for you?"
no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 04:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 04:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 04:47 am (UTC)On the other hand, we had a (very young) English teacher for 2 years when I was 11,12 whose English was worse than mine and we fought. The next one was superb. But still no grammar!
no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 04:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 04:55 am (UTC)The 2nd one was that for humans, most logic about our own behaviour is post-hoc explanation of decisions and behaviour that was emotional. Emotions drive, logic follows. More often than not.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 06:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 08:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 09:06 am (UTC)How's your 3d vision? Do you know if you have full perfect stereo perception? That I can see helping...
no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 09:15 am (UTC)But I'm thinking about people who can visualise mathematical objects and see how to take them apart. See, for instance the bottom of page 3/ top of page 4 of this. I'm never going to do that, because that's not how my brain works.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 10:30 am (UTC)Though I do need the picture in front of me.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-12 05:02 am (UTC)In college, I decided that calculus would be too hard (because of those high school experiences) & decided to try trigonometry. Horrible mistake. The prof worked with me after classes, & I still couldn't get my head around it. To this day, I have zero clue what was happening in that class. I managed well enough to not completely blow my GPA, but it was close. I was told years later that cal probably would have been easier for my brain (especially since I'd been quite good at physics). At which point, I kind of blew a gasket that nobody told me the math in physics was close to calculus.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-12 08:11 am (UTC)I feel... Seen
Date: 2023-09-12 08:19 am (UTC)I regard this, and several other issues I have, as a dyslexia-adjacent problem: I have several, except for the 'real dyslexia', which is to say that I have no problems at all with reading and spelling.
I struggle with any body of knowledge that is taught as facts to memorise, and do very well with things that you do and systems that consist of complex structures and relationships.
Re: I feel... Seen
Date: 2023-09-12 08:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-14 01:13 am (UTC)I tried a few times to take Hebrew classes locally, but the teaching model was "conversational" (just practice dialogues until you "get it"), not structural. I begged for a conjugation chart for the form we were using (all the verbs at that point were regular), and the instructor looked at me like I was from outer space or something. Why would I want something nerdy like that? Because I needed it to hang the rest of it on! It was a very frustrating experience that this post reminded me of. So yeah, definitely not just you on the learning style. :-)
I'm also terrible at names unless I can come up with a hook. A classmate once tried to explain finding hooks to me, using herself as an example -- she said her face shape and hair resembled Miss Piggy and her name was Peggy. It's been decades and I still remember Peggy's name, but I also still have no idea how to come up with stuff like that on my own.