PPP, Part 5, Avijjā A Little Closer to Home

Greetings, Friendlies!

Last time we looked at some rather extraordinary examples of avijjā, of not understanding how our minds work. This time I’d like to share a case that struck me quite strongly, precisely because it was so much closer to home than the others.

This case covered a former Johns Hopkins (JHU) student. She was an undergraduate in the Cognitive Science department. After learning about dyslexia she approached the professor and said, this all sounds kind of familiar. I think I may be dyslexic.

Prior to this exposure in her course, she had no idea that she may have had a cognitive “deficit”. Scholastically she was a high achiever, demonstrated by her acceptance into the JHU CogSci department. She agreed to being studied in the JHU CogSci Labs.

The professor of our class said it was challenging at first to locate the student’s deficits. Presented with a paragraph her reading speed and comprehension were above average.

After fiddling with the testing protocol, it was found that when presented with a single lower-case sans-serif letter “p”, she could not determine if it was a “p”, a “d”, or a “q”. Her brain could not distinguish the left/right or up/down orientation of the shape. She was able to read because her other language processing compensated from knowledge of the English language.

For me what was most interesting about this case was 1, that the student had never known of her dyslexia and 2, that learning about her brain function helped explain all manner of real-life behaviors she had not previously understood.

For example: she had always struggled with timeliness. What she learned in the course of the studies was that the problem was not laziness or some Freudian undercurrent of un-acknowledged resistance. It was that when she looked at an analog clock, she could not readily tell if it said 3:05 or 3:55 or 3:25 or 3:35 or 9:05 or 9:55 or 9:25 or 9:35. Because the orientation of top/bottom/left/right often came through garbled, her brain was never sure of the data it was receiving and, in typical brain fashion, disregarded the input it received that did not match its view of reality.

The student’s mother also remembered, when the student was young, the mother would ask her to set the table. And she never got it right. It was always garbled in some way. The mother was frustrated and thought it was because her daughter was not being careful or was not listening. Lo and behold, it was actually that the brain was not able to capture the orientation of the objects in order to set them aright.

Somehow this case struck home more than the more “severe” cases I shared last time. Those were shocking and illuminating, to be sure, but here was a highly-functioning young adult with what turned out to be a rather extreme cognitive disfunction that neither she, nor anyone else, had identified. What then, might be going on in my own cognitive dis/functioning?

The student reported that she now realized that when driving, if she came to a one-way street, she could not determine which way the one-way arrow was pointing. (!!!) She would look down the street and if she saw headlights, she would not turn down the street. If she saw taillights, it was safe to do so. In what compensatory mechanisms might I be engaging?

So much for the rational charioteer. Maybe it’s best sometimes to let the horses go their own way…

With friendliness!