MYTHS

“I’m confused. Let’s say my mother had a toaster that exploded. Now, go! Explain what you just  said about the law using that example.” 

No one else at Yale Law School talked that way, but Susan  did. 

Is that an example of a brain hopelessly stuck in the concrete? Unable to engage in abstract thinking? 

Well, if “abstract” means theory for theory’s sake, complex structures that lead to airy conclusions  that are so malleable they support anything and nothing,                       yes, Susan hates that kind of thinking. And is proud to report, she doesn’t do it very well.

But she loves reading Shakespeare, Freud, Kierkegaard, Rollo May, Ibsen, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickenson,                       Melville, Hawthorne and Victor Hugo (not for his “stories” but for his amazing insight into the social structure and institutions                       and mass movements). She loves theory that is connected to the world, that helps us understand what is real. She  loves theory that unveils the deep structures, the patterns underneath, the hidden but palpable connections and separations  between and among things, the music of the spheres. She  seeks the elegance that mathematicians and physicists seek. 

The dichotomy between abstract and concrete thought breaks  down here. It may not be completely empty, but it is surely                       overplayed and being asked to bear more weight than it  can handle. And it brands too easily. To be labeled a “concrete” thinker                       is to be relegated to the back of the bus. It is time to  rethink these categories.

 What is the punishment for being bad at arithmetic? Being denied the beauties of math. But that need not be so. Calculators can replace number skill. It is time   to stop telling children who can’t add, subtract, divide or multiply well, that they are “bad at                         math.” We don’t know that. All we know for sure is that telling people they are bad at math because they have trouble calculating prevents anyone from finding                       out whether some of the number-challenged among us might be talented at higher mathematics. 

These things we know. Many who can’t add, can’t  spell. Many who can’t read, can’t spell. Many who can’t read share many characteristics with those   who have number processing problems. Reading, spelling, and number manipulation all involve visual processing and spatial relationships. The parietal lobes play an important  role in keeping things in processing spatial information. 

Are we looking for the problem and the solution in the wrong place? Is it less about reading or adding and more about space and order? Why do so many have trouble in one domain and not the                       other, i.e., they can’t add but read like the wind or vice versa? We need to understand more about the underlying                       processing problems that separate and unite dyslexia and dyscalculia. Maybe there’s just so much “order” certain  brains can handle and the allocation of that space to “letters” or “numbers” is  a nurture phenomenon. Or not. We need to know more.

Some neuropsychologists and special educators are forever talking about those who can’t see the forest for the trees. Freud might have a field day with that. Those with NLD are, for example, supposed to be tree viewers  and forest-blind, but is that true?

One classic measure of the forest/tree dichotomy is a gigantic letter H that is composed of little T’s. Like this:

 One shows that to a child and then takes it away. Next,  the child is shown an H and a T and is asked which one looks more like what he just saw. 

Susan would say H. She is a big picture person (see right brain vs. left brain discussion). But she would see only  the H because she would move far, far away from it, so as to be able to ignore all the pieces, all the busy-ness,  all the horrid little Ts. Why? Because looking at all those  T’s (all the little pieces and trying to process them) hurts Susan’s head. She would do everything she could to blur them away, block them out. She craves  the whole picture always and cannot find it by trying to   juggle pieces or fit them together. She needs to grasp  the whole, whole. 

If she was forced to stand up close to all those little Ts, to avoid the feeling that her head was spinning round and round she would try to block out all the busy-ness                       and focus on just one T. She would force herself to see  one T as her “whole,” her forest. So a child who did not know the strategy of standing back far enough                       to blur the pieces together to form a whole might take a different route, constructing a whole from one T and  blurring out all the rest. The processing problem, you                       see, may have nothing to do with not knowing or craving the “whole.” It may instead be that some get to the whole by constructing it from pieces and others  cannot do that; they need to grasp the whole, whole. The pieces just get in the way.

As Susan experiences this problem, it is the “pieces” that get in the way. It is the “pieces” she does not understand. It is the whole that she can grasp, but NOT if the pieces are too obvious, too intrusive–not.  if the pieces do not lend themselves to blurring out, so                       that the whole can emerge.
 Is it helpful or accurate to describe someone who is always searching for the   big picture, who hates the trees (the pieces) and is forever lost in them,   as one who has trouble with the big picture.

No, it is harmful and inaccurate. Harmful because it   suggests that one is not “smart.” (See also     discussion of abstract vs. concrete thinking.) And inaccurate                       because it is the pieces that are the source of confusion,   not the big picture. The mistake here is beginning with the assumption that the “normal” brain is th  brain that gets to the big picture by compiling pieces. But another way of processing is possible: skipping the   pieces, blurring them out and grasping quickly and accurately,                       the whole. The forest people do it that way.

Just as Susan learned not to pay attention to the “pieces,” she learned to make her messiness work for, rather than against   her. She works better with a messy desk, so she lets her desk be messy. 

Keeping order takes so much time and energy for her that  she’d get almost nothing done, if she demanded that she was “ready” and her space “neat” before                       she began. Instead, she has notes on the backs of envelopes                       and scrawled on magazines stacked around her as she begins to write. And she has learned not to worry about missing                       a piece of paper here or there. She has learned to tell  herself, “If it’s gone, it probably wasn’t   that important. If it was important, the paper it was written  on doesn’t matter. The idea is stored somewhere in my head, even if I don’t know where now. It will   come to me when I need it.” And most of the time it does. Or, she can look it up again later. 

Before she begins working, Susan has too uncertain an idea of what will turn out to be important to bother fussing  about a missing “bit” or two. She can’t                       outline. The work will flow, if she lets it. And worrying  about order or neatness or missing bits when one works  this way is always a sure waste of time. 

It may well be that some (or all?) autistic children and  some (or all?) of the ever-expanding population of people                       being classified as belonging somewhere on the autism spectrum,  however far along toward “normal,” have a similar                       problem. They avoid eye contact. But avoiding eye contact may also be a sign of “too much” connection to others, not too little. 

As a child Susan avoided eye contact with others as much as possible. Why? Two reasons. One, she could see in the                       eyes of others what they thought of her and that was too painful to see. Two, others could sense that she was “reading                       them” and they did not like her looking in their eyes. She knew that too. 

Even today, Susan, who has no innate difficulty making eye contact, is careful not to do it too much. Her eyes  seem to read too much and others have some sense of that, so it makes them uncomfortable. Making others feel uncomfortable   is not polite and doesn’t win one friends.