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Some stuff about how my brain works.
This is one of the rambling personal entries I've been meaning to make for a while (think: months) and hadn't got round to. May be interesting if you intend interacting with me in person.
Ways in which my brain is odd:
1) I have a broken parser.
There's nothing wrong with my hearing, as far as I know. When someone talks to me, I hear the right number of approximately correct sounds at the right volume. But at times, I have trouble interpreting it into sensible English. Have you heard the joke about the navy colonel who sent messages like "Have found some fish and chips, please send a dish and all men." instead of "Have found sufficient ships, please send additional men"? Well, the former is how I often hear things, especially when tired.
I'm not quite sure why I'm telling you this. Most of the time after mishearing something I immediately work out what it should be. If I still don't get it, I'll say "Huh?" or "What?" or simply tell the other person what I heard for them to boggle at. The thing that is quite strange is that, although I'm more likely to misunderstand things said by people whose accents or speech patterns I'm unfamiliar with, my parser is broken even when I'm talking to someone I know really well.
This is also why I'm so likely to hear double entendres in innocuous statements, and why I'm so good at making completely unintentional dubious remarks. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.
2) I lose nouns
Um... thingy.
Seriously, my noun-losing is both very strange and very frustrating. When I'm tired or stressed, part of my vocabulary disappears - it's almost like I lose the ability to access the part of my brain that's storing words. It goes two ways - sometimes I forget a word but still know other words like it (like hedge and fence instead of wall), but other times I forget all the words associated with the concept and have to try to describe it from scratch. If I am not too tired and brain-fried to describe it from scratch, that is.
I don't know quite what causes it. I think it could be related to either depression or antidepressant use, because I know other people on similar drugs who have similar problems. It sometimes freaks the hell out of Richard, because it reminds him of when his grandfather started losing words after a stroke, and he worries it's some kind of brain damage. I don't think it is, because I don't have any problems at all if I haven't lost mental processing power to stress or tiredness or 101 other tasks that I'm trying to do all at the same time. Maybe it's bandwidth, or a faulty connection, or something.
Just as a point, while I'm happy to have people laugh at my broken parser, I really don't like it if people laugh at me losing nouns. Because I only tend to lose nouns when I'm already tired, stressed and frustrated - and the last thing I need when frustrated and exhausted is for people to mock me for being unable to do something, even if the people concerned think they're just doing friendly teasing. It doesn't seem friendly to me in that state.
3) I have extremely vivid dreams
I have very vivid dreams. I remember just about all my dreams in the first few minutes after waking, and most of them for at least the next day. Sometimes, if I dream about people and places that actually exist, the dream files itself into the same part of my memory as ordinary occurrences - so I end up with false memories about things that never happened. This is weird and sometimes scary - especially when I don't realise it's happened, and I talk to someone about something we did together once only to find it never actually happened...
I also suffer from nightmares, particularly when stressed or depressed. My most frightening nightmares have been about the most mundane things imaginable. I mean, I've had nightmares with chainsaw murderers and so on - I think everybody has those occasionally. But the worst nightmare I've ever had was one where I simply couldn't wake up. I'd had a nightmare about something that I don't even remember now and was fighting to wake up because I was scared - and I kept "waking up" in different beds. Sometimes the beds were completely different to the one I was asleep in, and sometimes it was my own bed but subtlely altered - like a different colour duvet to the one I actually had at the time. It was horrible - I "woke up" maybe 20 or 30 times before I woke up for real, and by the time I really woke up I was terrified I'd never be able to. After the first 10 times I'd started screaming, but apparently not out loud, because Richard & Alexa were both awake in the flat at the time and neither of them had heard anything. Ugh.
4) I have a very good memory for some things but not others...
My memory is so weird. While most people have different abilities for different memory tasks, my memory is one extreme or the other - it's either excellent or non-existent. The problem with this is that because I find some things trivially easy to remember, people often expect me to be good at remembering other things and are then surprised when I don't.
Something which I have noticed a huge improvement in recently is my process memory. I've always been good at finding my way round places - generally I only need to visit a place once to be able to remember the route, and by the second time I've got it sorted - but recently I've found other processes noticeably much easier as well. Like cooking - I used to be terrible at cooking (and lab chemistry), and had to follow recipes religiously, and check them 25 times per step. But these days I walk around with quite a few of my favourite recipes known off by heart - not just the ingredient weights, but also exactly how to make the finished thing. It helps that I'm much more relaxed about cooking than I used to be - maybe because I now have enough knowledge to be able to fix something if it goes wrong. Or maybe it's just that my brain is less fogged up by depression.
5) I apparently do not have any synaesthesia whatsoever.
I mention this because I know lots of people who do - ranging from people who find foreign languages easy to learn because they just remember the colour or smell of the word in the foreign language, to people to find foreign languages difficult because a word in English might have a completely different colour/smell/taste in another language, to someone who once got on the wrong train because she thought the train to Brighton should be green and actually it was blue (I think I've forgotten an important detail of this story). It sometimes bugs me that my brain is broken in so many weird-and-annoying ways, but not in a weird-and-sometimes-cool way :/
Ways in which my brain is odd:
1) I have a broken parser.
There's nothing wrong with my hearing, as far as I know. When someone talks to me, I hear the right number of approximately correct sounds at the right volume. But at times, I have trouble interpreting it into sensible English. Have you heard the joke about the navy colonel who sent messages like "Have found some fish and chips, please send a dish and all men." instead of "Have found sufficient ships, please send additional men"? Well, the former is how I often hear things, especially when tired.
I'm not quite sure why I'm telling you this. Most of the time after mishearing something I immediately work out what it should be. If I still don't get it, I'll say "Huh?" or "What?" or simply tell the other person what I heard for them to boggle at. The thing that is quite strange is that, although I'm more likely to misunderstand things said by people whose accents or speech patterns I'm unfamiliar with, my parser is broken even when I'm talking to someone I know really well.
This is also why I'm so likely to hear double entendres in innocuous statements, and why I'm so good at making completely unintentional dubious remarks. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.
2) I lose nouns
Um... thingy.
Seriously, my noun-losing is both very strange and very frustrating. When I'm tired or stressed, part of my vocabulary disappears - it's almost like I lose the ability to access the part of my brain that's storing words. It goes two ways - sometimes I forget a word but still know other words like it (like hedge and fence instead of wall), but other times I forget all the words associated with the concept and have to try to describe it from scratch. If I am not too tired and brain-fried to describe it from scratch, that is.
I don't know quite what causes it. I think it could be related to either depression or antidepressant use, because I know other people on similar drugs who have similar problems. It sometimes freaks the hell out of Richard, because it reminds him of when his grandfather started losing words after a stroke, and he worries it's some kind of brain damage. I don't think it is, because I don't have any problems at all if I haven't lost mental processing power to stress or tiredness or 101 other tasks that I'm trying to do all at the same time. Maybe it's bandwidth, or a faulty connection, or something.
Just as a point, while I'm happy to have people laugh at my broken parser, I really don't like it if people laugh at me losing nouns. Because I only tend to lose nouns when I'm already tired, stressed and frustrated - and the last thing I need when frustrated and exhausted is for people to mock me for being unable to do something, even if the people concerned think they're just doing friendly teasing. It doesn't seem friendly to me in that state.
3) I have extremely vivid dreams
I have very vivid dreams. I remember just about all my dreams in the first few minutes after waking, and most of them for at least the next day. Sometimes, if I dream about people and places that actually exist, the dream files itself into the same part of my memory as ordinary occurrences - so I end up with false memories about things that never happened. This is weird and sometimes scary - especially when I don't realise it's happened, and I talk to someone about something we did together once only to find it never actually happened...
I also suffer from nightmares, particularly when stressed or depressed. My most frightening nightmares have been about the most mundane things imaginable. I mean, I've had nightmares with chainsaw murderers and so on - I think everybody has those occasionally. But the worst nightmare I've ever had was one where I simply couldn't wake up. I'd had a nightmare about something that I don't even remember now and was fighting to wake up because I was scared - and I kept "waking up" in different beds. Sometimes the beds were completely different to the one I was asleep in, and sometimes it was my own bed but subtlely altered - like a different colour duvet to the one I actually had at the time. It was horrible - I "woke up" maybe 20 or 30 times before I woke up for real, and by the time I really woke up I was terrified I'd never be able to. After the first 10 times I'd started screaming, but apparently not out loud, because Richard & Alexa were both awake in the flat at the time and neither of them had heard anything. Ugh.
4) I have a very good memory for some things but not others...
My memory is so weird. While most people have different abilities for different memory tasks, my memory is one extreme or the other - it's either excellent or non-existent. The problem with this is that because I find some things trivially easy to remember, people often expect me to be good at remembering other things and are then surprised when I don't.
Something which I have noticed a huge improvement in recently is my process memory. I've always been good at finding my way round places - generally I only need to visit a place once to be able to remember the route, and by the second time I've got it sorted - but recently I've found other processes noticeably much easier as well. Like cooking - I used to be terrible at cooking (and lab chemistry), and had to follow recipes religiously, and check them 25 times per step. But these days I walk around with quite a few of my favourite recipes known off by heart - not just the ingredient weights, but also exactly how to make the finished thing. It helps that I'm much more relaxed about cooking than I used to be - maybe because I now have enough knowledge to be able to fix something if it goes wrong. Or maybe it's just that my brain is less fogged up by depression.
5) I apparently do not have any synaesthesia whatsoever.
I mention this because I know lots of people who do - ranging from people who find foreign languages easy to learn because they just remember the colour or smell of the word in the foreign language, to people to find foreign languages difficult because a word in English might have a completely different colour/smell/taste in another language, to someone who once got on the wrong train because she thought the train to Brighton should be green and actually it was blue (I think I've forgotten an important detail of this story). It sometimes bugs me that my brain is broken in so many weird-and-annoying ways, but not in a weird-and-sometimes-cool way :/
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Crud.
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Also, I tend to lose multiple nouns at the same time, and once it's started, I'll probably say "thingy" or "wotsit" for 50% of the nouns in a sentence, including people's names. The other day I was calling Peter "Tim" and vice versa - I know they have that gay couple thing going on where they've started to look like each other despite being physically quite different, but, forgodsake, I do know they are different people!
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Oh and don't get me started on pronouns...
Natalya
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'scuse me while I kiss this guy
If it's a hearing problem, I don't think it can have anything to do with the ear itself, because I definitely hear sounds at the right pitch and volume. That's why I called it a "parser" issue - the parser is the thing in a computer which interprets code. I don't think my ears are at fault so much as the part of my brain which interprets their signals into language.
Re: 'scuse me while I kiss this guy
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Okay so I have a physiological hearing loss which explains my version of #1, but my girlf doesn't have enough hearing loss (if any) to justify that... She regularly finds it hard to parse English. Sign language is massively useful as a coping mechanism as you can sign while speaking, or cue speech - or just sign. This cuts out the frustration in repeated parse failures. Also we use local IRC very heavily.
Both my girlf and I get #2 a lot, and will either use a meta-syntactic variable such as 'thing' 'foo' 'bar' 'jibbler' 'wossname' 'kitten' 'device' and hope that the other is able to understand what we mean by context. I have also been known to use the wrong noun for something, so I called my 'dressing gown' an 'xray' and I have no idea. It just came out.
I note that we get loss of nouns and noun-switching a lot less when we type, so on irc it's less of a problem. Iff we are stressed and tired we have been known to use irc to discuss problems which need solving cos it's less stressful and effort that speech. It also has a buffer which is useful.
I don't know how common these things above are cos sometimes when I tell people they are like "yeah me to", and others they are like "you're weird - REALLY weird". The ones who think we are weird think we cause it by using computers so much - whereas we feel using computers is a viable way of managing it.
Interesting post... I won't go into my dissertation topic and process memory cos it'd get long winded and I'm a bit too ill for that.
Natalya
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The main way this interferes with my functioning is that I'll lose multiple nouns at once, and so be standing in the kitchen wanting someone to help me by "getting the thingy out of the thingy so I can add it to the thingy". If I don't realise I'm saying "thingy" instead of the proper word, this can lead to utter bogglement on the part of the other person who will then ask "which thingy?", and distress as I realise I have no idea which thingy I meant either. At least if I do realise, I can gesture at the various thingies.
I wonder whether learning sign language would help? I think for me it would go into exactly the same part of my brain that deals with ordinary speech, so I don't think it would... but I haven't ever seriously tried to learn it. Of course doing a BSL course would also require that I have free evenings, and that is pretty impossible at the moment... :/
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I think kim gets that more than me, I tend to do it with one or two words, whereas kim does it with whole sentances. She often resorts to waving madly, pointing and stuttering... I think it is linked to stress and depression with her, cos the more distressed she gets the worse she is as a rule - that and when she's ill or sleep deprived..
Do you find it changes depending on your physical/mental/emotional states?
I wonder whether learning sign language would help?
Some people who have similar speech blocks say it does. A good friend of mine G crashed out of her uni course last year as she recognised symptoms of depression were coming on as they had done in the past. Her tutor persuaded her to continue with her dissertation not realising the problems were more severe than he could see. G had been using her remaining sanity and energy trying to intermit from classes/courses/assignments. She handed in a dissertation but was in a terrible state, she couldn't speak English and had to run away from friends. Then she met a Deaf friend and was able to sign that she was distressed and why, said friend signed with her for a while with no problem.
I think sign can help with some of the speech stuff, but it might not in your case if the word itself still isn't there... But I totally understand re other committments...
Natalya
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Broken Parser:
Your first point about understanding things said might be considered a blessing for someone in a pure artistic creative field. (Is that a helpful statement? I know you seem to be a professional academic now so maybe not.)
Vivid Dreams:
> I "woke up" maybe 20 or 30 times before I woke up for real,
I am some what worried by the fact that this actually happens to people. I thought it was an urban myth. I wonder whether it is worth finding people who deliberately try lucid dreaming (ie knowing that you are dreaming). My dream experiences are so different to yours that I cannot offer any sensible advice there, only sympathy. I forget my dreams very quickly - but only dream about once a month - as far as I know.
PS Don't "Vivid" do porn movies ? :-)
> synaesthesia
Apparently there is a BBC web test for synaesthesia. Did you take that?
I saw a program on the subject last week which suggested we all have it to some extent - and that it was very important in the development of language.
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I don't have nightmares much these days. They're usually a symptom of depression - either that, or hyperventilation. When I'm asleep - and have a cold or bad allergies, my nose gets blocked and mouth drops open, which floods my brain with oxygen. This leads to extreme levels of bizarre surreality.
I saw a program on the subject last week which suggested we all have it to some extent - and that it was very important in the development of language.
Yeah - I didn't see the programme but I read writeups about it, and it was that which partly inspired this post. I was reading the descriptions of other people's synaesthesia and it just made so little sense to me it's not true. Actually, it was this particular lj meme (http://www.livejournal.com/users/kyte/7070.html) where people first started discussing it. I read all the questions going "what... the... fuck..." and couldn't even begin to answer them - but lots of other people I know were talking about it in their journals and writing lengthy answers.
I'd be interested to see the web test. (Yeah, I know I could just go to www.bbc.co.uk and search, but that would take effort...)
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As for 1.. I'm not sure. I have problems when there's background noise, which doesn't bother other people. I also find that I can replay things quickly and figure out was meant (one of my more annoying habits is to say "What?" and then answer the question anyway.. I'm not being deliberately annoying, it's just that in the time it took me to query what was said, I've figured it out).
5. Words (and names) have 'shapes' to me, which often don't have anything to do with what they look like when they're written down.. I'm crap at foreign languages, though :/