H/T to Emily DeArdo who brought fully to my attention the debate (“debate”) about John Fetterman’s auditory processing disorder. I have no opinion about Fetterman’s candidacy in general, though taking a wild guess about that (D) after his name, it’s unlikely our politics overlap in a convincing way.
I do, however, want to make some very candid clarifications, from personal experience, about how the “thinking” of auditory processing is not the kind of “thinking” that is relevant to information processing and decision making.
Cutting to the chase: If someone is not able to understand spoken words but can read the same question just fine using a captioning device, then . . . what exactly are you in a huff about?
If someone can read for information, comprehend, analyze, and respond . . . that person’s ability to think is AOK. Comprehension, reasoning, and self-expression are all there.
Pause here while we fully acknowledge that many politicians, regardless of their auditory processing abilities, are marginal at best on the reasoning thing. Sigh.
I’m 99% sure I’ve been having auditory processing problems my entire life. My childhood best friend was always telling me I needed to get my hearing checked, and I more or less agreed with her. It’s not my hearing, alas.
I test normally. At the moment, my hearing’s actually a little too good, check over at the Evangelization blog for a funny discovery related to that. In good conditions, I have no difficulty comprehending speech. In contrast: Noisy restaurant? Crowded party? Static on the line? Forget it. Not happening. Either everyone else is completely faking their conversations, or . . . yeah no.
At my usual parish church, I’ve mapped out where I need to sit so I can understand what is being said. Unfortunately, where I need to sit depends on where the speaker is and what mic is in use, so if I sit where 90% of the time I’ll be able to understand everything, that 10% of the time that Father wanders off to give his homily “closer to the congregation” it’s over. I’ll just self-preach this week, then, okay.
Phone calls are variable. The mobile revolution killed me, I basically quit doing phone calls after landlines went away, but 5G has my back. I’m constantly shocked these days when I can understand a phone call. It’s neat.
None of this, however, has anything, at all, to do with my language skills or my “thinking” abilities generally. I was just as unable to parse out your muddled speech back when I was a precocious young thing becoming fluent in a second language, whizzing through standardized tests and winning the fellowships to go with, and mastering accounting and finance while working a professional writing and editing gig for my grad school assistantship.
But in this house, the captions are always turned on when we watch a movie.
One of my kids has the same auditory processing disorder. I was pretty sure she was going to get fitted for hearing aids when I took her to the audiologist. Constantly lost in group conversations, constantly missing what was said and needing it repeated or rephrased . . . nope. Hearing’s great. In retrospect that shouldn’t have been a surprise, she is a pitch-perfect singer.
You might guess that this affects her language skills? Not so much. She’s the kid who can whip out an A+ paper effortlessly. She analyzes poetry and collects poignant quotes for a hobby. And before you get all “oh but I guess she sucks at math” . . . nope. Good at math. Chemistry was a walk in the park. She is smart.
But totally needs captions.
There are a lot of factors that affect what we non-specialists call “cognition.” I can remember being sick enough at one point that the SuperHusband was worried I was having cognitive problems because I would say things a little bit wrong and not correct them.
These were lapses that native English speakers commit all the time — picking the close-but-wrong word, getting subject-object order backwards, conjugating a verb incorrectly. In normal life, you hear that slip-up and then you either quickly say the corrected version or else you wave your hand and say, “Oh, you know what I mean.” Everyone does know what you mean, because we all make those slips of the tongue.
He was worried because I didn’t seem to be noticing the errors anymore.
I explained to him later that I knew full well I’d made a totally normal slip-up. I also knew, therefore, that no one would have any trouble getting my intended meaning. So I let it go without comment, because I was just too damn tired to care.
That was going on back when I first got hired to blog here, spring of 2014. I won’t say everything I wrote was top of my game during that time, but yeah, I could process information, reason, and express myself at least okay enough to get paid to write.
It can be hard to parse out low-level cognitive problems.
Some people are just dumb all the time, no matter how high their IQ, so honestly the fact that they are “normal” is not a great reason to elect them to office. At the other extreme, I’ve read accounts of post-Covid cases where someone with, say, a PhD in the hard sciences was so affected that it was no longer possible to interpret a basic bar graph. My own experience with a brain gone AWOL was quite different from either of those situations.
When I went on extended blog silence in the spring of 2021, one of the weird neurological things I was experiencing was an inability to process what was in my right-side peripheral vision. Vision was fine, but my goodness if you left a mug sitting out on the kitchen counter in just the wrong location, my right hand was going to knock that thing over. But even though I needed total peace and quiet in order to succeed at things like making lunch, my language skills were there. They had to be, because my sound tolerance tanked so badly that for a couple weeks my voice left me nauseated (vestibular hyperacusis, look it up), and so I typed everything I said.
Thinking about it, even though I did basically panic back then if someone entered the kitchen while I was concentrating on making lunch? Because I needed to concentrate so please leave me alone??? I had no trouble skimming through research abstracts figuring out what was going on with that sound-induced nausea and how to treat it.
(Treatment worked. Or else the thing just went away on its own. Either is fine with me.)
So anyway, those personal stories are just some examples of why everyone who knows anything, at all, about cognitive functioning can immediately pick you off as an ignoramus if you start conflating audio processing disorders with other, completely unrelated comprehension, reasoning, and communication skills.
So maybe don’t do that.
Thanks.
PS: Don’t put me on speaker.
Seashell photo by RealGatba, via Wikimedia, CC 4.0. Some of you get the anatomy pun. All of you might be interested in the detailed image description found here, and more information about conus adversarius here.
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