My academic strengths are academics, I guess. Most anything academic you hand to me I'll find intensely fascinating and want to read for hours on end. It didn't show at all before college though because I've always struggled with executive functioning and staying mentally on the same page as the rest of the class. I'd learn the material like the back of my hand but struggle with the parameters of an assignment or remembering what the professor/teacher just said because I was so concentrated on the subject itself.
It was actually pretty bizarre to me to start with that I could be academically proficient or even ahead. I never seemed to get any good grades and I never seemed to understand what it was my teachers wanted from me. Yet at the same time I was reading at college level by the third grade (yep, I got to learn at a young age that War and Peace blows, who wants to read 800 pages that are mostly about Russian dinner parties?), scored an IQ of 210 my freshman year, and took this really interesting data retention test that a counselor gave me when they first starting looking into the possibility that I could be autistic (mind you this was practically forty years ago so we didn't know much yet):
I was made to repeat from the top of my head a series of numbers that my counselor told me. Then she increased the amount of numbers in the series until it was twenty numbers. After that she had me start repeating the series she told me backwards. And then she started having me repeat random sets of numbers and letters up to twenty of them, first forwards and then backwards again. Finally we ended with me having to set the numbers and letters in alphabetical and numerical order, forwards and backwards (had to give answers like 1112335555679ABBBIIQQSSVX or XVSSQQIIBBBA9765555332111) up to twenty again. I ended up in the 0 percentile because apparently people aren't supposed to get all of that. She suggested that I could be an autistic savant so we went to a specialist in Rancho Cordoba (an area of Sacramento, CA) and had that confirmed.
Was all pretty bewildering for me because before then I hadn't expected to do much of anything with my life, and figured I'd just be picking cotton or digging ditches for the rest of my life because that was all I could handle. But after that I went straight from high school to college at 14, and after they looked at my case I actually started getting paid by the state to work my brain muscle. It was like handing a loaded pipe to a junkie. Nowadays I pick up new subjects on the regular just for kicks. So I guess I've said I have special interests before here but when I come to think of it, I don't know if any of my intense interests are all that special any more (aside from a few particular interests like anthropology, 1st century history, comparative religions, musicology and music performance, ancient philosophy, and ancient languages), because once I read something nowadays I never forget it. Can actually remember incidents where I stopped reading a book for whatever reason, picked them back up 5-10 years later with a bookmark still in them and just continued where I left off because I knew exactly where I was and what the book had already said.
I wanted to major in music until I got the impression that there wouldn't be much money in it for me unless I wanted to teach music, which I definitely didn't want to do professionally aside from the private lessons I do. Wanted to set a goal of learning every instrument in a Western orchestra but I fell short and didn't learn the bassoon and viola after I started getting infatuated with HCM instruments (Hindustani classical music) like the sitar and surbahar. Here's some stuff I've been practicing lately:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq-y9KGqssc[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fahsREaFkyU[/youtube]
The strangest part is that when I was real little and even when I was reading stuff like War and Peace and Plato's Republic in the fourth grade, I'd still be really slow (like considerably slower than the other students) when I was first learning a subject. I used to both read very slow and still have trouble with retention if I was trying to learn something new. Now I blow through like 200 pages of something without even knowing it or having any sense of the time that passed. Maybe why it was that way was because I have seriously deficient senses (hard of hearing, almost blind and have had to have eye surgeries all of my life, practically no sense of smell and a dull sense of touch), still boggles me to this day how at the same time I can have trouble with sensory overload, and I've read that having one or more deficient senses all of your life can stunt brain development just in particular areas of the brain. So I went to do an MRI scan and found that most of the sensory areas of my brain and motor function areas of my brain are pretty slow and don't show too much activity. At the same time my frontal lobe and cerebral cortex were so active that I was told I needed to start taking occasional breaks because my brain could start getting inflammatory and give me seizures or psychotic episodes.
Looking into this kind of stuff more after that I read that there are four primary learning styles: auditory, visual, tactile/hands-on, and comprehensive. I ended up fitting into the comprehensive category, which is a category that is initially set back because comprehensive learners don't even develop into their category in a productive way until they've struggled with their inability to mentally apprehend subjects like the other categories do. Everyone no matter the category eventually has to comprehend a subject, it's principles and the methods and modes of thinking that make it easier/more-simple, but in the initial stages people "apprehend" the subject by associating one or more sensory stimuli with pieces of information in order to facilitate easy and quick access of information. Comprehensive learners, because they can't apprehend information as easily, have to struggle along until they come to the comprehension stage where apprehension can still be helpful but it isn't necessary.
So for whatever reason I became an extreme example of an already rare category and was compelled for whatever reason to struggle and struggle and struggle until I wasn't just caught up but either at college level or even ably conversant with people who have doctorates on a subject. It's hard to explain why but the stage of learning where I struggle at something has actually become the most pleasurable part of the process, and it has made everything that is academic extremely addictive. I used to get upset to the point of having a panic attack or episode when I had to stop reading a book during class. So at the same time that learning is wildly fun it can make me manic and I have had to make a habit of taking breaks because I can get way too worked up if I have to come down from something suddenly or if I've been intensely concentrating on something for too long. They've got me on anti-anxiety meds and I have to set alarms while I read so that my brain doesn't get inflammatory.
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There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance.
Nahj ul-Balāgha by Ali bin Abu-Talib
04 Mar 2014, 11:53 pm
