With regard to Sarah’s presentation.
*Sarah is a seventeen year old autistic girl who has recovered from several years of significant psychosis, either a worsening of already present autism or actual schizophrenia since is runs in the family. Sarah has hyperacusis, since her earliest years.
In Musicophilia, Dr. Sacks offers the concept that removal of normal auditory input might result in a hypersensitivity of the auditory cortex causing heightened powers of musical imagery – and sometimes auditory hallucinatory process. His focus is with music and how it is utilized and occupied in the brain of persons typically more normal, many of whom developed their atypical and more fascinating response to music later in life. What is not lost where Sarah is concerned is the fact that her sight perception, auditory perception, and other sense perception translates to unique and atypical understanding of all her life experience. The fact that her auditory sense is profoundly unique in how it translates sound from her earliest development (explained in Comp 2 of Musicophilia), and most likely even affects her physical well being, means that she has not learned in the usual manner even from her earliest years. If one is dealing with a confused auditory process, a process that might even have ramifications with regard to feeling physically well or not, their focus would not be in assimilation of all that is going on around them, learning about life in context; the abstract, the concrete, emotions and so on.
Perhaps, because of the above – Sarah’s ability to discern life in context; to understand the abstract, the vague, pretend, real, rote meaning and meaning in context, may be lost in varying degrees. She always has discerned things that are rote in nature, or mathematical and these have been a strength for her. I suppose that for her – abstract, vague, pretend, real, concrete, rote meaning, meaning in context, are of equal relevancy in her mind. Her understanding of all thought and life experience might very well be that; concrete is abstract and abstract is concrete – there is no difference. There seems an absence of pecking order with regard to types of thought and thought’s assimilation in her brain. Thus her intellectual complexity creates a repertoire similar in concept to musical imaging that Dr. Sacks describes, even as her neurological underpinnings might not possess development of separate identity types for different types of thought (Short-Term, Long-Term, Explicit, Episodic, Semantic, Implicit, Priming, Procedural – for chart see this site); those underpinnings hard pressed to develop since the offensive hearing changed what Sarah was able to focus upon. Sarah actually possesses an unique intellectual complexity that is amazing, hardly understandable to the masses. Understood only by those who have in some significant way have witnessed her life experiences. What I suppose is that due to the somewhat offensive way she has heard all along, her neural connections never made the proper pathways with regard to what to comprehend during differing types of thought scenarios. So, her neural connections would be hard pressed to know what to do with all the differing types of thought that are utilized and then occupied within the brain.
The best analogy I can offer: We were under a lot of snow here in the Dakotas. When I drive before the roads are plowed I am not going to be able to discern the location of the road without being able to identify landmarks, farm houses and road signs. I have typically taken in the environment on my many drives and my brain dealt typically with the information I had taken in on the previous drives that were absent of snow. Some aspects of the thought process involved while driving are abstract/less important (like what I listen to on the radio, or the idiot that is tailgating me on any given occasion) and need not be held on to, other aspects are more concrete/important; my neural connections dealt typically and usefully with those aspects of my many drives. Had my brain not worked typically and appropriately filtered and filed (for lack of a better describer) the differing thoughts during the drive, I would not be able to attempt a drive until after the roads were plowed.
Lastly, Sarah’s psychosis seems to represent the “filling in” that Dr. Sacks describes with regard to musical imagery. You are going to have to get his book to find out about how people’s brain seems to function as if it is actually hearing music, when it isn’t (according to imaging). The way they figured it out was to play familiar songs quietly as subjects listened, but have gaps where the music wasn’t playing (while performing the brain imaging). Granted, Sarah’s filling in is not about music, it is about her whole life experience since she seems to lack the filter that is standard in most human models; the filter for differing types of thought. Her neural stimulation seems a hodgepodge that is simply invoked by even the most novel of thought associations. It has made life for the rest of us most interesting and many times for Sarah most exhausting.
That is it for today.
Find more of my Musicophilia comparisons by clicking here.
