I did it again

I appreciate the attention given, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, to surprising and complex dynamics among phenomena such as deficit and giftedness, illness/pathology and creativity, disability and difference.

I feel a certain reluctance when I use words like “disability” and “deficit,” particularly when referring to neurological or psychiatric issues. On one hand, I don’t suggest dropping the terms for reasons of political correctness; that would seem reactive and finicky to me. On the other hand, those terms convey, at best, only half of the pertinent information. Sacks is alert to the brain’s amazing resilience and resourcefulness, its plasticity, its ingenious capacities for adaptation and compensation. Sacks understands, too, that often a limitation of some sort in the brain is accompanied by a corresponding and proportionate (though sometimes disproportionate) strength in another faculty. Similarly, he’s aware of how a pathology can be made generative and useful, how a deficit can become a resource, how a disability can occasion an exceptional capability of another kind. He speaks rather explicitly about the ways in which pathology and creativity are in dynamic relationship--or in collusion. For instance, any student of literature can attest to the remarkable frequency with which genius and madness appear side by side (while we have to be wary of romanticizing disease). I find increasingly that the distinctions among disabilities, benign differences, capabilities, gifts, deficits, illnesses, pathologies, blessings are really very murky, even as they have to be taken seriously.

A personal note. When I was in elementary school, I was diagnosed with a mild nonverbal learning disorder. It’s hard to explain concisely what this entailed--Google it if you’re truly interested--but my instinct is to describe it in positive terms, steering away from deficiencies and focusing on--strange to say--benefits. What characterizes the condition for me is an atypical reliance on language as a means for understanding and expression. Put differently--I am emphatically not a visual learner; I need stuff explained in language if I’m going to get it. This manifested (and manifests) itself as difficulty in math and science, clumsiness in sports, illegible handwriting, and ineptitude in visual arts--but also as early speech, early reading, a sophisticated vocabulary, good spelling, a better-than-average verbal memory, ease in writing. I’ve perused ancient report cards and been amused by their schizoid quality--disabled there, gifted here: a pattern that showed itself, as well, on every standardized test I have ever taken. There are, in addition, indifferent effects, more aptly characterized as differences. I tend to perceive things in a more piecemeal, less global way--I wish I could provide a better description, but it’s a slippery thing--and this for the most part hasn’t presented any problems, and most people don’t pick up on it. All the above came as a unit; it was never just an isolated lack.

How do these subtleties complicate and/or enrich our sense of these case subjects’ experiences? How about our own experiences?