In a heartbeat

The rhythm of music is my prosthetic for balance. I don’t have a preference ..just whatever moves me at the time. In fact, I find dancing easier than walking ..that’s probably why I go to the drum circle at the park every chance I get. Following a rhythm has helped me learn to walk again ..just as it helped me learn to ski when I was a kid. It puts me in motion so I don’t have to think about every step ..or anticipate every move. I suppose I have my early experience to thank for that ..those teenage years spent at rock concerts. Dr Oliver tells me that stroke victims, people who have lost the ability to speak ..can still sing. When they begin putting their words into a melody ..they can express themselves fluently. What this tells me is that ‘keeping the beat’ is a deeper, more fundamental process, than constructing sentences.

Turns out that most children with dyslexia don’t have a problem with vision. What they have is a gap in their auditory system ..they cannot identify the sound of the words they see ..and until they can do that .. it’s hard to progress much further. That’s why we have to go back and treat dyslexia using auditory training. Now, I don’t know what the church of scientology thinks about this .. I can’t find any of their literature ..only proclamations made by Tom Cruise. But according to Dr Goswami [link] the first language we learn is the sound of our mother’s heart beat. It’s like an internal metronome ..setting the tempo that helps us follow the sound of speech during early childhood. Lately I’ve been pushing the boundaries of my theory ..to the annoyance of those around me. I’ve come to think of it as the rhythm that helps us follow the events in our life. Without it ..everything we see and hear would simply appear as though they were coming out of nowhere ..and disappearing into nowhere. No coherence ..nothing helping us string them together.

In a heartbeat

Many children with dyslexia cannot keep up with the flow of text fluently enough to convert symbols into sound ..then sound into meaning. To read OK, the brain has about 40 milliseconds to do this. For children with reading difficulties, this may take as many as 500 milliseconds. According to Usha Goswami [link] part of the problem may be caused by difficulty in perceiving the rhythm of speech. Goswami and her colleagues discovered that dyslexic children could not track the beat in speech. The ability to detect a beat matters when the brain is trying to process syllables and phonemes. Like a metronome, it helps children pick-up the properties of speech in time. They inform me that the ability to keep the beat is so fundamental; the first language we learn is our own mother’s heartbeat.

KnowledgeNet

A model for the fabric of the mind has been tentatively settled-on [link]. It’s one that characterizes what’s inside my skull as a 3-dimensional network of delicately connected instances of prior experience and feeling. Prior experience is stored on this network in the form of linked propositions (as in predicate logic). This is referred to as a KnowledgeNet and it is necessary for reading comprehension. Reading is an active, constructive process that requires the interaction of elements of text and the KnowledgeNet. The more area on the net that you activate when you read, the more you are able to understand and remember. Under ordinary circumstances, signals from the senses produce ripples that spread out over this fabric, like stones on a pond, activating network-connections until a clear mental representation is formed. However, when something goes wrong, and there’s a disturbance in the fabric, activation may become amp’d and diffuse ..compounding insubstantial phenomena until, what may have started out as a gentle hummingbird, for example .. becomes a ferocious beast. Sometimes I think it’s only a matter of degree between clarity and delusion ..especially when I consider how many times I mistook a perfectly innocent remark as hostility.