I’ve got one of these brains. Dyslexic. I still to this day, cannot hear what syllables are in words. ‘Cat’, 1? I hear 2.
I cannot understand when I mispronounce words. I get corrected often and repeat back the correction but it sounds like what I said the first time.
I have a fantastic memory, a great imagination, and nonstop dreams during the night. I don’t enjoy the dreams anymore, I’m pretty bored of them now that I know what they probably do mechanically.
Not sure if I’ve gotten any benefit out of it. I think the memory might be in the family as default and the other changes I noted could be normal variations.
Not trying to pry, but is english your second language?
I assume not, but I have the exact same thing with articles (“the” and “a”/“an”) that you have, except for me it was clearly caused by english being my second (my native language doesn’t have the concept of articles like that at all). And I got much better at it over time too, but it still slips through all the time for me. Less so in writing (even though it still happens not that rarely), but moreso in speech.
Especially from languages that don't have the same final and consonant cluster options that English does. For example Richard in Chinese is commonly transliterated as Lichade (lee-char-duh), even though it's only two syllables in English, and Charles is Cha'ersi (char-err-suur).
It's not necessarily the case that Chinese speakers hear the English word "Richard" as three syllables. They might or might not; either way, it isn't possible for them to produce it as two. (Or as three, as you illustrate, but there's a limit to how far you can go in the attempt to produce a foreign name accurately. A country can be named 圣文森特和格林纳丁斯, but that's just not going to work for a person whose name you need to pronounce more than once.)
Hearing problems and production problems are both common, and they overlap heavily, but they don't overlap perfectly.
Speaking of how people perceive foreign words, I'm still interested in the following:
1. Mandarin and Cantonese both use the sounds /s/ (just like English S) and /f/ (ditto, just like English F, though there are Chinese speakers who, like the Japanese, don't distinguish F and H).
2. Neither Mandarin nor Cantonese uses the sound /θ/ (beginning of the English words thorn, thunder, thwack, etc.).
3. Mandarin speakers perceive an English [θ] as being the sound /s/. It's not just that they hear it as something strange but get /s/ when they try to produce it - they cannot hear the difference between [θ] and [s]. I have a friend who learned to produce [θ] accurately, which didn't help much because her English experience is mainly auditory and she ends up using [θ] in words that use /s/.
4. Cantonese speakers are different; for them, an English [θ] is the sound /f/. This means that if a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker both listen to an English speaker pronounce "thin", neither will necessarily perceive anything particularly strange about the word, but they will disagree with each other's attempts to mimic it.
5. By now, there must be many people who are native speakers of both Cantonese and Mandarin.
6. What do they think when they hear [θ]? My best guess is that they can tell it's a strange sound, but I don't really know.
> Richard in Chinese is commonly transliterated as Lichade (lee-char-duh), even though it's only two syllables in English, and Charles is Cha'ersi (char-err-suur).
I should note that the Mandarin syllable cha is not at all rhotic; the transcription "char" only makes sense if your variety of English doesn't have rhotic vowels.
> I don’t enjoy the dreams anymore, I’m pretty bored of them now that I know what they probably do mechanically.
Why would you think that you know what the dreams are? Could you tell the rest of us please? Perhaps you are coming at this from a materialistic perspective?
I personally don't think there is anything straightforward about dreams. Whether you take a 'spiritual' approach (have you ever had a deja vu?) or a psychoanalytic view (messages from the subconscious, whatever that is) or some other perspective, there is nothing mechanistic or boring in dreams for me.
I would like to randomly chime in here regarding antidepressants and dreams.
On Prozac I sleep well but have 100% formulaic dreams. I don't like them. Each one is a mildly to moderately annoying situation that I cannot escape from.
For example, I'm in a building or neighborhood and I want to get away from some antagonist or who knows what. Using much effor and willpower I sort of get away but in that instant it resets and I'm back to getting away.
Citalopram (Celexa) though.....those dreams were the opposite. Wonderful and enjoyable with a bit of flying. Lucid too, I often realized I was in a dream and learned to manipulate it at will as well as some flying.
Just pitching in my 2 cents here, and not sure if it is what the parent commenter meant:
When I "realized" that dreams and dejavu's are all, litteraly just in your head, and just memories and visualizations that your brain is connecting together, I realized that reality is the same. You're just getting signals and processing them. Wether they come from outside ("real") or from within yourself, it doesn't really matter as long as you can tell the difference.
what I appreciated about the realization of dejavu and dreams being what they are, was that it gave me a much firmer grasp and believe that I can control my feelings and escape to a little fantasy where this worlds rules dont apply. And also accept that when you're just feeling shit, it's fine for a while, just some chemicals not playing ball.
I can tell you but it’s a bit depressing. So turn back yea who are happy! Don’t read this. I thought it was something spiritual/mystical when I was younger and I liked that a lot more! And if you wanna keep enjoying dreams collapse my comment right now!!!
Here’s the boring nightmare: so… your mind is thinking what comes next? What comes next? And it’s corrected repeatedly by information from the eyes and ears. Maybe the nose. It constantly corrects and that’s your ‘experience’.
When you dream the system is still running; just no correction from the eyes
so you see a man in your dream and your brain goes -> what’s next? And it’ll take a guess. If good: nicer dream. If bad: bad(der) dream. Frankly, it’s usually something (seemingly) random which counts as neutral.
When wacky things happen your eye input isn’t correcting, so things get pretty wild or tame depending on how good your brains prediction is.
Your brain is going through scenarios with no correcting input.
Since I realized this 8-9 years ago I’ve been trying to prove this wrong to myself.
I wish it was spiritual or mystical but it’s pretty conclusively my deluded half asleep mind doing this. I have said goodbye to loved ones in dreams, a physically impossible scenario and it’s like your living it, just no reality correction from the eyes or ears.
Most people forget their dreams, but I get 4-6 a night EVERY damn night and they are like being awake!
ps. If anyone knows how to reduce dreaming please leave a comment! I don’t mind dreaming, but I envy falling asleep and waking up 7-8 hours in the future ready for the next day.
> ps. If anyone knows how to reduce dreaming please leave a comment! I don’t mind dreaming, but I envy falling asleep and waking up 7-8 hours in the future ready for the next day.
I had many more / worse dreams when on anti-insomnia drugs, so if you are taking those I would suggest trying to stop. Although, getting off anti-insomnia medication is a terrible, terrible experience for a couple weeks (and get medical advice etc of course).
Prozac: Bad,annoying dreams but mildly so.
Citalopram: Good dreams, sometimes epic dreams.
Venlafaxine: Not sure I dream. Makes it harder to sleep too.
Does that mean you lucid dream since that realization? Or because you know that dreams are just an illusion you are bored?
I know dreams are just hallucinations but it doesn't make them any less interesting for me. I lucid dreams sometimes and I enjoy that state the most, so much that when it happens I keep waiting to go lucid every night for next few nights until I forget about it. Some lucid dreams are so cinematically beautiful I remember them for a very long time. Bad lucid dream helps waking up because I know it's a dream.
Have you considered lucid dreaming or astral projection? The idea that you step into your dream and control yourself; that you can direct yourself in your dream state to explore whatever-it-is. You can go to places of your choosing, as you are not bound by the body.
If you look into these experiences, you find many people who say they learnt about parts of material reality, that they are then able to verify materially.
These ideas are highly intriguing to me. As you are someone with such a capacity for dreaming, you could certainly try these ideas out (ie explore in dreams then verify in reality), if you haven't already. If you have tried, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the matter.
> If you look into these experiences, you find many people who say they learnt about parts of material reality, that they are then able to verify materially.
I can do this, too, but usually while I'm awake and bored. Reality is quite redundant, and we get all sorts of information from all sorts of sources, and sometimes I can put the puzzle pieces together and deduce things I "shouldn't" have known.
This power doesn't extend to localised information, such as the value of a hidden dice roll, and it's quite mundane. A generalisation of cold-reading. What Sherlock Holmes would call deduction, though it's actually abductive reasoning.
Examples: • Entering a building, imagining design constraints, deducing the presence of exactly one lift, inferring its location, inferring the existence of an extra wing behind the building (to place the lift in the middle), extrapolating observed foot traffic, and guessing which floor and corridor a particular office was. • Listening to someone explain geopolitics for half an hour, and inferring that they're a double-jointed insomniac.
> If you look into these experiences, you find many people who say they learnt about parts of material reality, that they are then able to verify materially.
The opposite is true: the CIA wasted lots of money on this, and they came up entirely empty handed, obviously. It is very very thoroughly debunked.
Lucid dreaming is fun and you should try it. It’s tough to get the hang of in the beginning but a very interesting experience. If you do it well it’s whatever you imagine: done poorly, you’ll get close… but your own expectations might hold you back. When you wake up you can reflect on those and plan how to do better with your more capable conscious mind.
I have not astral projected but I’ll look into it and if I remember I’ll message you after a few months
I can induce sleep paralysis by sleeping with a pillow over my head pretty consistently. I’ll get double checked. I thought apnea caused tiredness more often but I usually feel pretty good in the morning.
I don't consume often, haven't in years, but I remember having pretty wild dreams after, so I wouldn't get a good rest. So there is a difference with regular documentation?
> I cannot understand when I mispronounce words. I get corrected often and repeat back the correction but it sounds like what I said the first time.
I have the exact same problem.
I had troubles learning pronunciations when I was a kid, but I never had other learning problems.
As an adult, I struggled enough with pronunciation that I consulted two hearing specialists to determine if there were any issues with my ears. It turns out my hearing is fine.
Is it possible for someone to get a diagnosis for dyslexic based on pronunciation problems only?
I must say I am relieved to finally find someone who shares my experience.
You might be able to be diagnosed, but there’s no medication or cure. You can get extra time on tests if you’re younger.
You can Google dyslexic signs. I think last time I looked auditory processing anomalies and the retina or lens was oddly shaped in 95% of dyslexics. Dyslexic is also an umbrella term for a bunch of things so you’ll have to sort through to find your flavor.
Best fix is a good nights sleep. Also make sure you move closer to speech you want to comprehend and the people you interact with most enunciate and speak at a good volume (too many people speak poorly and could use 2 weeks of beginner theater classes)
Thank you for the kind, detailed reply. I wish I had known my condition may be dyslexic when I was younger. Taking a beginner theater class is now on my todo list.
I'm always on the lookout for new ways to think about how we process the world, just curious if you're aware of this distinction appearing in something like poetry / music?
that’s right! I hear Cah and a T sound. I never realized it was consonant I was hearing. ‘Button’ has 4? I could have divided all my answers by 2 and passed those quizzes when I was younger…
My experience is that English speakers are terrible at knowing how many syllables there are in a word. I think it has a lot to do with how our vowels are. Some vowels like /i/ tend to get their own syllable in places where most languages would blend it into an adjacent vowel and maybe make it into /j/. Other times what we think of as a single vowel is actually 2-3 vowels.
I’ve always wondered about how language is taught.
Kids are taught that “cat” phonetically is “c-a-t”. Almost sounds like three syllables at that point. Do that with other words and one will quickly question how many syllables are in everything!!
I’m not dyslexic but I feel like the way we teach language is broken.
It's absolutely fascinating how differences in brain structure can cause a wide variety of conditions. Somehow I was linguistically (especially reading and writing) way above average in my childhood, but suck at mathematics and motor skills. Due to my mother's health condition my brain was scanned after I was born, and they found some abnormalities with left lateral ventricle. Apparently it's located near basal ganglia, which makes me wonder if the abnormality has a connection to these conditions.
I remember a few years back reading how cellphone signals will cause mental disturbances. I'm not claiming it has, though sometimes I do think the world is going kind of bonkers.
Just that eventually we will definitely stumble into something like this. Just like the Romans were oblivious drinking from lead pipes was causing their mental problems.
If there's a mass psychosis event, would the people under going it even realize it was happening.
We went from 1/150 to 1/36 Children with Autism in the last 20 years. Go back further, and it was practically unheard of.
A) Increased awareness of the issue for both parents and medical staff. I think that one is clearly true.
B) Rational response to educational incentives around relaxed testing for those diagnosed with syndromes. Extra testing time is big. During the Varsity Blues scandal it came out that you could buy paperwork for accommodations for around $5000. Or parents might see a legitimate issue and testing and in-school accommodations convince them that it’s worth getting their child diagnosed.
A) Collapse of traditional paths to marriage. If you’re less likely to meet mates by meeting them at church or other community events with a more wide spread selection of people, are you more likely to meet someone else on the spectrum?
B) Increased career rewards for those with autistic tendencies, so less need to find a non-autistic spouse.
While you make very good points, I think as society we are quite quick at discounting unknown unknowns in this case. Science and diagnostic methods have advanced a lot, but it is not at all improbable that there is some kind of man-made factor that also caused an increase in incidence of autism (or any other modern chronic disease, such as ADHD like I am). Being an unknown unknown, we literally cannot know until x decades later we find out, "ah yes, we used this chemical everywhere that had a measurable developmental effect on newborn. Whoopsie". Yet everyone keeps saying that's nonsense, let alone insulting and insensitive to even suggest that's the case.
I am not saying there is proof for the contrary, mind you, just science and laymen should avoid the hubris of thinking we haven't made a mistake along the way. It would not be the first time. Radium in toothpaste, cigarettes for sore throat, cocaine in health tonics, DDT, teflon, and the other hundred teratogen chemicals we have given pregnant women over the decades.
>Problem is that unknown unknows are not actionable.
How about carefully testing something new, especially something that one ingests? As far as I know no such testing is done, if it's done, it's done with the goal of gaming the safety standards that may be expected of the product. You cannot fix an ignorant, corrupt society.
How extensive safety testing of a hammer should be?
Should there be double blind clinical trials for it’s health impact when caried daily on a tool belt?
For most people, answer will differ depending on what the hammer is made of (iron vs uranium vs radium).
My point here would be that a) we must choose appropriate set of tests as they cost in money/time/opportunities, b) the choice of tests must be influenced by what we know and/or suspect.
If unknown is unknown, then we don’t know that we need a test for it.
This study is in very young children who haven’t had cellular phones yet. RF radiation falls off very rapidly as you get away from the cell phone.
The increased rate of autism is largely due to increased diagnosis. Autistic people existed long ago, but the diagnosis of Autism obviously didn’t exist in the distant past.
I agree. It's likely common that children with ADHD or autism diagnosis also have parents with such condition, but they were simply never diagnosed. At least in my family's case it's quite evident, though it took me a while to recognize.
While I can't quite say how big each effect is, it's undeniable that a big part of the difference in autism diagnosis is just the fact that we test at all. I grew up in the 80s, where the level for someone to be diagnosed with autism required being pretty close to non verbal. But if I look at my old classmates and think of people with significant sensory issues, social dysfunction and such, it's easy to imagine that today, a lot of them would be diagnosed as having at least some form of Asperger's today. Just like we had clearly gay kids, and others with behavior that today would indicate gender dysphoria. The kids with ADHD symptoms? They were just too active and refused to concentrate, no diagnosis outside of the most extreme cases.
We have different standards and different levels of attention. We don't just re-diagnose adults, so it's possible that there is a higher rates today. Maybecaused by something you mention, or straight out selection. Still,ignoring the differences in diagnosis standards is going to get us, at the very least, exaggerated conclusions.
Maybe it's the definition of "normal" that is the real problem?
If I use a pebble as my metric, some things we think of as 'small' would have to be counted as 'big'. The idea of abnormal is all wrong imo, but just the idea brings constraints with it.
The cell phone study literature you may be thinking of is on certain types of gliomas. There are also studies on other cancers in different tissues showing similar findings, for which the common link appears to be the cell emission.
There is a decent amount of evidence around this, though of course there are some assumptions made that are difficult to show directly (such as RF causing changes over intermittent use for years on living tissue from direct observations of hypothesized mechanisms, either RNA, protein or otherwise.). The typical argument is 'it is significantly altered in individuals that use devices more, has a "dose/time-dependent" effect, and convincing ipsilateral patterning', paired with 'there are changes in cell behavior under RF in vitro'. So a leap made is sticking the two together, but it's not a completely crazy one.
I’m genuinely interested in the evidence. Do you have any of the studies you’re referencing handy? I’ve done a general search, but so far I haven’t see anything significant.
Well we more recently had lead in petrol. Hard to believe we made that same mistake twice.
I agree regarding the psychosis thing. When I read the comments section of politically themed YouTube videos I actually get scared how insane people have become.
Psychosis has always been common. I believe single digit percentages of people experience it. If you know 100 people, maybe 1-4 of them experience psychosis. I have been close to two people who do.
One of the major differences about why it's so visible right now is that the internet is enabling psychotic people to find like-minded psychotic people and form communities. Qanon is one example. "Gang stalking" is another. They find people with the same delusions and riff off of one another.
In the olden days, one individual suffering from something like this can stay isolated, and their ideas do not travel that far. Today, they can find their tribe online. They can have meetups. They can act out their delusions en masse.
I'm have a feeling the whole Qanon thing was orchestrated by government actors. The whole things reads like a scheme to lead people off track. Not that psychosis is not involved.
EMF could indeed be the next asbestos. The Invisible Rainbow is on audible and worth a listen, regardless of any surrounding well poison about the author (or maybe because of it.) There’s some very interesting history of electricity’s role in society starting from the mid 1700s.
I hope you don't mind me pointing out the delicious irony of recommending an audiobook (requiring a mass communication network and electronic playback device) to sample a tome apparently on the subject of electricity invisibly killing birds and sickening people, when it is also available in dead-tree form.
>cellphone signals will cause mental disturbances.
I would think it goes way beyond that long term.
> Just like the Romans were oblivious drinking from lead pipes was causing their mental problems.
We are worse than the Romans in that regard, there is literature that suggests, that in general man made EMF waves are not safe and yet, immediate convenience trumps over any concerns of safety as with may other thing that people use. Bring up the subject and you will be labeled a pseudoscience indulger.
I'm not sure why you would think that. There's all kinds of substances that humans take (Alcohol, drugs) that change their mental state. Why is the idea that environmental pollutant could be doing the same, so rejected by people.
Is it an ego thing ?
I cannot understand when I mispronounce words. I get corrected often and repeat back the correction but it sounds like what I said the first time.
I have a fantastic memory, a great imagination, and nonstop dreams during the night. I don’t enjoy the dreams anymore, I’m pretty bored of them now that I know what they probably do mechanically.
Not sure if I’ve gotten any benefit out of it. I think the memory might be in the family as default and the other changes I noted could be normal variations.