WHEN WORDS ARE NOT ENOUGH: WATCH AND LEARN
1. Do you watch people’s body language and facial expressions during conversations to help you understand what is said? 2. Do you prefer to learn by watching someone do something? 3. Do you find it hard to listen to someone when others are talking at the same time? 4. Do you like to know the big picture, before you learn about just one part of it? 5. Are you often surprised that others don’t anticipate an outcome from an action that is very obvious to you? 6. Do you tend to plan ahead more than others do? 7. Do you sometimes ‘overthink’ things and end up worrying too much?
If you answered ‘Yes’ to a lot of these questions you may have auditory processing difficulties and have also developed some very useful compensatory strengths.
Auditory Processing
Auditory processing is the means by which the sounds you hear are processed by your brain, so that you understand what you hear.
Typically, there are two different types of auditory processing difficulty:
1. If someone has repeated middle ear infections in childhood they can have auditory processing problems later in life. This happens because children with repeated ear infections have partial sensory deprivation at a time of life when they are developing neurological skills in processing sounds.
2. About 10% of people have poorer auditory processing skills.
In the NT especially, many Indigenous people experience persistent ear infections in childhood. Some non-Indigenous children can also experience recurring ear infections.
Children with auditory processing difficulties often struggle more at school. Schooling is often frustrating and difficult. Children commonly come to think that they are not as smart as others when it is actually because they are struggling with ‘talk focussed learning.’ They tend to leave school earlier and often do better in real life settings where they have more control over how they learn. Later on, they often have strengths they developed during childhood to help compensate for their difficulties with listening.
Watching body language and facial expressions help to better understand what is said. Knowing how a person thinks and feels can help anticipate what they will say. Regularly thinking about how others think and feel in order to better understand what they say is common.
Habits of anticipation help to predict what may be said. Watching body language and thinking about others thoughts and feeling can foster empathy for others which is a strength for those wanting to work in aid professions. Anticipation also helps foster planning skills, so people may gravitate to study areas like IT, which require planning and thinking ahead. Visual strengths are also commonly developed so people may thrive in occupations like the visual arts and where design skills are needed.
Compensatory strengths can, however, also sometimes contribute to difficulties. In larger groups, people can become overwhelmed trying to read many facial expressions and think about others thinking. Thinking ahead can foster anxiety when that habitual anticipation goes beyond what is constructive. People can experience the same frustrations with background noise in class groups, but online learning can have some advantages and also disadvantages that will be discussed in a subsequent article.
As there are a large number of Indigenous students, mature age, and VET students, studying at CDU, it is likely that there are more students with auditory processing problems than at most other tertiary institutions. If you relate to the issues raised here, you can write to me for more information: damien@phoenixconsulting.com.au. And watch this space for the next article on coping strategies for students who experience auditory processing problems.
Damien Howard is a psychologist in Darwin who is interested in what happens when background noise makes processing words difficult.
