I took calculus in college, and if not for my kickass professor, I would have failed.
There wasn’t a question of intelligence. There wasn’t a question of being able to do the work. I performed well on homework and quizzes, but continually failed exams. I didn’t understand why, and at first, neither did my professor. While reviewing an exam, however, he made a discovery that continues to have an impact. I was doing well until one particular problem. I got stuck on one particular problem, and proceeded to get every problem after that wrong.
He set the exam aside, went to the chalkboard and we went through the problem. I got it. We reviewed the others, along with ones not on the exam, and I got those. We went back to the exam, he asked some questions about what I was thinking at the time then posited that perhaps I got so frustrated with that one problem I lost the ability to concentrate and thus missed the rest. He pointed to the board as if to further illustrate the point. I clearly knew the material. There was something about frustration that caused a chain reaction in my brain that made it impossible for me to refocus and treat each problem as new instead of a continuation of the problem I was failing to get. He recommended I go through a series of tests to see if there was an answer, and then we could find a solution.
After a battery of tests, it was revealed that I suffered from test anxiety. My nervous system kicks into overdrive, and when I find myself making a mistake or start second guessing, it snowballs. My brain just trips out on itself and refuses to get back in line. The solution? Extra time for exams, which fell under the purview of the Students with Disabilities department. Talk about suddenly being branded “disabled.” With a fair amount of encouragement, I took advantage of the extra time. I ended up going well enough on exams in calculus to go from a F to a B-. I still consider that my greatest achievement of my undergraduate career.
What I also learned, and what has undoubtedly had an even bigger impact: I am an auditory learner. Technically, I’m an auditory/kinetic learner. I learn best by hearing and doing. To those that know me, this is not news. My roommates will tell you I talk to myself, which is how I remember things that are important, and I have an uncanny ability to recite movie lines and song lyrics. I’m not always aware I am doing these things, and I’ve recently discovered I have been unaware of just how deeply rooted auditory learning is for me.
In Untangling the Mind: Why We Behave the Way We Do, David Theodore George and Lisa Berger discuss the important role our senses play in both informing us of danger, and our reaction to danger. One of those senses is hearing. According to them, our “auditory system is designed to pick up sound frequencies and intensities vital to survival” (Kindle pg 801). Makes sense. A little later it is explained that “not everyone’s auditory system reacts normally. Just as DR misses the sound of a dangerous growl, other people hear danger when none is meant. Because people are more sensitive to valence than intensity in a voice, it is likely that the pitch of a voice is a more accurate sign of trouble” (Kindle pg 814). Pitch of a voice is more accurate sign of trouble. My inner-critic has overshadowed, if not completely dampened, a “more accurate sign of trouble.” I had become accustomed to the sound of my inner-critic as it was all I heard, so thus what I learned and became all I knew.
If senses are how we are initially informed of danger, and my dominant sense and primary mode of learning is faulty because it is constantly alerting me to danger that does not exist (call it conditioning if you must), then what happens to the rest of my senses? Are they also corrupted?
No. My visual sense had been struggling against my “inner-critic” auditory input, with very little success. It took a simple visual representation of my “inner-critic” auditory input to break it: a loop. The visual representation cause a short-circuit of my “inner-critic” auditory input, it went silent. Until that moment, I had never experienced silence. It was very jarring to me. The auditory input completely shattered, leaving me with pieces that I could not put back together because some had been obliterated, leaving large, gaping holes. I no longer had a reference point.
Gradually, I came to realize that I would have to build a new auditory input. But with useless pieces from the “inner-critic” auditory input, I had nothing. I had no model, so I have had to construct my own. It’s a process, but to say that is to belittle the point. Everything is a process. The difference is how you go about the process. For me, with no model or starting point, I started reading everything I could get my hands on related to psychology, neurology/neurobiology, philosophy, Buddhism, story-telling and anything else that remotely seemed helpful. I took a renewed interest in the music I listen to, the lyrics that pop into my head and how it has started to shift.
A new auditory input has started to emerge, with a very different tone, speaking pattern and approach to things. I’m finding I prefer it.
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