The Black Box, Revisited

This brain business is freaking me out. I’m wondering how much more complex my mind is than I consciously realize. Today I had another auditory therapy appointment, my first since last quarter, and while I walked away feeling excited, I also walked away feeling unsettled. What exactly is going on inside that black box that I don’t understand?

To offer a quick recap: my therapist and I sat down and discussed my progress over the last month or so, then proceeded to listening exercises that I’ve done a few times before. Throughout, she commented on my growing confidence and poise with listening, or at least my growing willingness to persevere with deciphering what I hear. To paraphrase her words, she told me: “Your entire life, you’ve had to hang back, to resign yourself and say, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t understand this.’ You’ve felt constantly unsure and you’ve grown used to being cautious as a result. Now you have this wonderful new tool that helps you engage better, and you’re learning how to overcome that hesitation that you’ve grown used to.”

How true, not only for me but for anyone else with a hearing loss. And how nice to have this perspective articulated so clearly. Disengagement has been a survival mechanism for me for so long that it’s hard for me to commit my brain to listening, to trying to piece the sounds together despite having less than ten months’ experience with this auditory mess. The words streak by, not making any sense at first, that old response kicks in and I think “I can’t do this! For heaven's sake, I’m deaf!” and then I get overwhelmed and implode and my mind switches off. I don’t do this intentionally, I don’t think. It’s not that I mean to give up. It’s that habit (by now, almost instinct) tells me that my efforts will be futile and that trying isn’t even an option. Spoken word gibberish soup, again. So much for that.

But when I do try, strange things happen. One of today’s exercises dealt with listening to a simple sentence involving two words: “Please pick up (food item) and (food item) from the store.” Old hat, this exercise, even while the words to engrain in my auditory memory seem limitless! Some of the food words, I’d heard often enough to get right away, such as hamburgers and French fries. Others were more unexpected, and when my auditory therapist saw that I wasn’t getting them she would switch to verbally describing them to give me clues, instead of either 1) repeating the word over and over again while I got progressively more frustrated, or 2) throwing in the towel and telling me the word outright. This backroads strategy is one that she’s used from the beginning, to force me to listen in the context of language. It’s also very hard for me right now. Remember, I’m listening to full-bodied descriptive sentences without lipreading. Talk about a jump up!

So, today I sat and listened to her describing this unknown word using other unknown words, the sounds piling up and toppling over and burying me in their rush, and while I couldn’t have told you what I was hearing I also wasn’t completely overwhelmed. This time was different. The words going by sounded like English words, they sounded like language. They sounded comfy, like they could have been my friends. Even if it was impossible for me to say exactly what they were, at least after the fact – I felt more like I was brushing each one of them as they passed, but not strongly enough to sink in my hook and reel them in. Once in a while, one or two would jump up and I would grasp a fleeting phrase, but then struggle to hold on as the stream continued. “This is a… breakfast… You use it to… and it… green…” Other times, I would rustle against individual sounds but couldn’t think fast enough to assemble them into words.

Yet, out of this ghostly, translucent chaos, some sort of picture emerged. The first time this happened, I listened to my therapist’s stream of speech, sat there subconsciously ruminating, and then said, “Yogurt.”

“Very good!” she told me.

“That’s really what it was? Yogurt?”

“Yes.”

How did I ever get that? All I’d heard, at least consciously, was something about flavors and strawberries. Impossible, for my brain to make the leap from that to “yogurt.”

But then it happened again. The word in question: zucchini. I listened, gathered that my therapist was talking about a long and green vegetable, but instead of searching through my mental food vocabulary to find something that fit the bill, the word popped up and came to me right then. I knew. It had been there all along, beneath the surface of my brain, but hesitating and not knowing how to fight its way into conscious articulation.

And again. Something about cutting and breakfast and sugar, only half-grasped and feeling like a murky dream: without a doubt, it must be grapefruit. I wasn’t assembling clues, because the clues themselves hardly made sense. Unless they were assembling subconsciously, just like everything else?

Whoa whoa whoa, wait. What the eff is going on? I don’t get this. How can I so definitively say something, based on so little (read: almost nonexistent) proof? Unless the proof is there in abundance, somewhere deep within that black box, and I’m not capable of realizing it? What determines whether the sounds click together to make a word or whether they don’t? How can all this be happening without the conscious input of my work ethic or deductive reasoning or problem-solving skills, but based only on my willingness to sit there and listen to and accept what seems like chaos? How can my brain be so resourceful, all by itself and seemingly without me?

And, at the same time, how amazing is that?!

Auditory Memory and Other Ramblings

Auditory therapy, session two. Take-away points: right now it's all about building confidence and auditory memory. (Nothing new. That mental sound dictionary is going to be years in the making.) And it's about making myself stretch, too, defining a set that's neither too open nor too closed. I have to flex my listening muscles, so to speak, and make myself work hard without becoming frustrated or feeling like the answer is out of reach. It's a tricky balance. So how do I push those boundaries? This week we tried several things. Listening and selecting sentences at different volumes and distances, defining a category and then having me discern open-ended statements about it, listening to sets of words and determining which one did not belong. That brain of mine is still reluctant to listen, to put its faith in something previously so unknown, but the more I push it the more it cooperates.

Also, I need to put aside my fear of incomprehension. It's a bit ironic that lack of communication is probably my biggest fear, yet it's something with which I have a tremendous amount of experience. Over the years I've come up with a number of coping mechanisms for situations when I'm just not getting it. My brain has gotten good at glossing things over, at filling in the blanks when it can and trying to cope when it can't. Up to this point, that puzzle-solving process has mainly applied to lipreading, but now it applies to listening too. While deciphering the speech sounds I hear, I need to make myself release some of my inner tension. I'm going into overdrive, piecing together sounds in an attempt to extract a statement that makes sense, and worrying when none of it fits - but, when things do click, it often happens suddenly. No analysis involved: I know what I'm hearing! That's the goal, moving forward - to ask myself, am I listening with my ears or with my brain? That analytical mind of mine has always been a huge asset, but maybe one day it'll be a bit less necessary, or a bit less overburdened, as more of the pieces fall into place. What a great thought.

And, finally - this may be a bit redundant, but I keep feeling stunned at the texture of the world with sound in it. Seven months has not distilled my private sense of wonder. There's a bird building a nest outside my window, and I hear it right now as I type. I've been noticing new types of bird calls around campus, too, and other sounds keep shadowing me, feeling more and more like good friends. The whistling of the wind, the squeal of my bike tires, overlapping machinery, people's voices carrying over from the most improbable places. Hard work aside, all of this is so, so amazing.