Mind What You're Doing

If you ever hated school, or parts of it, Mel Levine's A Mind at a Time is guaranteed to bring back memories. He's a pediatrician who has made childhood neurodevelopment his life's calling. And we can all be glad he has, because we may be able, with work, to exorcise the terms "stupid," "slow," "spacey," "lazy," and "klutzy" from our vocabulary. It's one of his concerns, in fact, that neurodevelopment is discussed in terms of moral approval or disapproval.

Whereas, a good deal of understanding is called for. Neurodevelopment refers to the fact that, throughout our lives, but especially in childhood, our brains are actually growing and developing. Often we refer to the evidence of this, like when we say we learned to read. Meanwhile, inside our brains, many different processes were coming online. We had to learn to hear phonemes distinctly, we had to train our memory to let us turn a string of phonemes into a word, we had to master word order and relationships -- all more or less unconsciously.

Actually reading meant we also had to learn to recognize letter shapes, train our visual memory to keep letters together so we could see words, and train our visual recognition to trigger the sound of the word and its meaning.

Neurodevelopment teaches us that a) you can't learn to do anything before you have succeeded in mastering the constitutive steps in the right order, and there are always many small steps, b) the learning process is largely that of automation, getting consciously good enough at something to let it become unconscious, and c) any mental process "costs" us, whether we're good at it or not.

It also teaches us that minds are not the same, and we have to learn (thus the "mind at a time") to explore each one's inherent strengths and weaknesses without making pointless comparisons to others. We're all going to have things we're good at (though we may not realize it, because it's always been so easy we never thought of it as an accomplishment), and things we have to work at, and things that we may be better off avoiding (the square peg, round hole syndrome).

Distinguishing between all of these option takes care and attention because while what we're good at may be invisible to us (we may imagine "everyone" can do it), we need to applaud ourselves for our gifts and put them to use, not ignore them. It's also easy to fall into the trap of avoiding the things we could improve, and butting our heads against the things we can't.

Levine has countless examples of cautionary tales, kids who seemed to teachers and parents stupid or lazy, but whose gifts were being smothered by a neurodevelopmental deficit. Some kids, while possessing a lively and imaginative interior monologue, react like a stroke victim to verbalizing that monologue. The words and concepts elude their grasp, and it's frustrating because they know they know better, and they can tell that others are condescending to them.

Levine mentions more than once how hard it is to maintain a positive self-image in the face of overwhelming feedback, especially when it's a kid versus an adult, a teacher or parent. Because of the moral aspect, some kids become convinced that they're bad. And their frustrated acting out underscores that they're just a bad seed. They don't measure up, they know; their parents don't understand them, and they're a disappointment.

All of this burdens them even more than the actual neurodevelopmental deficit(s) they struggle with. The deficits themselves can be hidden behind more apparent diagnoses. If kids aren't slow or stupid, they may "be" ADD or another acronym. But a person can be enormously lucid and verbal, but have a long-term memory that needs an extra push to function. A person may be able to master high level conceptual thinking only if the teacher isn't speaking too quickly, or if the teacher draws a diagram of relationship. This isn't a disorder, it's who they are.

If you think about it, there's a reason that we have such a capacious mental toolbox when it comes to communication. It's not because of a love of variety; it's because we are the variety. Some of us grasp things in detail, others by the big picture, others through language. This is why in poetry you have Formalists who lean toward regular rhythms and rhymes, and Imagists, who refuse to entertain anything that can't be pictured. Abstract art bespeaks a different neurodevelopmental profile than representational art.

(Or, more Biblically, there's the story of the Tower of Babel. In this parable, the tower -- the self -- is constructed by many different workers. The king's monolithic dictates can only build the tower so high, though. God has made each worker, each part of us, different enough so that at some point uniformity of purpose breaks down. Is God afraid of a really tall tower? Or is that simply not the way to God? Isn't the gift here, instead, the many languages, the many means of communicating?)

While this book discusses childhood education, Levine knows that adult readers find it equally illuminating, as people raised before neurodevelopment was coined find clues to their terrible test scores, rushed or plodding performance, keen insight and carelessness with detail, or the blooming of a former weakness with age. The book also sheds light on the dysfunction of coping mechanism behaviors that mask the deficit that provokes them.

As children, a number of things can make us lose the thread of meaning: someone speaking too quickly, using abstract language, or not having gained our attention with relevance. That's a short list. But when we cease to understand, we become bored with nonsense, and we develop habits to rescue ourselves. We might clown around in class, lose ourselves in a fantasy, or turn to a physical expression like toe-tapping or knuckle-cracking. Any of these provides an escape from the terrible monotony of nonsense, any of these can become a bad habit we're punished for, and none of these helps us address why we became bored in the first place.

What these evasions do is color our character, people respond to our these behaviors as if they're us, and soon enough we become persuaded that they are. We don't seem to able to stop, after all. What Levine encourages us to do is notice when we've lost the thread, how it happened. Frustration, boredom, anxiety, in this case, are great clues. Rather than attributing them to a person or situation, we'll know they are markers telling us to slow down, or back up, until we've found our way again.