The Woman Who Changed Her Brain: And Other Inspiring Stories of Pioneering Brain Transformation by Arrowsmith-Young Barbara

Author:Arrowsmith-Young, Barbara [Arrowsmith-Young, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2012-04-30T20:00:00+00:00

People with learning disabilities are often told, even reassured, that adaptive technologies will allow them to get around the problem of reading and writing. And while some of this compensatory software is marvelous, it’s not foolproof. Just ask the learning-disabled John Jackson, who knows the territory.

A twenty-five-year-old of Celtic lineage, he was raised in a small town north of Toronto. When I talked to him in October 2010, he had just started a one-year full-time program at the Toronto Arrowsmith School—after completing three years of university courses. John had graduated from high school and made the honor roll three years in a row. That brief sketch would suggest a rosy picture, but a deeper look reveals another story—and the many flaws and limitations of compensatory technology.

At university, John took less than a full course load each year while latching on to multiple compensatory technologies, including one that scanned textbooks and then read them out loud, voice recognition software to get around writing, and a digital recorder for note taking. Each technology had an unforeseen flaw. The first device deployed a computer-generated voice, which drove John to distraction. The voice recognition software went off the rails when it heard words such as “The Aeneid” or “Fenian Raids.” And the recorder worked fine until a professor who had lived under a dictatorship in his homeland and was fearful of being taped forbade the device in class.

John was, as he puts it, “basically born dead. I was blue, and they had to revive me. I had my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck blocking oxygen to the brain.” Medical authorities later diagnosed John as having mild cerebral palsy, which they believe led to his learning disabilities. Once that assessment was finally made when he was fourteen, John was given the sort of help that learning-disabled students typically get: extra time on tests, a scribe, a digital recorder, and devices that convert text to speech. But even with all this human and technical help, John still had to rely heavily on his parents to proofread all his essays.

“I have my parents proofread my e-mail and Facebook messages before I send them since I don’t trust my proofreading skills,” John says. It means he has no privacy, but he sees no alternative. “In my first year in university, I was seeing a girl I really liked; we had mainly been communicating by telephone and sometimes by Facebook. When a close friend of hers died, I sent her a message on Facebook just asking how she was doing. I got an angry message back. I had not realized that in the last few e-mails, I had spelled her name wrong. I had sent her messages using voice recognition software. What I had been saying into the microphone was not what the program was interpreting. I had never felt so ashamed in my life. It took weeks before she spoke to me.” They are friends now, but John’s hopes for something beyond friendship have been dashed.

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