The particular case involved a girl, otherwise bright & well-behaved, who could become very disruptive at times. Turned out she could not read the blackboard, so the appropriate glasses fixed that one
Brain scanning shows us that subtle differences in the way the brain works - in either receiving messages from outside or in the way it processes them - can affect behaviour in all sorts of ways. Someone who has difficulty recognising faces can easily get a reputation for being stuck up or rude or just very absent mindedly living in a world of their own
But calling all of them, such as the inability to sing in tune or remember names 'conditions', implying that treatment or cure is needed would be a mistake. We need variation, not just to add to the gaiety of nations but to support division of labour & evolution by natural selection to adapt to changing environments
Having said that, the brain is plastic so practice & training can improve performance. Even so, just as I could never have run in Olympic time, no matter how much training I had, differences will remain
But then there are tricks & stratagems which help. One such I have been using recently after reading of research that people who are consistently running late, behind time - just getting to school or catching the train, not necessarily people with overloaded diaries - consistently overestimate the length of time available to them. In the sense that their internal clocks tell them that 5 minutes is much longer than it really is
I realised that I have the opposite problem, & so am always impatient at the time things - and other people! - take. If I were ever to be asked by a radio interviewer to sum up in 20 seconds I would say NO. Not to be curmudgeonly & unco-operative, but because I would think the 20 seconds used up by that monosyllable. So just recently, when I feel that cross look come on my face, I have started to count, slowly. Just the old remedy for keeping your temper, but with the added bonus that it is teaching me that things do not take nearly as much time as I think they do. You are never too old to learn
Gradually though I think more & more it is a mistake to think of things in terms of mind or matter. Just like nature in nurture, it should be mind in matter
And vice versa
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Compressing the Human Memory File
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