Learning to Comprehend

Dear Tony,

Some interventions I found almost instinctively.

Another stereotypical young-child activity which helped me is to watch the same television show again and again and ask for the same bedtime story again and again. I started doing that without realizing it, and eventually was focusing on it. I can feel the changes in my own brain. It has to do with moving beyond understanding information told to me directly to picking up cues and subtle hints from the broader culture. I have always had difficulty with that. You need some sort of template in place to do that, and I was lacking one.

I worked with the first season of ER, something which I had rarely watched when it was originally aired. I focused on television strictly for practical reasons: It is much faster to watch the same forty-five minute television show again and again than it is to read the same two hundred page novel again and again. I watched one specific episode over and over again, and eventually was able to figure out what was happening and how people’s words and actions led to different outcomes. Some lines were intended for that specific episode's plot, some were intended for character development, some were not important at the time but hugely important in future episodes, and some were intended just for humor. While I fully understood that in theory I had tremendous difficulty putting each individual line in its specific category. After watching several episodes repeatedly I was slowly able to classify each utterance bit by bit.

It helped me learn to sort out what I do and do not need to pay attention to. I gradually learned to identify what was important and how one specific incident led to another. All of these were things I was not able to do before. If asked, I could explain the meaning of one specific scene, but I could not figure out how that scene connected to those before and after it. I gradually grew able to understand how different interactions worked together.

Although I did not know it at the time, ER was a really good choice because it focuses on multiple characters and on-going situations. Once I had the basic template from one episode in place I was able to follow the different story lines to other episodes. I needed to watch each episode at least twice — and some I watched more than ten times — but slowly I was able to build my capacity to follow different characters and story lines and see how they related to specific incidents.

One final note: I am not advertising ER. It benefited me because it was a longer show (a half-hour sitcom was too short to push me) and had multiple on-going story lines. I think another reason ER worked well for me was because I could remember some of the details people discussed when it was aired and some scenes which I could not understand back then. It was a great thrill to be able to put those memories in context at long last. I later tried to do the same thing with the first season of The West Wing, which meets all the above criteria but aired when I was out of the country. I didn't work. I thought I would enjoy the show, but I just could not become interested. At least for me, it seems that connecting my actions with ancient memories is a critical piece to making progress.