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It is one thing to hear and correctly identify the words. It is another to understand the meaning. I've been thinking about this because my son has Auditory Pr

• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• noir_lord 9y ago
  I'd never heard of APD. Interesting, all my life I've struggled to follow a conversation in a crowded environment, so much so that I actively avoid background noise with words in, I work with silicon ear plugs in or headphones and music with no lyrics. Looking at NHS symptoms they describe me as a child, didn't learn to read until I was 8. I nearly ended up in the remedial track but for a single awesome teacher who spotted that it wasn't that I was incapable but that I was struggling to understand in a noisy classroom, she gave up her lunch time for 6mths and taught me one on one by the end of that year I could read much better.
  • fillskills 9y ago
    Wow, I wish there was an easy way to pay back star teachers or mentors.
    • soperj 9y ago
      Is it really that they were a star? Or just that they cared.
      • Digit-Al 9y ago
        The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Sometimes just caring when no one else does can make someone a star... at least to the person they help.
      • recursive 9y ago
        What's the difference?
        • ImSkeptical 9y ago
          I don't mean to denigrate the wonderful contribution that the teacher in question made, as it's truly a selfless commitment with life changing impact. However - One distinction may be that the star teacher scales better. What if there were two students with this problem? Should the teacher stay late? Should teachers not take lunch? What if someone needs help in math, etc. A star teacher may be able to reproduce this effect for a large number of students. Perhaps using technology, recorded lectures, practice apps, etc. Perhaps organizing study groups for kids to teach and learn from each other. A caring teacher may sacrifice her lunch. A star teacher may not need to.
          • anonytrary 9y ago
            I am not clear on what definition you are using for "star teacher". But it sounds like "caring" is in the set of things that are required to be a star teacher.
          • akvadrako 9y ago
            The thing about teaching is that you can be star just by having one success story. If you are a vital part of the success of 2 people you've already clearly contributed more than your share. But one is enough; some of the most famous scientists only got where they were because they had a specific advisor. Neither the teacher nor student would ever have accomplished half as much working alone.
    • DonHopkins 9y ago
      The best way to pay them back is to succeed, but it's not easy!
      • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        >is to succeed // And then buy them a holiday?
    • aaronblohowiak 9y ago
      Write them a handwritten letter and make sure it gets to them.
      • okreallywtf 9y ago
        This. I did this with a math teacher (pre-calc and trig) I had at a community college years later when I was taking calculus etc in college and killing it (after having a less than stellar math education before and during highschool) and I think it was a huge deal to him. He really put his all into teaching that class and a lot of people probably went on to 4 yr college and didn't think much of it but after having professors that hardly spoke a word to their students and spent a straight hour just writing on a chalkboard I totally appreciated an invested, engaged math teacher.
  • spuz 9y ago
    I am sure you have thought about it but since you didn't mention it, are your symptoms those of Asperger's syndrome? Asperger's is often thought of as a sensory perception problem and Aspies tend not to be able to filter out sounds from background noise.
    • rjsw 9y ago
      Only one data point, but I find it much harder to filter out speech from background noise in my second language than I do when people are speaking my first language in a noisy environment. My guess would be that we have multiple ways of processing language that use different bits of our brains.
      • opportune 9y ago
        I also notice that even though I can't read lips, I often find it much easier to understand what people are saying when I can see them. I think part of the reason speech recognition isn't generally at a human-level is that they don't receive the same amount or kind of data that we do. An interesting experiment might be to include a speaker's native tongue when trying to recognize their speech in a different language. I bet that speech recognition would be a lot easier on e.g. native Spanish speakers speaking English if you know to ignore, for example, the sound "e" when spoken before "st" or "sp"
        • twothamendment 9y ago
          My son was so good at reading lips that we'd play a game where we only mouthed words and he'd tell us what we "said". In school we let the teacher know he needed to see her say the words on a spelling test. In those younger years that was the only way he could tell the different in some sounds. The big one I remember was "th" and teaching him to look for the tongue on the front teeth. As he is getting older he relies less on seeing lips. I'm hopeful at some point he'll outgrow most issues.
    • noir_lord 9y ago
      I took one of those online tests a while back that said if you get over 25 you need to see a specialist, I got 43. Not sure I have Asperger's though, I'm just a programmer who likes his own company.
  • autokad 9y ago
    wonder if i have that. i always try to fill in words with context or words that rhyme with the sound. - when people talk on tv, i need the volume at 95%, everything else like 4 bars. - i hate phones because only one ear gets the information, headphones makes talking on the phone so much more relaxing. - i dont understand how anyone understands anything at clubs, how is that even possible?
    • nothrabannosir 9y ago
      > i dont understand how anyone understands anything at clubs, how is that even possible Mostly, I don't. Earbuds help for some weird reason, as does pressing your ear shut. Looking at their mouth does 80% of the work. And most conversations I have in clubs are pretty mundane and uninspired. “What do you want to drink?” “This DJ is good. Do you also think this DJ is good?” “Do you agree with late justice Earl Warren that Baker v Carr was the most important supreme court decision of his era?” etc... Low entropy, easy to error correct.
  • anonytrary 9y ago
    Wow, you just made me cry. That's beautiful that your teacher was willing to do that for you. Thanks to all the awesome teachers out there.
• bagacrap 9y ago
  > Since then I've thought about voice recognition differently. The AI to understand the context or fill in the blanks is what will make or break it. Of course, and all humans rely on this as well. No one hears every word perfectly all the time --- it's impossible, because the source person doesn't pronounce every word perfectly all the time. Context clues are a huge part of speech recognition, as well as gestural typing recognition and other forms of machine interpretation of human input. While it's always been a component of NLP, you can clearly see it in action with the Android keyboard these days because after you type two words in a row, the first may be corrected after you enter the second one, based on context provided by the second one.
  • squeaky-clean 9y ago
    This is why I think Google recently saying 95% word accuracy is just as good as a human is wrong. If I ask if you after dinner if you "Want to get a pizza cake", you'll probably quickly realize I mean "piece of cake". Mistakes like that in 1/20 words is a lot. Google is the best of all the big players at figuring out this context (I once asked it what a Dead Left Shrimp was, apparently I was mishearing the name of basketball player Detlef Schrempf), but it will still search for "Pizza Cake" rather than correcting it.
    • deleted 9y ago
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    • MereInterest 9y ago
      Not only that, but even if you were to get 100% word accuracy, context is still important for choosing between multiple possible meanings. As an example, I was being directed by Google Maps to a new place, and I asked it "What is the ETA?" It responded, "From Wikipedia, the estimated time of arrival or ETA is the time when a ship, vehicle, aircraft, cargo or emergency service is expected to arrive at a certain place." It was a completely valid answer to the question, but not one that any human would give.
      • RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 9y ago
• p1esk 9y ago
  Interesting. I wonder if your son will be smarter as a result, kinda like when neural networks generalize better if trained with a dropout.
  • twothamendment 9y ago
    He seems a bit behind on social cues, but I am often shocked at things he picks up on. We just started playing the board game "Clue". The second game he was using tricks that I use but hadn't mentioned. His deductive reasoning was awesome. He won that game and I don't "let" my kids win.
• beamatronic 9y ago
  TIL I have APD
• d33 9y ago
  Sorry to hear that your son has APD! This makes me wonder though - do you know if this condition is language-specific? I assume you taught him English; would he have same problems with a very foreign language - say, Chinese?
  • twothamendment 9y ago
    I don't think it is language specific. He is in karate and I didn't see and difference. The background noise seems to be key. He was doing great in karate and a new teacher started blasting music. He went from doing great to being unable to know he should put his right for forward when told to. That was one of the clues that something wasn't normal.
• opportune 9y ago
  This reminds me a lot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia also known as "face blindness". People with the disorder can see perfectly fine, but have trouble recognizing people's faces, just as your son hears just fine, but has trouble recognizing people's speech. Similarly, I know someone who beat brain cancer, but after a certain point he became unable to properly taste/enjoy food. Interestingly, these disorders all seem to have pretty direct neurological causes: there is something causing a difference in the person's brain between where they sense the information and where they process it, whether it's genetic (i.e. affecting the layout and growth of the brain) or due to trauma such as a head injury. I'm curious as to whether your son is able to enjoy music, especially music with multiple different instruments playing simultaneously. I have a theory that the same process on a neurological level that makes food pleasurable is what makes smells smell good, music sound good, certain surface (e.g. soft fur) feel good, and certain sights (e.g. a mountain stream) look good. I mean that not from a neurotransmitter perspective, but in the actual neural processing. It seems these configurations are programmed into our brains genetically, just as our propensity toward recognizing faces/speech are, which is fascinating.
• marcoperaza 9y ago
  What you're asking for is equivalent to a general purpose intelligence, i.e. human intelligence, i.e. AI-complete. All (most?) of our ideas can be expressed in language, so in order to actually understand language, you have to actually understand any idea.
• thaumasiotes 9y ago
  > After playing him a bunch of audio with missing words, the lady who tested him was blown away by how smart he is - explaining that he is quickly filling in almost every missing word based by guessing from all thing possible things it could be, narrowing it down on context and getting it right. I guess that is a normal, all day long task for him. Sure it is; it's an essential part of speech recognition for all humans.