Recalled to life by Oliver Sacks, a review
I loved this book, especially the chapter 'Recalled to Life' because of its insights into how stroke victims could lose certain faculties but learn to compensate for them by developing tactics in other areas, to cope. It also disclosed how strokes could lead to an inability to either translate sensory data into verbal terms or interpret input, to make sense of the world around them. Some people suffered word blindness - others lost facial recognition as an ability. Some were able to talk in an intelligible manner but when asked analyse what they'd said or done, they couldn't make sense of their thoughts or actions. It affected verbal and visual memory as well as passive (receptive) or active (transmissive) states of mind - in other words input or output. It was like they never reached a perception point of realising what they were seeing or a recognition point because their memories of what they were seeing weren't there anymore or available to them.
Some of these difficulties involved abstract knowledge as opposed to objective reality (written or spoken language as 'representational' data): Could lack of a sense of direction be down to the same magnetic sense in migrating birds, being lost or damaged?
In The Beth Abraham Hospital for Incurables, residents / patients found ways round their disabilities through mimicry - that is using other sensory input to kick start memory in lost areas or to communicate in new ways (visual or verbal mostly as for instance, tracing the shape of letters in mid-air or forming words with their tongues; 'Only connect...' CS Forester): Children's books teach the alphabet by simulcra that resemble the abstract forms of letters e.g's a post for 1, a sail for 4, a catapult for Y etc.
Phil Beadle, the teaching trouble-shooter, says that there are three ways of sensory learning input - visual, sonic and tactile. This reflects the areas of difficulties for stroke victims as they try to relearn communication skills.
As a side issue, people who are deaf, appear to be dumb to the hearing because they associate mental sharpness with clipped speech. The deaf can only approximate word pronunciation which makes them 'sound' like they have learning difficulties. However given sign language, the deaf can appear as swift and erudite as any voiced person can. This is because it builds upon a sense they are strong in (vision) as opposed to one they are not (sound). This is the opposite of the blind of course.
You cannot expect a man in a wheelchair to run upstairs or play football because this is his area of weakness, not strength and trying to force him to fit in under such circumstances, shows weakness on the part of the enforcer, in the brain department. This is why I think positive discrimination is foolish and humiliating to the person with the disability – depending upon their attitude to the situation of course. Ben Parkinson for instance, the Afghanistan combat veteran, has struggled and is struggling now against brain damage and the loss of both legs and it is people like him that push medical science and technology along but on a voluntary level.