Strengths and Differences That Come With NLD
Today we’ll discuss what NLD is, the strengths and differences of one who has NLD, and also how it applies to me. I don’t like the word weakness so I’m using difference instead. I have an invisible learning disability called Nonverbal Learning Disability. I don’t like the word disability so I prefer to use the word challenge instead because it’s not that I am disabled I’m only different.
So what is NLD? It is a learning disability that originates in the right hemisphere of the brain. The connections and firing between the neurons in the brain don’t work the way are supposed to with individuals who have NLD. Because NLD is often misdiagnosed it is really hard to assess its impact.
What are Some of the Leading Researched Causes of it? Researchers have given the causes of traumas, genes, or problems with the right side of the brain. NLD consists of specific strengths and differences:
The differences include challenges with:
Visual-spatial
Coordination
Poor balance
Fine motor skills
Critical Thinking
Executive functioning
Essay writing
Reading comprehension
Activities that require multitasking
Handling new and novel situations
Peer relationships
Understanding idioms, sarcasm, and humor
Understanding charts, maps, and graphs
Math skills (understanding fractions, geometric shapes, and word problems)
Interpreting nonverbal communication (facial expressions, reading social cues, posture, tone of voice, etc.)
Visual memory is often weak
Big picture is something that is hard to grasp
Logic
Strengths include:
early speech and vocabulary development
remarkable rote memory skills
attention to detail
early development of reading skills and excellent spelling skills
eloquent verbal activity
strong auditory retention
Following is how The NVLD Project describes the challenges that people with NLD have, “people with Non-Verbal Learning Disability (i.e. NVLD) struggle with a range of conditions that include social and spatial disabilities. Often they are marginalized and isolated consequently, they can experience social barriers throughout their lives.”
I want to provide you some excerpts from the third edition of “NLD from the Inside Out” which is a book by Michael Brian Murphy, who is a NVLDer himself. And I have read this book and I think it is really good. If you have NLD, you might want to read it yourself with someone else, since the vocabulary is a little tricky to understand. At least that was true for me.
So Michael says “How can you recognize NLD? Does this sound like you?
You began to read on your own at a very early age,
You astonished your parents and elementary school teachers with your advanced vocabulary.
You didn’t learn to ride a bike until you were 8 or 9, and may have been clumsy in both gross and fine motor skills,
You‘ve had a parent or teacher refuse to acknowledge that anything is the matter other than your laziness, lack of trying, ineptitude, or bad attitude.
You’ve had a parent or sibling who “babied” you.
You’ve had teachers who threw up their hands in frustration, telling your parents, ‘I just can’t get through to him/her.’
You’ve been labeled as a ‘discipline problem’ in school—maybe not for serious stuff, but for the stuff that gets attention.
You’ve had teachers ask, ‘You are so bright—but why aren’t you working up to your potential?’
You’ve sat and stared at a writing assignment for English class, unable to get past writing the first sentence or two.” I can definitely relate to that one
“You may have no or only a couple of friends; other kids see you as nerdy or uncool.” yep that would be me.
“You get along much better with adults than with your peers.” that was me in college.
So, What is NLD? These are my definitions from the Podcast’s website livingwithnld.com: Nonverbal Learning Disability is a learning challenge that makes it more difficult for individuals to process nonverbal information. This includes understanding things like body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, social cues, hand signals, and other behaviors that make up the bulk of social interaction.
NLD or NVLD also has physical challenges such as impaired fine motor skills and lower visual-spatial awareness. People with NLD can also process information more slowly which makes it difficult to do things like mental math, retain information, and think abstractly. In spite of this, people with NLD can live rich lives with unique gifts like memorizing song lyrics, lines from movies, and names of friends. This book highlights these triumphs and gifts.
This book is for NLDers, by NLDers: The Living with an Invisible Learning Challenge podcast discusses the challenges and triumphs of those with NLD or NVLD by sharing their stories. The goal is to raise awareness and build community so fellow NLDers no longer feel as alone. By learning from and sharing resources the hope is that this book can help make NLDers lives a little bit easier than they did before they read this book.
I would like to share with you some of my gifts and differences. I can remember people’s names well. When I was young I often went to summer camps with 300 people that would attend each time. At the end of the event, we would take a group photo. And later when I received the photo I would look at it and be able to name every person in the photo no matter if they were new or not. This still fascinates me to this day, I don’t know how my brain does this. But I’m glad it does. And I even looked at one of these photos recently. I did this because I was curious if I could still do it because I haven’t see some of these people for a while. And I couldn’t name everybody but I did maybe half which is still pretty good.
It isn’t easy for me to do mental math though. Whenever I do it takes me a long time to get the right answer because I have a slower mental calculating speed than someone without NLD. It’s also really hard for me to remember mathematical formulas because of all the symbols that you have to memorize. What I usually do to help me memorize is write them down on an index card. I remember when I was in statistics I was having a hard time recalling the formulas, so I wrote them down. Since I can remember when to use them but not all the symbols in them. That helped because I remembering learning that the brain can remember about 2-7 symbols at a time. Believe it or not I think most mathematical formulas have more than, so that’s probably why it was hard for somebody with NLD recall and memorize them.
And another that is interesting about NLD is that even though it can be challenging to have it. As someone who has it, I can throught life being able to remember things really well. Because of my auditory memory which makes me have really good memory of my experiences whether they were positive or negative. And I like that because I’m able to remember things that have happened to me. And be able to learn from them and my mistakes. And be able to know what I want to change in the future. And be able to look back at them and retain my memories. And like I said earlier be able to pay attention to detail. And I would say it’s grainual detail. For instance when looking at a document and be able to realize the really small errors that somebody else might miss. Like if looking at a time an event used to occur, let’s say it occurred at 9 am. But now it occurs at 10 am so if you should be up at 8:45 am instead of 9:45 am you would be an hour early. We would want to change that because it is advertising the wrong time for the event. So that would be the little detail that someone like me because they have NLD would notice.
Or another thing I remember because I have NLD. I like hummingbirds. I can remember that hummingbirds can fly really long distances even though they are really small birds. And when they hover by moving their wings in a figure-eight pattern. It amazes me that I can remember this because I wrote a research paper about this when I was in middle school and now I’m 26.
In this chapter we discussed the challenges, differences, and strengths of those with NLD. We explored how one with NLD navigate some of these issues. And we learned that in spite of having those problems they work hard to do things that are difficult for them to do. People with NLD don’t get easily knocked down by the things they find challenging to do.
Links for articles:
https://bit.ly/436HIks
bit.ly/437qmVn
bit.ly/3IqXTBx
bit.ly/3ohFnod
