I once read a story (true or not, who knows) about a bochur in yeshiva ketana whose time had come to go in for his farher at a yeshiva gedola. The trouble was, he kept behaving in ways that just didn't fit. It wasn't that he was mischievous. Quite the opposite, he was a good, innocent boy. But he was so innocent that he couldn't match how he acted and spoke to what was expected, or to what was going on around him.
The night before the farher, so he'd still have a chance of getting in, one of the rebbeim sat down with him and coached him in every last detail: what to say and what not to say, how to act and what to do in every situation imaginable. The bochur wrote it all down in a little notebook and went off to the farher.
When the yeshiva finally answered no, his rebbi called him in and asked to hear exactly what had happened at the farher. The bochur insisted it had gone wonderfully. But along the way he mentioned, quite innocently, that after he finished talking with the yeshiva's second mashgiach, he was asked to go see the Rosh Yeshiva, whose office was one floor down. And he got there by sliding down the banister…
When the stunned rebbi asked how he could do something so foolish, the bochur looked up at him, puzzled, and said: "I checked the notebook with all the rules, and there was nothing in it about not sliding down banisters…"
"You know, Yossi really worries me. I thought he'd grow out of it as he got older. He's so babyish and naive for his age. There are things I'd expect him to pick up on his own, and he just doesn't! You have to explain to him how to behave and how not to, and don't think it helps much. He doesn't connect the dots. How are you supposed to react when you see a 14-year-old rolling around on the floor with the little ones? When he doesn't get jokes? When he has no social tact at all?
"And the worst part is the things he says, anywhere, whether it fits or not. You know the people who ask out loud what everyone else is only thinking? I live with that up close.
"And the mortifying moments… don't ask! Yossi isn't stupid. He can tell people are laughing at him, and he's ashamed. It hurts me to see him like that, but I feel helpless. What do you do in a situation like this?"
Yossi's struggles are typical of children who have a difficulty with perception. Perception means activating the brain cells responsible for integration: understanding the whole. Picture looking into a room through a keyhole. You only see part of what's going on inside. If we don't realize we're seeing only part of the picture, our understanding will be off.
This ability to see the whole is central to how we understand anything, and it's part of every single thing we do. For example: when we know someone's face, we don't remember each feature exactly. We take in the overall picture of their face, and that's what we remember. That overall picture is made up of all the details, of course: the nose and mouth, the ears, the skin tone and so on. But we may not remember the details. What we remember is the whole.
Social life runs on 'unwritten' rules. What we call 'tact' isn't written in any rulebook. Yet these rules are so clear and obvious to us, because together they make up the whole picture of how we relate to the people around us. That's how it is with everything in life.
A child, or an adult, who lacks perception will misread life. They take it in piece by piece and miss the system as a whole, so the whole comes out distorted. A child like this will struggle socially, because he doesn't know how to behave. Naturally, he also won't know how to communicate well, and often he won't recognize his own place in relation to his parents or teachers, and will treat them as equals. Or, on the other hand, he may be very babyish.
In adults and children alike, we can spot weak perception in reactions that are out of proportion to what actually happened. In learning, it shows up as trouble with reading comprehension and a whole range of learning difficulties.
Here too, the practice and therapy are done through play, with games that require seeing the whole picture. Step by step, we wake up the brain cells responsible for perception, until the therapy is complete, b'ezras Hashem.
Names and identifying details have been changed.
Sarah Shugerman · Cognitive assessment and therapy through play
