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Jan. 13th, 2017 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moonflower77Cognitive style:
Visual-logical. Azila's thinking operates in terms of vivid and precise images rather than abstract concepts or words, and is best suited for organizing empirical facts - cataloguing, creating sets of categories and subcategories, making outlines, drawing mental charts or diagrams.
Likes to collect and memorize various encyclopedic tidbits on the plant kingdom and biology in general (one could say her own memory is like one large encyclopedia).
Learning strategies:
Azila's predominant subtype of reasoning is inductive (making generalizations on the basis of facts). She will find out and memorize as many empirical facts as possible, then trace their general structure, organize them into different sets or subsets, draw connections between them, compare/contrast and draw conclusions.
She learns social rules and conventions by rote-learning numerous minor regulations. One of the first things she did after Initran took her home was to hand him a pen and sheet of paper and ask him to write down the main rules observed in his society so she could learn to follow them. This became the foundation of her knowledge about the society she was stranded in. Later, she added more and more of those rules to her mental catalogue, and, as time went by, began to merge some of them into more common guidelines suitable for most situations (or, alternatively, split others into specific rules suitable for separate situations only), and to arrange all of them into a more general system. Sometimes she draws tree diagrams of these social regulations, complete with arrows and highlighting, to see how they are connected and follow from each other. To this day, she carries a small notebook with her and will write down any new rule she happens to encounter. Her perfect ability to remember written or printed text makes it easy to recall any of them where required, though she isn't always able to properly apply them and to override her own hard-wired mode of communication (and she's completely clueless in the situations where we break or subvert these rules on purpose).
Azila does the same when she needs to determine which information must and mustn't be shared, and with whom. She divides facts into distinct spheres, each of which had clear boundaries and certain logical criteria to determine where and with whom it can be used (those that should be left between her and her significant other in conditions X1, except for situations of type Y1; those that can only be discussed with her superiors in conditions X2, except for situations of type Y2; those that can only be discussed with the other members of the team in conditions X3, except for situations of type Y3; etc.). She puts down anything she knows about what this culture considers to be acceptable or appropriate topics for conversation, and what would be dangerous to divulge to others and why, and compiles lists of topics, each being marked as disclosable or non-disclosable - and if disclosable, then to whom and under what circumstances. When she comes across a new topic, she does her best to establish where it should be on her list and whom she can discuss it with. Often, she will draw tree charts and diagrams to arrange the information in a more
To a person with a different cognitive style and a better social instinct, such methods could look, in a sense, dehumanizing and "mechanical", but to her they are very convenient and efficient.
On occasion, she still makes mistakes. While the ever-expanding checklist and set of diagrams are a great help and make her feel at least a little more at ease and more secure, there is no reliable way of telling what is or is not appropriate in the given situation with 100% certainty, as there are far too many variables to consider, and sometimes, in spite of all the careful calculation, Azila guesses wrong. And, of course, blunders can and do occur whenever she encounters an entirely new field or category of information whose social connotations are not yet clear.
The optimal way for her to learn a sequence of actions is through observation; an opportunity to repeat them would offer an additional benefit, but isn't necessary. If the information is presented too quickly for her to process, she simply commits it to memory as a series of images and recreates the actions at her own pace afterward. This is how she tries out new recipes after watching culinary programs, most of which are too fast-paced for her to follow.
Advantages:
- Eidetic memory
Able to memorize complex visual images with a high degree of precision, as her mind registers details most other people filter out as "minor" or "insignificant" due to selective attention. When she recalls scenes from the past, she sees them again in her mind for a few seconds, which often takes on the quality of a PTSD-induced flashback - she is forced to relive the event as if the clock has been turned back and she was there again. The feeling may be overwhelming enough to make her lose track of her surroundings for a minute or two.
May memorize complete pages from a book, including numbers, footnotes and entire passages of text. Can reproduce the information at random and without preparation through quoting the text word for word, or, say, drawing a sophisticated diagram of plant tissue in cross-section with the arrows pointing to the separate parts and the specialized terms for them.
With memories lost due to the neural damage, the fissure occurs between separate scenes, rather than within a scene; each scene is just as vivid, but there are fewer of them, so that she may not be capable of recalling an event in its entirety, but there is no sense of the memories having become foggier or more faded, as would be more common in similar cases of organic amnesia.
- Synaesthesia (the most common variety)
Azila perceives sounds, including music and spoken words, as vivid and dynamic visual images, which may flash, change shape and float in front of her. This either a residue of the perception she had as part of the Tha'i'n, which, from what little she can say, appears to have been based on a global pervasive synaesthesia among all the senses, or a sign that her synaptic pathways were restructured wrong when her nervous system was trying to repair the damage (or both).
From time to time, she may feel as if her senses were intermingled and "leaking" into each other, and this makes her world even more confusing and overwhelming; however, the synaesthesia has made it much easier for her to memorize words and to understand their meaning, and has helped develop a better understanding of poetic language and metaphor.
Interestingly, new, unfamiliar words produce nothing but an abstract pattern associated with their sound, whereas for familiar words it will be overlaid with a rapid cascade of exact, definite mages, each of which represents a particular meaning.
She also appears to have a rudimentary form of sound-to-motion synaesthesia where rhythmic sounds, such as the waves beating into the shore, are translated into a sensation of being swayed or rocked, especially at a high volume.
- Excellent rote-learning ability and recall of memorized facts
Includes quoting large sections of text verbatim.
Disadvantages:
- Horrible handwriting
So much she can't read it herself afterward. She is able to write in small, neat, bead-like letters if given plenty of time, but this causes pain in her wrist and fingers (her hand muscles are no longer meant to perform such fine tasks) and only lasts over the first three or four lines. Later, the letters deteriorate into an illegible tangle. The movement of her hand is frequently so forceful and fast that the pen tears the paper.
- Poor verbal skills:
Not all of her verbal ability has been affected equally. Her reproduction of text in a visual form (typed or handwritten) is perfect, almost phenomenal, and she has an extensive vocabulary. Her reading comprehension is unaffected.
Her writing, on the other hand, is poor. She has what amounts to a severe form of dysgraphia and makes a staggering number of orthographic and syntactic, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, grammatical mistakes. They are the main reason why most of her attempts to write by hand fail (the other being her handwriting itself). When she types without switching on the spell-checking function, one can at least tell what the message was supposed to be, even if half of the letters in each individual word are wrong and the words themselves are out of sequence. To counter this, Azila uses an autocomplete/autocorrect program that enables her to type almost without errors, except for the occasional odd lexical choices where the software suggests the wrong option.
Her listening comprehension is rather poor as well; the words may come across as unclear and blended together, and she has to ask one to repeat the sentence several times before she understands, which, along with her unnecessarily loud voice, has caused some to wonder whether she was hard of hearing. She isn't good at remembering oral text either.
But it's Azila's spontaneous speech that has suffered the most. At first, her speech was a chaotic tumble of words that made no sense, and was best described as "word salad". Since then, she has made remarkable progress and her speech, though still full of errors and less than cohesive, can largely be understood. However, if she is overwhelmed or subjected to extreme stress (for example, while overcome with a strong emotion, or on the brink of sensory overload), it again deteriorates into an incoherent stream of mostly unmodified and misused words.
In contrast, Azila is quite capable of reproducing phrases she had previously learned by rote without any problems, and uses them in casual situations as stock requests/responses. If one sees her communicating like this for the first time, one may assume that she isn't that different from most humans (neurotypical ones, at least), until one watches her for a longer period of time and realizes that she uses the same phrases over and over again, every day, and is lost whenever she is required to add anything new that had not been part of her pre-learned script; at that point, one may well think of her as almost robotic.
The following errors are the most common:
- using unmodified or insufficiently modified words (nouns in the nominative singular and verbs in the infinitive or imperative);
- omitting articles, particles, conjunctions and other short auxiliary parts of speech not essential for conveying the main meaning;
- dropping pronouns or confusing between them, inability to modify verbs for person;
- tendency to use the equivalent of the present simple tense regardless of the actual period of time being described;
- occasional neologisms, including those caused by the misuse of morphological mechanisms (e.g. attaching affixes to incompatible stems);
- using words with the wrong meaning in mind, so they don't collocate (which is especially noticeable in the case of semantically close synonyms with only a subtle difference in meaning);
- being unable to remember the correct word on time and using the second closest one with regard to either meaning or sound (this also shows in writing - she will start to write one word and unconsciously replaces it with another that sounds similar or has a related meaning);
- severe difficulty arranging the words into a sequence and constructing a complete sentence, which results in a jumbled word order and sentence fragments that have no beginning and no end;
- tendency to use passive or impersonal structures or shortened sentences with the subject dropped.
Azila is conscious of this and usually limits herself to short, simple, even primitive phrases that don't do justice to her intelligence. One- or two-word responses are common: Yes. No. Why? How? Here. Leave. Out. Go. Move. Nonsense. Never. As paradoxical as it might sound, that way she is much easier to understand, and to talk to, than otherwise. She frequently chooses a single long formal word, often of the sort one doesn't hear in everyday conversation, where someone else would have used a colloquial phrase: "Abhorrent" instead of "I swear, I hate this"; "Incorrect" instead of "No, you're wrong" or "This is wrong"; "Objections?" instead of "You don't happen to mind, do you?", etc. Once again, these words are the first to come to mind when she speaks, and it's much easier for her to use one of them than to construct a whole sentence.
In the best-case scenario, she uses a formal academic register with minimal syntax, where the sentences are clipped and limited, on average, to 1-3 words, and any auxiliary parts of speech are left out. Wherever possible, she retains the passive or impersonal structure, or else omits the subject. Imperative constructions are dominant. This enables her to be more exact and efficient with her speech and to inject maximum meaning into a minimal number of words.
In social situations, she relies on pre-learned stock phrases to establish minimal contact and get her through the day, as recalling and reproducing them is easier than constructing her own sentences within a short window of time (however simple they might be). Often appears too formal, rigid and artificial as a result, such as when she will use the full formal greeting of "peace be with you" in a friendly setting.
Uses pointing and other indicative gestures to fill out the gaps in her speech. When she describes an object, she may indicate its size or shape with her hands, as if tracing an invisible contour.
Her use of pronouns deserves to be mentioned separately, as it directly reflects her thinking and her perception of herself and others. She often confuses between pronouns and uses them as randomly as any other words, but when she isn't too stressed, one can notice a pattern. She refers to herself in the plural as "we" and rarely uses "I", though she appears to be able to grasp the general idea behind the word. Unfamiliar, indifferent, suspicious or hostile persons are addressed in the third person as "he"/"she" or "this one here" (person she is talking to at the moment, as opposed to "that one there" - some other person who isn't present). If she begins to use the third person to refer to herself, she is on the brink of a breakdown. She has little problem with "you", but tends to reserve it for people she knows thoroughly and is attached to. In addition, with them she may substitute "you" with "we" because she sees them as inseparable from herself. There were numerous moments where she would say, we did this or that, and Initran was bewildered and wondered whom she had in mind, before he had the time to realize whether it was something done by himself, by Azila or by both of them together.
In writing, she substitutes the word [self] in square brackets for "I" or "me", as a sanitized, less threatening version.
- Poor mathematical skills.
Borders on dyscalculia. Usually able to perform the simplest arithmetical operations in her mind, but it doesn't go further than that - algebra and anything more complex are beyond her. Has sudden mental blanks where she finds herself incapable of, say, counting the change at a store and has to give the cashier all the available money to select however much is needed, or have someone else help her. Likewise, she finds formal logic incomprehensible. She doesn't really understand philosophy, apart from practical ethics, unless it can be "translated" into images.
Other people are often surprised at how precise and well-organized her thinking is when it comes to empirical scientific facts, or everyday life for that matter, even though she is so inept at formal logic and mathematics.
- Disrupted sense of rhythm
To be more precise, she does have a keen sense of rhythm as such, but is unable to synchronize her own movements or voice with it; as a result, she cannot sing, dance or so much as tap her hand on the table to the music at regular intervals. The only regular movement she is able to make is the flexing of the fingers and claws, which is automatic and doesn't require any conscious control.
- Low sensory thresholds, problems with sensory processing and integration
Whatever was said about the peculiarities of sensory perception in Ibrahim Tanko's subspecies also applies to Azila, with one difference: with her, it's twice as bad. Levels of sensory stimulation that are tolerable to an ihr like Ibrahim are enough to produce acute pain and disorientation in her. In addition, she lacks the capacity to process the sensory signals properly and to perceive them simultaneously as a single whole. When extremely stressed or exhausted, she may see the details of an object, but not the object itself; if it's a table, for example, she will discern the rectangular shape, the four long, rectangular legs, the texture of the wood, the particular shade of brown, the splinters around the edges, but not recognize this complex of sensory signals as "a table". At times, when in this state, she may lose track of where she is or what she is supposed to do because her surroundings have dissolved into a sickening and incomprehensible jumble (at this point, she is likely to have a violent meltdown).
The problem is further compounded by the fact that, due to her T'elX wiring, she finds it difficult to identify any object or creature unless it moves, makes sounds or interacts with her.
Visual-logical. Azila's thinking operates in terms of vivid and precise images rather than abstract concepts or words, and is best suited for organizing empirical facts - cataloguing, creating sets of categories and subcategories, making outlines, drawing mental charts or diagrams.
Likes to collect and memorize various encyclopedic tidbits on the plant kingdom and biology in general (one could say her own memory is like one large encyclopedia).
Learning strategies:
Azila's predominant subtype of reasoning is inductive (making generalizations on the basis of facts). She will find out and memorize as many empirical facts as possible, then trace their general structure, organize them into different sets or subsets, draw connections between them, compare/contrast and draw conclusions.
She learns social rules and conventions by rote-learning numerous minor regulations. One of the first things she did after Initran took her home was to hand him a pen and sheet of paper and ask him to write down the main rules observed in his society so she could learn to follow them. This became the foundation of her knowledge about the society she was stranded in. Later, she added more and more of those rules to her mental catalogue, and, as time went by, began to merge some of them into more common guidelines suitable for most situations (or, alternatively, split others into specific rules suitable for separate situations only), and to arrange all of them into a more general system. Sometimes she draws tree diagrams of these social regulations, complete with arrows and highlighting, to see how they are connected and follow from each other. To this day, she carries a small notebook with her and will write down any new rule she happens to encounter. Her perfect ability to remember written or printed text makes it easy to recall any of them where required, though she isn't always able to properly apply them and to override her own hard-wired mode of communication (and she's completely clueless in the situations where we break or subvert these rules on purpose).
Azila does the same when she needs to determine which information must and mustn't be shared, and with whom. She divides facts into distinct spheres, each of which had clear boundaries and certain logical criteria to determine where and with whom it can be used (those that should be left between her and her significant other in conditions X1, except for situations of type Y1; those that can only be discussed with her superiors in conditions X2, except for situations of type Y2; those that can only be discussed with the other members of the team in conditions X3, except for situations of type Y3; etc.). She puts down anything she knows about what this culture considers to be acceptable or appropriate topics for conversation, and what would be dangerous to divulge to others and why, and compiles lists of topics, each being marked as disclosable or non-disclosable - and if disclosable, then to whom and under what circumstances. When she comes across a new topic, she does her best to establish where it should be on her list and whom she can discuss it with. Often, she will draw tree charts and diagrams to arrange the information in a more
To a person with a different cognitive style and a better social instinct, such methods could look, in a sense, dehumanizing and "mechanical", but to her they are very convenient and efficient.
On occasion, she still makes mistakes. While the ever-expanding checklist and set of diagrams are a great help and make her feel at least a little more at ease and more secure, there is no reliable way of telling what is or is not appropriate in the given situation with 100% certainty, as there are far too many variables to consider, and sometimes, in spite of all the careful calculation, Azila guesses wrong. And, of course, blunders can and do occur whenever she encounters an entirely new field or category of information whose social connotations are not yet clear.
The optimal way for her to learn a sequence of actions is through observation; an opportunity to repeat them would offer an additional benefit, but isn't necessary. If the information is presented too quickly for her to process, she simply commits it to memory as a series of images and recreates the actions at her own pace afterward. This is how she tries out new recipes after watching culinary programs, most of which are too fast-paced for her to follow.
Advantages:
- Eidetic memory
Able to memorize complex visual images with a high degree of precision, as her mind registers details most other people filter out as "minor" or "insignificant" due to selective attention. When she recalls scenes from the past, she sees them again in her mind for a few seconds, which often takes on the quality of a PTSD-induced flashback - she is forced to relive the event as if the clock has been turned back and she was there again. The feeling may be overwhelming enough to make her lose track of her surroundings for a minute or two.
May memorize complete pages from a book, including numbers, footnotes and entire passages of text. Can reproduce the information at random and without preparation through quoting the text word for word, or, say, drawing a sophisticated diagram of plant tissue in cross-section with the arrows pointing to the separate parts and the specialized terms for them.
With memories lost due to the neural damage, the fissure occurs between separate scenes, rather than within a scene; each scene is just as vivid, but there are fewer of them, so that she may not be capable of recalling an event in its entirety, but there is no sense of the memories having become foggier or more faded, as would be more common in similar cases of organic amnesia.
- Synaesthesia (the most common variety)
Azila perceives sounds, including music and spoken words, as vivid and dynamic visual images, which may flash, change shape and float in front of her. This either a residue of the perception she had as part of the Tha'i'n, which, from what little she can say, appears to have been based on a global pervasive synaesthesia among all the senses, or a sign that her synaptic pathways were restructured wrong when her nervous system was trying to repair the damage (or both).
From time to time, she may feel as if her senses were intermingled and "leaking" into each other, and this makes her world even more confusing and overwhelming; however, the synaesthesia has made it much easier for her to memorize words and to understand their meaning, and has helped develop a better understanding of poetic language and metaphor.
Interestingly, new, unfamiliar words produce nothing but an abstract pattern associated with their sound, whereas for familiar words it will be overlaid with a rapid cascade of exact, definite mages, each of which represents a particular meaning.
She also appears to have a rudimentary form of sound-to-motion synaesthesia where rhythmic sounds, such as the waves beating into the shore, are translated into a sensation of being swayed or rocked, especially at a high volume.
- Excellent rote-learning ability and recall of memorized facts
Includes quoting large sections of text verbatim.
Disadvantages:
- Horrible handwriting
So much she can't read it herself afterward. She is able to write in small, neat, bead-like letters if given plenty of time, but this causes pain in her wrist and fingers (her hand muscles are no longer meant to perform such fine tasks) and only lasts over the first three or four lines. Later, the letters deteriorate into an illegible tangle. The movement of her hand is frequently so forceful and fast that the pen tears the paper.
- Poor verbal skills:
Not all of her verbal ability has been affected equally. Her reproduction of text in a visual form (typed or handwritten) is perfect, almost phenomenal, and she has an extensive vocabulary. Her reading comprehension is unaffected.
Her writing, on the other hand, is poor. She has what amounts to a severe form of dysgraphia and makes a staggering number of orthographic and syntactic, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, grammatical mistakes. They are the main reason why most of her attempts to write by hand fail (the other being her handwriting itself). When she types without switching on the spell-checking function, one can at least tell what the message was supposed to be, even if half of the letters in each individual word are wrong and the words themselves are out of sequence. To counter this, Azila uses an autocomplete/autocorrect program that enables her to type almost without errors, except for the occasional odd lexical choices where the software suggests the wrong option.
Her listening comprehension is rather poor as well; the words may come across as unclear and blended together, and she has to ask one to repeat the sentence several times before she understands, which, along with her unnecessarily loud voice, has caused some to wonder whether she was hard of hearing. She isn't good at remembering oral text either.
But it's Azila's spontaneous speech that has suffered the most. At first, her speech was a chaotic tumble of words that made no sense, and was best described as "word salad". Since then, she has made remarkable progress and her speech, though still full of errors and less than cohesive, can largely be understood. However, if she is overwhelmed or subjected to extreme stress (for example, while overcome with a strong emotion, or on the brink of sensory overload), it again deteriorates into an incoherent stream of mostly unmodified and misused words.
In contrast, Azila is quite capable of reproducing phrases she had previously learned by rote without any problems, and uses them in casual situations as stock requests/responses. If one sees her communicating like this for the first time, one may assume that she isn't that different from most humans (neurotypical ones, at least), until one watches her for a longer period of time and realizes that she uses the same phrases over and over again, every day, and is lost whenever she is required to add anything new that had not been part of her pre-learned script; at that point, one may well think of her as almost robotic.
The following errors are the most common:
- using unmodified or insufficiently modified words (nouns in the nominative singular and verbs in the infinitive or imperative);
- omitting articles, particles, conjunctions and other short auxiliary parts of speech not essential for conveying the main meaning;
- dropping pronouns or confusing between them, inability to modify verbs for person;
- tendency to use the equivalent of the present simple tense regardless of the actual period of time being described;
- occasional neologisms, including those caused by the misuse of morphological mechanisms (e.g. attaching affixes to incompatible stems);
- using words with the wrong meaning in mind, so they don't collocate (which is especially noticeable in the case of semantically close synonyms with only a subtle difference in meaning);
- being unable to remember the correct word on time and using the second closest one with regard to either meaning or sound (this also shows in writing - she will start to write one word and unconsciously replaces it with another that sounds similar or has a related meaning);
- severe difficulty arranging the words into a sequence and constructing a complete sentence, which results in a jumbled word order and sentence fragments that have no beginning and no end;
- tendency to use passive or impersonal structures or shortened sentences with the subject dropped.
Azila is conscious of this and usually limits herself to short, simple, even primitive phrases that don't do justice to her intelligence. One- or two-word responses are common: Yes. No. Why? How? Here. Leave. Out. Go. Move. Nonsense. Never. As paradoxical as it might sound, that way she is much easier to understand, and to talk to, than otherwise. She frequently chooses a single long formal word, often of the sort one doesn't hear in everyday conversation, where someone else would have used a colloquial phrase: "Abhorrent" instead of "I swear, I hate this"; "Incorrect" instead of "No, you're wrong" or "This is wrong"; "Objections?" instead of "You don't happen to mind, do you?", etc. Once again, these words are the first to come to mind when she speaks, and it's much easier for her to use one of them than to construct a whole sentence.
In the best-case scenario, she uses a formal academic register with minimal syntax, where the sentences are clipped and limited, on average, to 1-3 words, and any auxiliary parts of speech are left out. Wherever possible, she retains the passive or impersonal structure, or else omits the subject. Imperative constructions are dominant. This enables her to be more exact and efficient with her speech and to inject maximum meaning into a minimal number of words.
In social situations, she relies on pre-learned stock phrases to establish minimal contact and get her through the day, as recalling and reproducing them is easier than constructing her own sentences within a short window of time (however simple they might be). Often appears too formal, rigid and artificial as a result, such as when she will use the full formal greeting of "peace be with you" in a friendly setting.
Uses pointing and other indicative gestures to fill out the gaps in her speech. When she describes an object, she may indicate its size or shape with her hands, as if tracing an invisible contour.
Her use of pronouns deserves to be mentioned separately, as it directly reflects her thinking and her perception of herself and others. She often confuses between pronouns and uses them as randomly as any other words, but when she isn't too stressed, one can notice a pattern. She refers to herself in the plural as "we" and rarely uses "I", though she appears to be able to grasp the general idea behind the word. Unfamiliar, indifferent, suspicious or hostile persons are addressed in the third person as "he"/"she" or "this one here" (person she is talking to at the moment, as opposed to "that one there" - some other person who isn't present). If she begins to use the third person to refer to herself, she is on the brink of a breakdown. She has little problem with "you", but tends to reserve it for people she knows thoroughly and is attached to. In addition, with them she may substitute "you" with "we" because she sees them as inseparable from herself. There were numerous moments where she would say, we did this or that, and Initran was bewildered and wondered whom she had in mind, before he had the time to realize whether it was something done by himself, by Azila or by both of them together.
In writing, she substitutes the word [self] in square brackets for "I" or "me", as a sanitized, less threatening version.
- Poor mathematical skills.
Borders on dyscalculia. Usually able to perform the simplest arithmetical operations in her mind, but it doesn't go further than that - algebra and anything more complex are beyond her. Has sudden mental blanks where she finds herself incapable of, say, counting the change at a store and has to give the cashier all the available money to select however much is needed, or have someone else help her. Likewise, she finds formal logic incomprehensible. She doesn't really understand philosophy, apart from practical ethics, unless it can be "translated" into images.
Other people are often surprised at how precise and well-organized her thinking is when it comes to empirical scientific facts, or everyday life for that matter, even though she is so inept at formal logic and mathematics.
- Disrupted sense of rhythm
To be more precise, she does have a keen sense of rhythm as such, but is unable to synchronize her own movements or voice with it; as a result, she cannot sing, dance or so much as tap her hand on the table to the music at regular intervals. The only regular movement she is able to make is the flexing of the fingers and claws, which is automatic and doesn't require any conscious control.
- Low sensory thresholds, problems with sensory processing and integration
Whatever was said about the peculiarities of sensory perception in Ibrahim Tanko's subspecies also applies to Azila, with one difference: with her, it's twice as bad. Levels of sensory stimulation that are tolerable to an ihr like Ibrahim are enough to produce acute pain and disorientation in her. In addition, she lacks the capacity to process the sensory signals properly and to perceive them simultaneously as a single whole. When extremely stressed or exhausted, she may see the details of an object, but not the object itself; if it's a table, for example, she will discern the rectangular shape, the four long, rectangular legs, the texture of the wood, the particular shade of brown, the splinters around the edges, but not recognize this complex of sensory signals as "a table". At times, when in this state, she may lose track of where she is or what she is supposed to do because her surroundings have dissolved into a sickening and incomprehensible jumble (at this point, she is likely to have a violent meltdown).
The problem is further compounded by the fact that, due to her T'elX wiring, she finds it difficult to identify any object or creature unless it moves, makes sounds or interacts with her.