 I'm hemoplegic as well, which is a sort of milder form of cerebral palsy. It affects my leg primarily, but also when I was younger, it affected visual perception, body awareness, so it's almost like living in half a body, so language, visual perception, body perception. My parents in particular, my mother, realised there was something different around six months. Initially she thought I was deaf and blind, and it was nothing, again, it was nothing to do with my sensory organs, it was to do with the how my brain was taking in these modulations or not. I know, even with autism, there's quite a lot of... I think that's one of the common misdiagnosis is when we're younger, the fact that we're deaf because one of the typical behaviours of autistic children is that we don't always respond to our name or we might go the opposite. And if people address... if you're at school and people address generally the teacher comes across and says, okay kids, or okay group, or something like that, then we just don't pick up that we're included in that. Absolutely. Yeah, it's a sort of egocentric reaction. It needs to be more directed at you or at least aware that the conversation is also about you. You're quite right there. So it was around six months and then she said as I got older, it became more apparent and I was her first child, I was a secret baby actually, she kept me secret. She still doesn't understand why, but I was kind of this big reveal to my grandparents when they got so tall in the evening saying you've got a... And don't get me wrong, they were brilliant grandparents, so they were very loving. But moving forward, as I got older it became more obvious and there's a few reasons why my language was like it was and it goes into the visual perceptual aspect. So breaking down these visual perceptual aspects, there's two things going on. Firstly, there's a condition called somalagnosia, you can read about it. There's a syndrome called Balance syndrome, which I relate to apart from the optic ataxia, which is the movement of the eyes, I don't have that. But somalagnosia I do have and Donna had it as well, this is why I connected with her more than just an advocate, there was shared experience. And what it means is it's tunnel vision. So if I look at one thing in my visual field, everything else is neglected. So you can see how that affected social perception, you know, if I looked at a person, they're being pieces, all fragmented, distorted. I could maybe see a nose or a pair of eyes or hair, but if I would switch from the eyes to the nose, I would lose the eyes and focus on the hair. If I switch to the face, I could sort of focus on the face and the body, or I could look at the room but lose the person or look at the person and lose the room. So somalt simultaneous visual sensory information I couldn't get. The other thing I have was semantic agnosia or visual associative. So this is one of the reasons why my mum thought I was physically blind. It's because the way I was interacting with the environment was like a deafblind child. So I was licking, sniffing, tapping, rubbing my hands with my eyes and ears. So what I was doing was getting other sensory modulations to create a framework which I couldn't internalise visually. So I don't have a visual memory. The opposite of Temple, I know you spoke to her. That must have been very interesting. I'm the opposite. So I don't have that strong visual pictorial framework. And it's quite a common way of thinking. It equates for about between 60 and 80% of the human populace visual thinkers. And that's trailing behind with word thinkers, which is about 20%. So I'm more tactile kinesthetic. So my world was tempered by touch. My mum has nice memories of me. I was a happy boy. I mean, I don't want to paint out that I certainly wasn't. It's not true at all. I was happy, partly because of their open-mindedness. I mean, she has a very fond memory of me, you know, because I didn't wear shoes because I needed the texture of the ground. Yeah, being grounded, literally. And she can remember those moments out in the garden. So that's quite like it's definitely like a sense that we've lost nowadays. And obviously, it's a lot to do with safety. You know, you obviously don't want to tread on rocks or grass. No, not grass. Grass will be fine. Let's say it's an insect on it. Yeah, an insect, yeah. But we're actually like, it's actually quite important for us in terms of like sensing. Like we very much like blunt our input from like the ground and the earth and like a lot of people who are into like the whole kind of spirituality, like meditation thing. They often like to take their shoes and socks off and like, you know, just go barefoot whenever they can. And you know, for me, someone who has kind of difficulties with proprioception and vestibular, you know, balance and awareness of your body in space. I used to wear these things called skelly toes, which are like an off brand version of vibram fine five fingers, which are basically just barefoot shoes. So like minimal padding, just like pretty much like similar to crocs, I guess, in a way. But I used to used to do everything in them and they were really kind of it's it's such a different feeling feeling like the pressure of the ground on your feet. Whereas, you know, nowadays we have a lot of shoes that are very heavily padded. You know, they've got big heel lifts. They're like, you know, there's so much sponge between you and the ground, even even even more. So if you like like chunky shoes that it kind of makes you feel a little bit detached from your environment, I think. Yes, it does. You're right. And being with the earth, I suppose, and the way in which I interacted with the environment, the physical environment, people, places, etc. Means that the way in which I interacted was, I suppose, more sensory based because it was a trade off. If I can't see with meaning, or I wasn't getting clarification through my eyes or the way my brain was interpreting this visual information, then I'd find other ways to navigate and create compensatory ways of what is a tree, what is a shoe, what is a face? Is that mum? Is that father? Who is that? So I do all these things. And of course it did have an impact on language because if I haven't got the pictorial referencing, that's going to affect language association. Yeah, yeah, because I imagine like, because, you know, a lot of the ways that kind of humans learn and also, you know, particularly like youngsters, little kids, babies learn is by like association, like your parents say some combination of sounds together. And then they like hold up like an object and they say like, oh, this is a rattle, rattle, rattle, you know, and they're holding it up and you have that kind of, you see what it is and, you know, hopefully you mimic it and you say like, whenever you see a rattle, you go, oh, rattle, you know. Yeah, I didn't have that, not. No. And I would wonder what it is, unless it was being used or unless there was a way of object of reference moving it about and making it come alive. But when things are dead, when they're not moving, I would easily wonder what they were or confuse them with other things. So the other aspect is language. So I was about 80% meaning death when I was young. So when I was in preschool, all I all I saw was fragmented pieces of information. All I heard was phonics. So these fragmented things. I'm trying to give you an idea of how it felt. So these fragmented things were making sound phonics to one another. So I didn't create the association with the image and the sound to create word. What I was hearing was just pattern speak. What I was seeing was visual patterns. I was very high. Like it's a way to mean about this way. Like animal crossing. Yes, absolutely. Little animalese speak, but they don't think. Yeah, or like for older viewers, and I used to watch reruns of these peanuts, Charlie Brown, when they used to be in the school, he would do this trumpet sound. It would be the adult speaking. You've never heard the adult. I always liked that they'd done that because it was purely about the kids and all their... Charlie Brown was quite an endearing character. He's a bit of a sulker. But he would always get there in the end. He would always have his friends backing up. Sounds like me as a kid. Well, yeah, I think it kind of sounds like me too. Maybe that's why we relate to it.