Understanding and interpreting information is different from person to person. Sometimes, when someone reads a post or a novel, or a story, different pieces of information are gathered from that. I remember the tests given in 1st grade onward to “test your reading level,” and those tests consisted of reading a paragraph in front of an adult, and then answering questions about that afterward.
I picked up a piece of information today and gathered that in some cases what one person sees in reading the paragraph -
(Just an example - from a book called Fahrenheit 451 - this was a book a family member liked as a kid, and he just fought a large fire, so fitting, even if he doesn’t remember (PTSD - details of life lost in conversation) I’m using this.
Line 1, Paragraph Start:
“It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his sym- bolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.“
There are multiple ways this can be read. Autism, a disorder, can cause a person to lack the ability to understand or comprehend certain things within that paragraph, like a metaphor, but without any actual “retardation” say they can read it - the metaphor “while the flapping pigeon-winged books,” could come across differently to them.
Someone with higher or normal comprehension can understand the emotion, images, and thought behind the paragraph. Altered understanding can cause a blank space, where the words can be read but they’re flat “feeling,” or no feeling is gathered from reading it. Reading feels in enjoyable, and the emotion behind the words falls behind. The other side is that the words themselves stand out more, and memory of the words and the way they’re written (or the creativity of them) might stand out and even create an image (in a different part of the mind) like a wire with sparks, still working.
Someone may remember that paragraph based on “WHAT IT SAYS,” (normal standards put “what it says,” as priority in testing as -normal- or high in comprehension.
That’s what the education system is set at, says and does. So what it says to one person might be that the response they’d give to a teacher is “the character in the book is standing next to flames or something burning, his thoughts are that he wishes something else was happening, he took some form of happiness from watching the fire burn,”
And a neurodivergent way of reading that and comprehension may come out as chunks. “It was a special pleasure to see things eaten,” might be separate from the whole of the paragraph, but the words forming together would stand out and may create an emotion where a reaction might not be perfectly relayed. Connotations of “fire,” exist but it’s difficult to pick up exactly what’s going on.