#auditoryprocessingdisorder

// subtitles 888

Recreated the Ceefax homepage in Illustrator using Teletext typefaces and pixel precision.

This was how I first accessed subtitles—Page 888—launched in 1974, two years before I was born. But I didn’t start using them until age 4, after my deafness was diagnosed.

Sometimes I wonder: if I’d had captions sooner, would the wiring of my brain be different? Would the delay in auditory processing still be there?

This screen isn’t nostalgia.

It’s an interface.

You either:

A) Hear all the sounds of what they’re saying but not the actual words and just accept your fate

B) Guess what they’re saying and hope you get it right

C) Ask them to repeat themselves multiple times throughout the conversation and hope they don’t get annoyed

D) Hear a completely different sound entirely such as a dog barking two streets away

*conversation ends*

No one ever mentioned brain lateralisation when I was approved for a cochlear implant.

Not the surgeon. Not the audiologist. Not the literature.

I chose the left side because it seemed weaker. But in hindsight, I may have digitised the wrong half of myself.

Here’s what’s often left unsaid:

The left ear feeds into the right hemisphere (intuition, pattern, analogue).

The right ear feeds into the left hemisphere (language, logic, decoding).

I was born deaf, developed APD, and relied on visual comprehension from the start.

My brain wired itself around sound—using sight, captions, and pattern recognition.

So what happens when you inject digital, high-frequency, artificial sound into a hemisphere never built to process speech?

More input. Less understanding. More noise. Louder tinnitus. Sensory overload. Misophonia.

Signal is lost in translation—not because the implant is faulty, but because the wiring was never accounted for.

Where are the studies on this?

Why isn’t laterality—especially for older CI patients with APD or visual-first language mapping—ever mentioned?

Why are we still treating deafness as a deficit of ears, instead of a reconfiguration of the whole sensory system?

It might be time to start asking these questions out loud.

I’m considering drafting a speculative white paper. Working title:

Crossed Wires: Rethinking Laterality in Cochlear Implantation for APD & Prelingual Deafness

🧮⚡️COUNTER TIMER 745 // DELAYED RESPONSE

New addition to the Process Zine glitch lab: The OMB Electronics Counter Timer 745, repurposed as a visual signal device — RCA output via BNC — flashing numerals like it’s trying to count what can’t be measured: misfires, mistranslations, missed beats.

Originally built to capture frequency, period, and pulse width — now it captures something else: delay as a metaphor for how we hear (or don’t). Like auditory processing disorder (APD): the sound arrives, but the meaning lags behind. It stalls, skips, stutters — sometimes never lands.

The display loops through numbers — not as data, but as captioned silence. An attempt to visualise what’s normally inaudible: time, drift, latency, lag. Interpretation in slow motion. Glitch as comprehension.

It began as a warehouse stock trolley, repurposed to house Process Zine’s analogue glitch gear. It became an AV sculpture. And now — somehow — it’s evolving into something semi-sentient: a system that mirrors auditory processing disorder (APD), glitch culture, and fractured memory.

It listens, misinterprets, responds. A kind of self, built from signal and delay.

⟶ 01: SYSTEM BUILD PLAN (JULY 2025) 📁 The Interpreter: System Architecture & Build Plan ↳ [Read / Download] A technical map of connections, devices, and cognitive routes. AV flows, glitch streams, CRT reflections. Speech becomes signal. Signal becomes memory. Printed output becomes evidence of miscommunication.

📎 processzine.org update 🧰 lab tool no. 450

[series: signal // noise] captioned machines / captioned selves

SCOTCH EA-450 — vintage embossing labelmaker chrome-faced, analogue, brutal and direct. no backspace, no undo, no kerning. it labels like we listen: one letter at a time, no way to take it back.

✳️ I’ve started using this for tagging every device in the glitch lab. But it’s also something more: a tactile metaphor for APD (auditory processing disorder). You hear something, just slightly wrong. You label it, too fast. You commit. And only later do you realise:

that wasn’t what they said.

🧠 For those of us with APD, captioning is comprehension. Labels are lifelines. We read what we can’t quite hear, decode meaning from fragments, and build memory from embossed ghosts.

📷 [photo set: EA-450 macro shots, label tape close-ups, “processzine.org” demo label]

🔘 The machine doesn’t guess. It doesn’t autocorrect. It gives you what you type. Not what you meant. Not what you missed. And somehow, that feels honest.

🗃️ Thinking of labelling not just gear but cables, ghost loops, broken formats, forgotten ports and maybe even moments.