Neural Rewiring

I feel lately like I am in the process of a complete re-establishment of my neural network. Everything that I have known and that I use instinct to easily do have been turned on their head. From being able to ask the grocer where to find the saran wrap, to recognizing which package is ketchup and which is pasta sauce, everything that I do requires an enormous amount of mental attention.

One of the biggest things that I am feeling “reprogrammed” on is the nature of human interaction. People here are very nice and have treated me very well, but they interact in a very different way than I am used to. For example, they tend to wait until the very last minute to inform you of what your upcoming schedule is or what to expect in given situations. On the weekend, I was taken by car along with another researcher to Jozankei for the symposium by my supervisor. We had a nice ride up, went for lunch and walked in the forest and chatted. The meeting was business as normal and at the end of it all I waited around with the other researcher for my supervisor to finish up things and then head out to the car. We were walking to his car (and of course most others had left on the shuttle by this time) and he turned to me and said, you will have to find another ride, my car is full. Right.... he had the entire weekend to touch base with me on this but waited until we were in the parking lot 2 minutes before leaving to tell me this. This is only one example, there have been many other events like this and I am finding them a little hard to get used to.

Another major reprogramming involves the language. It has been hard so far to be illiterate and unable to read even the grocery labels in the store. Many things are similar enough in packaging that I can fake my way around, but as a person who has lived a life very used to literacy I am starting to grow weary of peering through the package of dressing to try to see what colour it is and guess at the flavour. My work in that department is going ok I suppose and I am learning more and more characters every day.

The characters are complicated and there are two phonetic alphabets (the characters each represent a different sound that when used in sequence form words). The sounds are different than the way that our letters work but the system is more simple than english because one character has only one sound (not like english where one word spelled the same way can have two pronunciations and meanings – eg. read and read). So far I have only been working on learning the phonetic alphabets and there is roughly 100 characters involved in that system so I have enough to keep me very busy there. Kanji is an additional alphabet where the characters represent entire words or phrases. It is harder to learn and there are thousands of characters. I have learned a few of the more important ones so far (woman, exit, north) but won't get into learning those until I have the other alphabets down. The written language here uses all three alphabets at once so it makes reading pretty involved – at least for me for now.