Gwern Branwen

Having the dinosaur phase and the construction equipment phase and the submarine and tank phase.

I think it's actually more that people kind of grow out of being very into rabbit holes as a kid.

For me, it wasn't so much that I was all that exceptional and having obsessions as a kid.

It's more that they never really stopped.

You know, the tank phase would just be replaced by my Alcatraz phase, where I would go to the public library and check out everything that they had about Alcatraz.

That would be replaced by another phase where I was obsessed with ancient Japanese literature.

You know, I would check everything out at the library about Japanese literature before the haiku era.

And just kind of like the process of falling into these obsessions kind of kept going for me.

Oh, yeah.

Absolutely.

Hugely.

I went to a special ed school before kindergarten for hearing impaired and other handicapped kids.

During school, it was very rough because at the time we had to use pairs of hearing aids hooked up to the teacher.

Every class, I would have to go up to the teacher with a big brown box with these hearing aids so that she could use it.

I always felt very humiliated by that, how it marked me out as different from other kids not being able to hear.

The effects on socializing with other kids were just terrible because you're always a second behind, right, in conversation if you're trying to understand what the other person is saying.

The hearing aids back then were pretty terrible.

They've gotten a lot better, but back then they were just really bad.

You would always be behind and feeling kind of like the odd person out.

Even if you could have been like a wonderful conversationalist, you can't be if you're always just a second behind and kind of jumping into conversation late.