The 96th Percentile Anomaly: A Parent’s Guide to Deafness

Summary

I spent the first quarter of my life fighting against a system that mistook my deafness for being dim-witted. I was a child who “read words that were not there”, a student accused of “not trying hard enough” in French and music classes that he couldn’t hear, and a college student who fled a stage overwhelmed in terror. Today, I build and lead product design teams in giant global organisations.

This article maps how an induced high-logic / low-audio profile became my greatest professional asset. It reveals how this specific rewiring is actually common for children with this history, making this story a relevant roadmap for any parent navigating the same path. It concludes with a Survival Guide for parents to help spot the signs early. Above all, it offers a window into the invisible reality of growing up with undiagnosed deafness. It exposes the hidden sensory, social, and cognitive taxes that persist for the individual long after the medical fix.

Author’s Note

This article is not a criticism of the schools I attended or the teachers who taught me, nor my childhood doctors or my parents. They were operating in the 1980s and 90s. This was a pre-digital era without the awareness or resources we have today. They did their best with the tools they had.

It is also a huge thank you note to my wonderful mother, Janet, to whom I owe my career. Without her continued persistence during my childhood, this story would read very differently.

Why I Wrote This

My goal in sharing this account is to help parents spot the signs of deafness earlier, empathise with their child’s reality, and manage their recovery effectively. I want to provide a window into the future challenges they might face and, above all, offer hope that their child’s life can be normal, full, and successful.

Two thirds of school-age hearing issues are missed
at birth.

This is not intended as just a story about my challenges during the 1980s. In researching this story, I was startled to learn that today the number of children diagnosed with hearing issues actually more than triples between birth and school age. The majority of school-age hearing issues are either missed at birth or develop silently in the years that follow.

I also hope this article serves to create more awareness and empathy for persons who are (or have experienced being) deaf, within their families, friend groups, and workplaces. It highlights specific realities often invisible to others, including long-term overstimulation, the struggle of loud environments, situational anxiety, the necessity of non-textbook learning approaches, and the complex emotions surrounding receiving help.

The Evidence Base

To ensure accuracy, I conducted a forensic audit of my entire educational history to write this piece. It took the best part of a year, and reviewing these records was often difficult. This article is cross-referenced against:

• 14 years of continuous school and college reports (1985 to 1999).
• Over 150 pages of handwritten teacher observations.
• Psychological assessments from 1989 and 1993.
• Feedback from over 70 unique teachers and lecturers.

The Catalyst

In the late summer of 2024, I took a calculated risk. I was sitting with my line manager, a Director at Google who I highly respect, for a feedback session on my executive communication. It was the kind of rigorous review where you are effectively dragged over the coals in the interests of growth. His critique was hard, but it was fair.

Yet, my internal reaction was visceral. It was an intense, disproportionate wave of defensiveness. I felt a sudden, primal spike of adrenaline. I was bracing for impact against what was, in reality, just helpful feedback.

I knew I had to be candid, but sharing the truth felt dangerous. In the corporate world, vulnerability can be weaponised. I was handing over information that could damage my standing just as easily as help it. But deciding that true understanding was worth the risk, I took a breath:

“Until I was 9, I was deaf. I spent the first quarter of my life fighting like mad to catch up to everyone around me. So when I receive criticism on my communication, it hits hard. I spent years being criticised by teachers who didn’t appreciate my circumstances. It is a super sensitive topic for me.”

For most of my life, I had hidden this history from everyone other than my partners and family. But having taken that risk, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. Something shifted. I hoped that by opening up, those who know me might understand me better.

Furthermore, when a friend’s child began struggling with hearing difficulties, I felt a duty to share the complex reality of this experience, in the hope that it might help them give their child the best chance of effective support and success.

1. The Lost Years: The Bell Test Failure

In the UK school system of the 1980s, a child’s journey began in playgroup (ages 2–4). It was here that the first red flags appeared. My playgroup leader pulled my mother aside and told her: “I think you ought to have his hearing checked out”.

I was 4 years old. My mother, trusting this advice, took me to Axbridge Surgery (Somerset, England).

The doctor performed a standard bell test (ringing a bell out of my sightline to see if I reacted). I turned my head. I reacted well. The doctor told my mother I was fine. She was relieved.

That simplistic test sealed my fate for the next four years. Because a doctor had rung a bell and I had turned my head, the medical system assumed I could hear. I drifted through the school system, often misinterpreted as slow.

I recently found my school report from June 1985 (age 5). The teacher’s comments are heartbreakingly clear in hindsight. She wrote:

“Philip’s imagination often takes over from the printed word, and he reads words that are not there.”

At the time, this was seen as a lack of focus. In reality, it was a survival strategy. I couldn’t hear the phonetic sounds required to read, so I used my logic to look at the pictures and guess the story . The report also noted my concentration was “sometimes not all it could be”. However, in hindsight, I was likely suffering greatly from auditory fatigue.

The Sliding Doors Moment

My life changed due to a random stroke of luck when I was 7½ years old. My regular teacher fell sick, and a substitute teacher took over. By chance, the new teacher had experience working with deaf children.

While others had watched me struggle for five years and seen a slow child, she watched me for three days and saw a deaf child.

While others had watched me struggle for five years and seen a slow child, she watched me for three days and saw a deaf child. She took the trouble to arrange a discussion with my parents and insisted I get retested.

My parents, armed with this second opinion to counter the original bell test, pushed for a re-evaluation.

By age 8, I had been given an audiogram (a far more advanced hearing test) which confirmed significant hearing abnormalities. My school records confirm this timeline, noting a “history of hearing difficulties which were only recognised when he was 7 years”.

Stages of Auditory Development

This late diagnosis was very damaging to my development. To understand exactly why, I dug into how a child’s brain typically learns to process sound. It is effectively a sequence of critical software updates.

1. The Setup (0-12 Months): The brain learns to tune in. It filters out irrelevant noise and identifies the specific phonetic building blocks of its native language.
2. The Data Collection (1-3 Years): The sponge phase. The brain acquires vocabulary rapidly through constant, passive background listening.
3. The Noise Filter (4-7 Years): A critical window where the brain develops sensory gating, the ability to suppress background noise to focus on a single voice.
4. The Refinement (7-12 Years): The brain masters high-level processing, understanding complex grammar, tone, and emotional nuance.

In my case, I missed the first three windows entirely. Consequently, my brain simply moved on to other priorities, silently wiring itself around the silence I was experiencing. This created a massive, invisible divergence in my development… one that was about to be starkly revealed.

2. The Anomaly Revealed: High CPU, Broken Input

The Age 9 Assessment

At the age of nine, I was referred for a comprehensive educational psychology assessment. This was commissioned following a telephone call from my mother, who was voicing specific concerns about my “difficulties in retaining information” and “concentration problems”. While many others had accepted I was simply dim-witted, my mother had kept fighting my corner believing something was wrong.

It was a rigorous evaluation conducted by a senior educational psychologist, involving interviews and a comprehensive range of cognitive testing using the British Ability Scales.

What Was Measured

The assessment looked at two distinct types of brain function:

• Reasoning: This measures raw intelligence. It looks at verbal reasoning (the ability to solve problems using logic and language) and matrices (the ability to see patterns and visual logic without words).
• Memory: This measures auditory memory (specifically recall of digits), which tests the brain’s ability to hear a string of information and hold it in the short-term memory long enough to use it.

In most children, these two dimensions track together. If a child scores in the 50th percentile for reasoning, they typically score near the 50th percentile for memory. This is what psychologists call a flat profile. It indicates that the brain is developing evenly across all fronts.

The Anomaly

My results were not flat and revealed an improbable spike. The data provided evidence of a massive neurological split:

• My auditory memory was broken: My ability to recall digits or sounds I had just heard was in the 38th percentile (lowest 38% of national age group).
• My reasoning was exceptional: My scores for verbal reasoning were in the 96th percentile (top 4% of national age group) and matrices (non-verbal) were in the 93rd percentile (top 7% of national age group).

The Gap

Statistically, this asymmetry is rare and is an anomaly. I possessed the logic engine of a gifted child paired with the auditory processing RAM of a child significantly behind their peers. This massive discrepancy explained why my behaviour was so confusing to the adults around me. I wasn’t just performing inconsistent, rather I was extremely specialised in certain activities.

Note to parents: While this felt like an unexplainable contradiction at the time, I have recently learned during researching this story that this asymmetric profile is actually a predictable trait of the deaf brain adapting, a phenomenon I explore later in Section 5.

The Parent’s Translation Guide: What This Actually Means

To understand why this profile is so confusing for teachers and parents, often appearing as a frustrating mix of high capability and low effort, you have to look at how this split manifests in daily life.

I had a high-performance processor, but the audio input cable was loose.

Verbal Reasoning

• What it is: The ability to frame and solve complex problems using logic and language.
• The Score: 96th percentile (top 4% of national age group)
• The Teacher View: “He is clearly bright and capable.”
• The Reality: I could solve complex problems, connect disparate ideas, and see systems instantly. I knew the answer before the teacher finished the sentence.

Non-Verbal Matrices

• What it is: The ability to see patterns, shapes, and logic visually without needing words.
• The Score: 93rd percentile (top 7% of national age group)
• The Teacher View: “He is creative and good with patterns.”
• The Reality: I didn’t need words to understand how things worked. I could look at a machine, a drawing, or a chaotic system and immediately see the logic holding it together.

Auditory Memory

• What it is: The RAM of the brain, the ability to hear information and hold it in your short-term memory long enough to use it.
• The Score: 38th percentile (Bottom 38% of national age group)
• The Teacher View: “He isn’t listening. He is lazy.”
• The Reality: If you told me three numbers, I forgot the first one by the time you said the third. I wasn’t ignoring you. The data stream corrupted before it hit my hard drive.

Think of it like a computer. I had a high-performance processor, but the audio input cable was loose. Because I couldn’t learn by listening (i.e. the textbook way), I forced my brain to learn by deduction. I reverse-engineered it.

3. The Trauma of The Cure

A few months after the assessment, I was in Musgrove Hospital (Taunton, England) having grommets inserted into both ears. The fluid was drained, and for the first time in nearly a decade, the world had sound.

My speech improved rapidly because, for the first time, I could actually hear the words I was trying to say. Everyone assumed this would be a fairytale ending.

Instead, it really marked just the beginning of a lifelong journey of recovery and coping.

Memory Formation

Ironically, what stands out most is the sudden ability to recall. While my memories prior to this moment are a blur, this scene is burned into my mind in high definition. Over thirty years later, I can recall every detail of the hospital ward I woke up in. Despite suffering from the symptoms of waking from the general anaesthesia, the room spinning violently before my eyes, I can recall exactly where people were standing, what I was given to eat, and even what was playing on the TV on the wall.

It was Dr. Who and the Daleks, the movie starring Peter Cushing and Roy Castle. It is forever etched into my long-term memory and remains one of the most vivid and full memories I have. It could easily have happened yesterday.

This was not a temporary spike. It became a permanent trait. Since that day, my memory for conversations, meetings, and specific details has remained hyper-vivid. In professional terms, this is an asset; I can recall the exact phrasing of a stakeholder’s objection weeks later. In personal terms, it can be a curse, as painful moments are replayed with the same high-definition clarity.

In neuroscience, this is likely a mix of cognitive load theory and compensatory plasticity. For years, my brain had been using all its bandwidth just to decode signal. Simultaneously, it had overclocked my visual memory to compensate for the lack of sound. When the audio was finally restored, the bandwidth opened up, but the supercharged visual memory remained.

Note to parents: If your child has this operation, do them a favour. Ensure there is something awesome playing on that TV and wear your Sunday best. Since they are likely to remember this moment in 4K resolution forever, make it count.

Sensory Sensitivity

After the operation, when I was around 10 years old, while attending middle school, I was asked to read aloud from a book in class. I’d done this time and time again in the past without a single second thought. But this time, something would happen that would impact the rest of my life. I went to read aloud in front of the entire class room, and I could suddenly hear myself. I began shaking, completely overwhelmed. I begged the teacher to move on to the next person. They didn’t understand and insisted I try again. I was not shy. I was suffering from sensory overload. I was having a full blown panic attack in front of all my class mates and experiencing it for the first time. It was extremely traumatic.

In neuroscience, this is the auditory feedback loop. My brain had never developed sensory gating (the ability to filter background noise). Suddenly, my own voice boomed in my head. I froze. I was in fight or flight.

Volume Regulation

Another immediate side effect was the inability to calibrate my own volume. Because my hearing had been restored abruptly, my brain had never learned to filter the volume of my own voice. I had probably been speaking very loudly prior to the operation because I could hear so little. Now, I suddenly sounded thunderously loud to myself. To compensate, I developed a subconscious habit of low talking, adopting a soft, low register to ensure I wasn’t shouting. I did not realize that this voice simply does not travel and gets lost instantly in ambient noise.

In audiology, this is a calibration error within the auditory feedback loop. My brain was accustomed to operating on high gain to hear anything at all. When the input signal was suddenly repaired, that high gain made my own voice sound deafening inside my skull. My natural reaction was to turn down the output volume. Even today, I have to consciously project my voice to be heard.

Operational Consequences

Prior to the operation, I was a strong swimmer. It was one of the few places I felt confident. However, shortly after the surgery, I discovered a painful reality: water entering my ears now caused intense, piercing earache. My swimming days were effectively over.

Medically, this is the trade off of grommets. To work, the tube must create a physical hole in the tympanic membrane (eardrum) to allow air in and fluid out. Unfortunately, this creates an open doorway. When you submerge your head, non-sterile pool water floods directly into the middle ear cavity. This can cause immediate bacterial infection (acute otitis media) and intense pressure pain. In some cases, cold water entering the middle ear can even trigger the caloric effect, stimulating the vestibular system and causing sudden dizziness or vertigo.

At the time, I was livid. I insisted that had I known the cost, I would never have agreed to the operation. In hindsight, my parents likely did tell me, but I simply hadn’t understood. Thankfully, the operation went ahead regardless of my protest. However, I never really returned to the water. The association between swimming and pain was now permanent.

4. The Effort Myth: Decoding the Negative Feedback

The years immediately following my operation should have been a victory lap. But my school reports reveal that once I was medically fixed, the teachers forgot I was still neurologically recovering. They misinterpreted my coping mechanisms as behavioural flaws.

Note to parents: Look closely at your child’s school reports for these specific phrases. Here is what they actually meant in my case.

The Defeatist Label

Note from French class report:

“Unfortunately Philip has taken a rather defeatist attitude… he does not believe he can do it!”

The Reality: It wasn’t that I had given up but rather I was experiencing being linguistically locked out. I had missed the critical developmental window for phonology. Foreign sounds were just noise to me. Telling me to “make more of an effort” was like telling a colour-blind child to try harder to see red.

The Unenthusiastic Label

Notes from music class report:

“I have been slightly concerned with Philip’s rather relaxed and unenthusiastic approach…”

“…come on Philip, I know you can make more of an effort!”

The Reality: Pitch and tone discrimination were physically exhausting for me. I was not unenthusiastic. I was suffering from sensory fatigue. I withdrew to protect my brain from the noise.

The Bad Advice

The proposed solution was often just as tone-deaf. In 1989, a psychologist suggested:

“The most important thing… will be to ensure that the learning is exciting, relevant and fun.”

The Reality: Fun wasn’t the issue. My input cable was broken.

The Arrogant Label

Notes from design and technology class report:

“Philip appears to interpret help and advice as interference.”

“Offers of help… were either refused by him or resulted in his feeling uncomfortable.”

The Reality: They were right. I did view their help as interference. When I was building or designing, I was in my flow state using my visual strengths. A teacher giving verbal instructions broke that flow and added cognitive load. I wasn’t being difficult. I was protecting a rare moment of clarity and flow.

The Careless Label

Notes from school year report:

“He tends to ‘rush’ work sometimes… He can sometimes make careless mistakes.”

The Reality: My auditory memory was in the 38th percentile. I rushed because I couldn’t hold the instructions in my head long enough to do it slowly. Speed was a coping mechanism to get the information onto paper before it evaporated.

The Software Lag

Note from 1989 educational psychology assessment:

“Philip no longer has any significant communication problems.”

The Reality: They were wrong. The system wanted to believe the problem was solved, but the proof of the lag appeared in my 1993 (SEN) assessment. Four years after my hearing was restored, my reading comprehension score was stuck at 9.0 years, exactly the age I was when I had my operation. The medical fix had worked, but the developmental tax was still being paid.

5. The Signals They Missed: Decoding the Strengths

While the school system was busy critiquing my effort in subjects I couldn’t hear, they nearly missed the potential emerging in the subjects I could see. Just as we must decode the negative feedback, we must also learn to spot the Signals of Strength.

These were the data points that hinted at the High Logic / High Visual profile hiding behind the deafness.

The Flair Signal

Notes from design and technology class year 9 report:

“…extremely interested… [has] flair.”

The Forensic View: In hindsight, “flair” was likely a descriptor for intuitive system thinking. Unable to process linear, verbal instructions easily, I visualized the finished object and reverse-engineered it. I was simulating the outcome visually to bypass the written steps.

The Marketable Signal

Notes from design and technology class year 10 report:

“Two of his ideas were extremely good, possibly marketable!!”

The Forensic View: This comment stands out for the sharp contrast it offers. At the exact same time other teachers were labelling me as “slow” or “defeatist” in text-heavy subjects, this teacher identified output that was arguably adult-level. It validated the 1989 psychological assessment: once the barrier of language was removed, the underlying reasoning engine proved to be operating at a high level.

The Data Don’t Lie

My final GCSE results (1996) provide the statistical proof of this split.

The Auditory Deficit (Text-Heavy Processing):

• The Result: Grade D in English Literature, English Language, Geography.
• The Driver: These subjects relied heavily on auditory retention, phonetic decoding, and long-form text processing.

The Systemic Strength (Logic & Visuals):

• The Result: Grade B in Information Systems, Mathematics, Science (Double Award).
• The Driver: These subjects relied on logic, visual patterns, and predictable systems, which were areas where my processing speed was unimpeded.

Scientific Validation: The Visual Takeover

This distinct split between auditory struggle and visual dominance is a recognized neurological phenomenon known as cross-modal plasticity.

In layman’s terms, the brain hates wasted space. When the audio highway is blocked during childhood, the brain reroutes that energy to the visual highway instead.

My brain had sacrificed its ability to process lists to supercharge its ability to process images.

Studies on deaf and hard-of-hearing children consistently show a specific trade-off:

• The Struggle: The brain finds it hard to process things that happen in a strict order (Sequences), like remembering a spoken sentence or a list of numbers.
• The Strength: The brain becomes excellent at seeing the whole picture at once (the big picture). This includes spotting patterns, understanding complex diagrams, and noticing visual details that others miss.

My GCSE results were a textbook example of this trade-off. My brain had sacrificed its ability to process lists to supercharge its ability to process images.

Longitudinal Proof

Recently, I questioned if the cognitive results from 1989 were an anomaly or a true reflection of my potential. To test this, I sat for a modern, standardized IQ assessment.

While IQ tests are imperfect measures of human value, the result of 132 offered a quiet, personal vindication. This score places me in the top 4% of the population, categorized as “Exceptional”.

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Crucially, while the reasoning scores remained consistent with my childhood, the breakdown revealed a significant shift:

• Logical Reasoning: 4/4 (Top Tier)
• Visual-Spatial Processing: 4/4 (Top Tier)
• Working Memory: 4/4 (Top Tier)

The working memory result is the true revelation. In 1989, this was my broken metric (38th percentile). Today, it is top-tier. This does not mean my auditory processing healed itself. It is proof of compensatory plasticity.

I have subconsciously trained my brain to convert audio into video. Decades of forcing my brain to use visual cues and patterns to hack memory tasks have effectively rewired the system. The deficit is still there, but the workaround I built is now highly effective.

6. The F1 Dream

Despite my academic success in science and maths, the trauma of public speaking (born from that first major panic attack at age 10) had not healed. It was lying in wait.

At Bridgwater College, I was studying product design. I was running 2nd in my class. I was strong. The stakes were incredibly high. The strongest students were given an opportunity at Williams Grand Prix Engineering, the Formula 1 team. As an F1-obsessed kid who raced Karts, this was my dream.

The final hurdle after nearly 2 years of hard work was a presentation. I had to present my project from a stage to an auditorium full of lecturers and students. I knew as soon as we were briefed on this final assessment that this was going to be horrific. The memories of reading aloud at my school flooded my mind.

After weeks of over-preparation, I awaited my turn to go on stage and present. I was terrified. I can still recall how I couldn’t stop myself from shaking. I was regulating my breathing and drinking water, but nothing was helping. It was my turn. I walked onto the stage. I started speaking. Then, everything went white.

The next thing I knew, I was running out the fire escape, stage left. I never returned to that class. The terror of speaking on that stage was paralyzing.

The Crash

I fled the room and vanished. The shame was absolute. I was seething at the injustice of my own limitations. I had two years of hard work at stake and a potential career at Williams, yet I was willing to burn it all down rather than face that room again. The humiliation was heavier than the logic. I never went back.

What followed was a total system collapse. For months, I fell into a severe depression and was placed under psychiatric care. My mother recently confessed a chilling detail from that time: for weeks, she would come home terrified of what she might find, fearing I might have taken my own life.

The Burnout Reality

In hindsight, the root cause went far deeper than public speaking. I was roughly 18 years old, and I had been fighting a silent war to catch up for 17 of them. I was exhausted. My brain simply went on strike. I spent months in my bedroom, mostly sleeping, effectively shutting out the world. I also discovered how I could connect my PC via a phone cable and a plastic box to this fascinating new world called the internet…

Note to Parents: If your child suddenly collapses or refuses to engage, realise this might not be teenage rebellion. It might be masking burnout. They have been working twice as hard as their peers just to appear normal. When the fuel runs out, the stop is abrupt. Do not force them back to the front line. Let them rest. That downtime is not wasted and will allow a possible biological reset.

7. The Pivot: Finding The Perfect Fit

I lost the F1 opportunity. However, that lost time in my bedroom provided the reset I needed to survive.

Crucially, I also had Andy Davidson, a lecturer at Bridgwater College who refused to let me drift away. Even when I was at my lowest, he kept reaching out to my parents and me, looking for ways to salvage and repurpose the work I had done.

He helped arrange a transfer to Weston College to study graphic design and new media. It was 1998, and the internet was just emerging. This became the moment everything clicked.

Because the web was so new, the education system had not yet figured out how to teach it. There were no textbooks to memorize and no rigid verbal instructions to follow. In this chaotic environment, I thrived. I could literally view source on professional websites, reverse-engineer the code to see how they were built, and then build my own.

For the first time, my need to deduce how things worked became a superpower rather than a handicap. This self-taught agility put me months ahead of my class. It is also what ultimately secured my first job at a design agency at the age of 19.

My final transcript from 1999 confirms the transformation:

• Digital Graphics: Distinction
• Applying Technology: Distinction
• Managing Tasks & Solving Problems: Distinction
• Business & Professional Practice: Distinction

I went from a child who “read words that were not there” to a young man graduating with Distinctions in complex, visual, and technical systems.

8. The Social Tax: The Ghost in the Machine

The impact of those early years went beyond academics. It was deeply social, and the tax is something I still pay today.

The “Yellow” Shadow

Even immediately after the surgery, I continued to pronounce words incorrectly. I would say “ellow” instead of “yellow”. Children are cruel, and even close friends mocked me.

While that specific error faded, the underlying processing lag did not. Decades later, I still occasionally struggle to pronounce less common vocabulary. It takes a conscious beat to assemble the sounds.

My colleagues often find this hard to believe because I show no outward signs of struggle. However, the anxiety of mispronunciation remains. It creates a constant, invisible cognitive overhead.

The Multilingual Wall

Recently, living as an expat in Switzerland (a country with four national languages), I hit a hard limit. Despite my professional success, I face a distinct neurological barrier when it comes to learning new languages.

This is not a lack of effort. It is a biological block known as a failure of the phonological loop. This is the component of working memory responsible for holding spoken words in your head.

Because my auditory memory is in the bottom 38th percentile, my brain cannot “hold” new, alien sounds long enough to convert them into long-term memory. Furthermore, because I missed the critical period for language acquisition (ages 0 to 7), my brain struggles to distinguish phonemes it didn’t hear in childhood. To my ear, the subtle vowel changes in German or French are indistinguishable. They are just noise.

In a globalised future, this is a genuine challenge. It limits social integration and the ability to make friends outside of English-speaking bubbles. It is a burden I carry every day.

The Cocktail Party Effect

As I entered adulthood, I found myself navigating a world designed for the hearing. In loud bars and clubs, I faced a humiliating two-way failure.

In neuroscience, this is known as a failure of spatial processing. A typical brain uses the slight time difference between sound hitting the left ear versus the right ear to “triangulate” a voice. It allows them to mentally mute the background noise.

Because I missed the developmental window for this binaural calibration, my brain never learned to filter. To me, the background noise is just as loud as the person standing next to me.

I struggled to distinguish a voice three feet away from the noise thirty feet away. Second, because of my volume regulation issues, my voice was too soft to cut through the ambient noise. I would ask them to repeat themselves, and they would ask me to speak up. It became an exhausting, mortifying loop of “Pardon?” and “What?”.

The Sanctuary of the Bar

To escape this cycle, I often retreated to the bar. This was tactical. The bar counter offered a fixed location where I could engage people one-on-one, away from the chaotic centre of the room. It was one of the few places I could actually hear.

However, this proximity to the alcohol meant I drank more. I used it as a tool to dampen the overwhelming sensory input.

Today, after periods of intense interaction, such as a wedding, a birthday party, or a networking event, I can feel the toll it takes. In audiology, this is called listening effort. While hearing people process speech passively, my brain has to actively “decode” every sentence, using up massive amounts of cognitive fuel. It simply takes more from me to stay tuned in.

The Meeting Regression

Perhaps the most significant challenge is what happens during conflict. In a highly charged meeting, if people talk over me or correct me mid-sentence, my modern coping mechanisms fail.

Science explains this as the cortisol effect. High stress floods the brain with cortisol, which temporarily impairs the Prefrontal Cortex, the area responsible for language and logic. For most people, this is annoying. For me, it is catastrophic. I can feel the words I want to say. However, I cannot see them in my mind’s eye. In that moment of stress, I revert to my original operating system: the deaf child who didn’t visualize words or hear them clearly. My recall evaporates. This is why I am often super-prepared for meetings. My preparation goes beyond the content. I am caching the vocabulary to ensure I don’t get lost in the silence.

9. Non-Academic Doesn’t Mean Failure

There is a deep, primal fear that every parent feels: if my child fails in school, they will fail in life. If they don’t get the grades or the degree, the door to the future is closed.

I stand as living proof of the opposite. I do not have a university degree. By the rigid metrics of the school system, I was not academic. Yet, my career has taken me to the highest levels of the global tech industry.

The Self-Taught Advantage

My trajectory is a common pattern for people with my history. Because I couldn’t rely on the passive learning of a lecture hall, I was forced to become a self-teacher. I bypassed waiting to be taught. I had to go out, look at the world, and deconstruct it until I understood it.

This used to be a disadvantage. However, we now live in a world of AI agents, open-source code, and instant information. In this modern landscape, the ability to teach oneself is far more valuable than a certificate that says you listened well for three years, and that you can summarize other people’s understanding for other people to then read and understand. That commodity has very little value going forward in this world.

The very thing that makes the input difficult is often what makes the output exceptional.

The System Thinker Phenotype

Research into neuroplasticity suggests this is a predictable outcome. When the brain is deprived of auditory input (language), it often over-indexes on systemising (understanding how variables interact). This is why so many people with auditory processing issues end up in engineering, design, and strategy. We are highly specialized.

The Result

If your child struggles with the traditional listen and repeat model of education, remain calm. They may simply be building a different engine. My non-academic brain, which failed French and music, was perfectly wired for the complexities of product strategy and design at Amazon and Google. I contribute towards a portfolio worth billions in annual revenue. My value comes from seeing the system.

The student who was labeled “quiet” and “defeatist” grew up to build the global in-house UX practice at Credit Suisse. At Tesco, those same “visual” traits allowed me to redesign a customer journey that projected a revenue increase of millions per year.

The lesson is simple: Avoid forcing a square peg into a round hole. If the academic route is blocked, support them in finding the side door. It is often a shortcut.

10. A Message to Parents: The Survival Guide

If you take one thing from my story, let it be this: You must be the architect of your child’s environment. The medical fix is often just the start line.

Based on my journey, here is what you need to know, watch for, and do.

Deafness in children rarely looks like silence. It looks like behaviour.

1. Trust Your Instinct

Do not trust the bell test or a single medical opinion. Be prepared for professionals to dismiss your concerns. In 1989, an educational psychologist wrote that:

“parental anxiety… could easily feed Philip’s anxiety.”

They were wrong. My mother was anxious because she was right.

If your instinct tells you your child is missing cues, sleeping too much due to exhaustion, or ignoring you, push for a comprehensive audiogram and a sight test. Do this early, and do it regularly. A child’s senses can change, and a pass in 2025 does not guarantee a pass in 2026. If you suspect something is wrong, you are probably right.

2. The Newborn Test Is Not a Guarantee

Writing this article has opened my eyes to so much that I had not understood or appreciated before. I honestly had no idea what the medical landscape looked like, either when I was a child or in today’s modern world. I was relieved to learn of the safeguards we have today, but painfully struggled to believe that these simply didn’t exist when I was born. I was particularly shocked to learn that the UK only fully adopted these measures in 2006. This was decades too late for me, but I am relieved to know they are now in place.

The Evolution of the Safety Net

I was fascinated to learn that Universal Newborn Hearing Screening (UNHS) is now the standard across the developed world. This technology measures the ear’s physical response to sound and removes the ability for a clever child to cheat.

• United States: Widespread implementation began around 1999 to 2000, reaching 98% coverage by 2009.
• Switzerland: Introduced UNHS in 1999, achieving near-total coverage by 2012.
• Europe: The European Consensus Statement recommended screening in 1998, with most nations rolling it out over the following decade.
• United Kingdom: Fully implemented across the NHS by 2006.

The Late-Onset Reality

I want to share these statistics because they surprised me. While this testing regime mitigates the risk significantly, a “Pass” at birth is not a lifetime guarantee. Research shows a second, smaller spike in diagnoses that happens exactly when mine did, at school age.

While roughly 1.7 in 1,000 babies are diagnosed with hearing loss at birth, that number rises to approximately 6 in 1,000 by school age. This suggests that roughly over two-thirds of school-age hearing issues were either missed at birth or, more likely, developed later.

My Understanding of Why This Still Happens

If your child passed their newborn test but is struggling now, here is what I have learned about why that might be. Please remember I am not a medical professional. Think of this as a coffee chat where I am sharing some fascinating things I have recently become aware of.

• Progressive loss: Hearing is not static. A child can be born with perfect hearing and lose it gradually due to genetics or common childhood viruses (like CMV). A “Pass” in 2021 does not validate the hearing of 2026.
• The glue ear fog (otitis media with effusion): This was a new term for me, yet it affects 83% of children at least once by age 3. The middle ear (the space behind the eardrum) should be filled with air to let the drum vibrate. In glue ear, this space fills with a thick, sticky fluid. It is described as trying to listen to the world while underwater or wearing heavy industrial ear defenders. The trap is that it fluctuates. Your child might hear you perfectly on Tuesday (when the fluid shifts) and be in a silent fog by Thursday. This inconsistency often looks like they are simply ignoring you.
• The processing gap (APD): Standard hearing tests check if the hardware (the ear) works. They do not check if the software (the brain) can process the signal. A child with Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) can hear the beep in a quiet room but cannot separate a teacher’s voice from background noise.

My personal takeaway: a Pass at birth is just a snapshot in time and not a lifetime guarantee. If the behaviour you are seeing says they can’t hear, believe the behaviour and not the old test result. Please take this information and use it to start a conversation with your paediatrician or audiologist to get an expert opinion.

3. The Signals Are Often Behavioural

Deafness in children rarely looks like silence. It looks like behaviour. Watch for these red flags that I exhibited:

• Reading pictures: Are they guessing the story based on visuals rather than decoding the words?
• The “Huh?” buffer: Do they frequently ask you to repeat yourself, or do they answer a different question than the one you asked?
• Auditory fatigue: Are they disproportionately exhausted after school or social events? Processing sound manually is physically draining.
• Mispronunciation: Words like “Yellow” becoming “Ellow” because they cannot hear the high-frequency starting sounds.

4. Post-Op Realities

When the grommets go in or the hearing aids turn on, the world changes instantly, but the brain takes time to catch up.

• Sensory overload: The world will be terrifyingly loud. To a child used to silence, a flushing toilet or a school bell can sound like an explosion. Be ready for anxiety and the need for quiet retreat spaces.
• Physical limits: If they have grommets, be prepared for lifestyle changes. Swimming often becomes a challenge due to the risk of infection or water entering the ear. You may need to find other outlets for their physical energy.

5. Rebuilding the Foundation

If the diagnosis comes late (age 7+), they have missed the critical developmental window for phonology. They might hear the sound now, but their brain doesn’t know what to do with it.

Consider restarting them on foundational language learning, even basics of their native tongue, to help them understand the structure of language. This structural approach can help them hack learning other languages in the future, using logic rather than just intuition.

6. Manage the Network (Be The Broken Record)

You must advocate for your child every single year. Do not assume that because your child has a medical file, their new teacher will read it.

Brief the support team: At the start of every school year, meet the teachers. Tell them:

“My child hears, but they process slowly. Please check they have understood the instruction before walking away.”

Contextualize behaviour: Remind the network that what looks like daydreaming is often buffering.

7. The Golden Rule: Let Them Speak

It is painful to watch your child struggle to find a word or answer a stranger. Your instinct will be to jump in and answer for them to save them from embarrassment. Do not do this.

When you answer for them, you validate their fear that they are incapable. You cut off their opportunity to practice processing in real-time. Give them the grace of time. Let the silence hang for a few seconds. Let them form their words. By waiting, you tell them: “I know you can do this, and I am willing to wait because what you have to say is worth hearing.”

8. Protect the Spark

Finally, watch for the thing they do easily. It might not be in English or maths. It might be in Lego, drawing, code, or complex games. When you see it, protect it. That spark is their future superpower waiting to be developed.

11. Final Thoughts: The Anomaly is the Asset

The process of creating this document has taken me the best part of a year. I have conducted a forensic audit of my past, collecting school reports, medical records, and scientific papers to finally understand the mechanics of my own history. It has formed a significant part of my own healing process.

My hope is that this work brings clarity to everyone touched by this experience. This is for the parents navigating this path with their children. It is for the adults who have lived this story themselves. And it is for the professionals who work alongside them.

We often talk about diversity in the corporate world as a metric. True neurological diversity is messy. It does not always show up as a superpower on day one. Sometimes it shows up as a failed bell test, a panic attack, or a refusal to follow instructions.

If you are leading someone who seems to be processing on a different frequency, or if you are that person yourself, remember the 96th percentile anomaly.

The very thing that makes the input difficult is often what makes the output exceptional.

12. Resources for Parents and Educators

If you are looking for clinical support or advocacy resources, I recommend starting with these organisations:

Switzerland

• Pro audito schweiz The leading resource for the hard of hearing in Switzerland, providing support for both adults and children.

United Kingdom

• National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS): Specialized guidance on auditory processing and childhood deafness.
• British Dyslexia Association: Support for learning differences that often overlap with auditory issues.

United States

• Asha (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association): Extensive toolkits for parents and professionals.
• Hearing Loss Association of America (HLAA): Advocacy and community support.

Europe-wide

EUROCI and European Federation of Hard of Hearing People (EFHOH) represent the interests of the hearing impaired at a continental level.

13. Let’s Talk

If this story resonated with you, I am always open to connecting. While I cannot offer medical advice, I can offer the perspective of someone who has navigated the silence and the noise to find a signal.

• Connect: www.linkedin.com/in/philip-hillman/
• My website: www.philiphillman.com

Reference List of Evidence

Personal Sources

• Axbridge First School Report (1985): Teacher J.A. Sargent
• Somerset Psychological Service Report (1989): Nigel Blagg, Senior Educational Psychologist
• Somerset Education Special Needs Report (1993): Margaret Fraser, SEN Support Teacher
• Fairlands Middle School Reports (1991–1993): Various Subject Teachers
• Kings of Wessex Upper School Reports (1994–1996): Various Subject Teachers
• GCSE Examination Results (1996): Southern Examining Group / Welsh Joint Education Committee / NEAB
• Bridgwater College Reports (1996–1998): National Diploma in Product Design
• Weston College Results (1999): National Diploma in Design (Graphic Design)
• Personal Communication: Recollection from mother regarding Playgroup & Axbridge Surgery (Jan-Dec 2025)
• Standardised IQ Assessment (2025): IQ Test Foundation™ Report (Dec 2025)

External Sources

• CDC (Centers for Disease Control): Prevalence of Hearing Loss in Children (Data & Statistics).
• NIDCD: Ear Infections in Children (Otitis Media with Effusion stats).
• NHS / National Screening Committee: Newborn Hearing Screening Programme implementation timeline.
• National Institutes of Health (PubMed): Research on Cross-Modal Plasticity and auditory deprivation.

With thanks

The teachers, tutors, and professionals who featured in my journey, for better or worse:

• Psychology & Support: Nigel Blagg, Margaret Fraser, Axbridge Surgery, Musgrove Hospital
• Axbridge First School: J.A. Sargent
• Fairlands Middle School: Elizabeth Bowskill, L. Sharp, D. Gosling, B. Hodges, C. Keen, A. Hill, A. Lydn, Miss J. Cresswell, Mr. B. Halliday, Mr. S. Tavner, Mrs. J. Perkins, Mr. B. Morris, A. Copes, Jean (Art), Jane (Music)
• The Kings of Wessex Upper School: T.K. Herring, L.W. May, E.M. Evans, M.A. King, S. Roberts, P. Robinson, S. Crosland, R. Lovelock, W. Brian Elvin, R.J. Arnott, D. Kelly, J. Downes, S.A. Ross, L. Larcombe, Geary
• Bridgwater College: Andy Davidson, Russell Dawkins, Lyn Hawkins
• Parents: Janet Hillman, Martin Hillman

And my huge love and thanks to my friends, family, supporters, who have reviewed and contributed towards this article over its many, many, iterations. Thank you for your time, expertise, and honesty.