Learning to Communicate Through Our Finger Tips!
- Troy Lowndes
- Jul 25
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 28
Short of time? Listen to the voice over here.
As I type this, I catch myself staring at my right index finger, tapping away at the glass of my iPhone.
I’m not one of those people who glide across a keyboard like a pianist in full flow. Typing for me has always been awkward. It’s measured, deliberate… one tap, one letter, one fragment of thought at a time. My thumb sometimes joins in for the familiar keys, but the rest is just one finger. A staccato symphony. A Morse code of meaning.
Before I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2023, I used to mentally abuse myself for it. Ten thumbs, I’d say. Clumsy.
Broken. To write anything at all, I’d need a perfectly quiet space, no distractions, no excuses. Typing left me speechless in the worst sense… like trying to talk through my fingers.
At times it felt like being handed the tools of a detail surgeon or neurologist and told: here you go, use this hammer and chisel, whack away as best you can, and come back when you’ve managed to bash out something that sounds like Shakespeare.
About a year after my diagnosis, I asked my psychiatrist a question that had haunted me for years: could I have dyslexia as well? We spoke about it often. We never tested it, but the conversation opened doors. ADHD became my way into deeper self-understanding, and from there we began exploring autism too. Close cousins, interwoven with dyslexia… each with its own constellation on the neurodivergent spectrum.
Finding a Mirror
Not long ago, I stumbled onto a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. It wasn’t the words that struck me, but the spaces between them. The silences. The sense that these voices carried lives saturated in feeling, but starved of language to share it.
In the comments, someone suggested: “If you liked The Telepathy Tapes, check out Spellers.”
So I did. And it floored me.
Spellers is a documentary about non-speaking autistic people who, once given a letterboard, reveal a stunning depth of thought and perception. Just a board. Just letters. Just one finger. That’s all it took to bridge the gap between their inner and outer worlds.
To outsiders it might look agonisingly slow. To me, it felt like resonance. A mirror. A message: you’re not broken… just untranslated.
Filling the Gaps
For years, I masked. I mimicked. I played the part I thought people needed. I could speak, but rarely with my real voice. The one that stutters. The one that freezes. The one that feels more than it can say in real time.
Clinically, this gets called confabulation. A flaw. But I’ve come to see it as design. The mind’s way of stitching fragments back into coherence. Emotional truth, not falsehood.
That’s what I see in Spellers too. Letter by letter, people reconstructing their stories. The same way artists do with paint. The same way musicians do with rhythm. The same way I do when I code or write, piecing inner static into something whole.
Home in Frequencies
Around me, reminders are everywhere. My grandmother whispering through porcelain brushes. My grandfather stamping patterns into leather. My lounge wall holding a painting of Fremantle by Ken Rasmussen, twisting the familiar into something dreamlike. All of them neurodivergent in their own way. All of them speaking through different frequencies.
That painting says more about how I experience the world than a thousand conversations ever could.
The Unexpected Ally
Which brings me here… to AI.
The public conversation circles endlessly around fear. Replacement, mimicry, loss of control. But for me, it’s something else.
AI has become a translator. A bridge. Meeting bots capture notes so I can stay present. Tools like ChatGPT… and my own project, ToneThread… act like co-authors. Not to speak for me, but to help me hear myself more clearly. To untangle thought from overwhelm. To reflect back what was always there.
After a lifetime of trying to talk through my fingers, I finally feel like the machine is learning to listen.
“You’re not broken. Just untranslated.”
When I first began using AI to express what I’d struggled to put into words for decades, it felt like something inside me unlocked.
Not automation. Not imitation. Resonance.
In the same way a speller types one letter at a time to share their story, I’ve used AI as a tool to slow down thought enough to finally capture it. To find patterns in the fog. To give voice to parts of myself I never knew were trying to speak.
So when people warn that AI will rob us of our humanity, I can only smile, a little sadly.
Because for some of us, it’s only just begun to reveal ours.
So here I am. Still tapping. Still translating.
One finger. One letter. One tone at a time.
Learn more here
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Suggested Listening - Resonant Frequencies of the Neurodivergent Mind
A companion playlist to “One Finger at a Time”
I see these as a collection of Resonant Frequencies, shaped in part by imaginative and spectral neurodivergent minds.
These tracks don’t explain - they evoke. Like tone maps for the soul, they invite the listener to feel their way through rather than rationalise.
1. SYML – Fear of the Water
YouTube: https://youtu.be/xGJY1wqgEsw
2. Radiohead – Subterranean Homesick Alien
YouTube: https://youtu.be/qMljY1yZ3iY
3. Ludovico Einaudi – Nuvole Bianche
YouTube: https://youtu.be/kcihcYEOeic
4. R.E.M. – E-Bow the Letter
YouTube: https://youtu.be/qg8LrPdb5kE
5. Imogen Heap – Hide and Seek
YouTube: https://youtu.be/UYIAfiVGluk
6. Sigur Rós – Svefn-g-englar
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Bz8iEJeh26E
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Learn more about ToneThread and the Spectral Binary framework here.
Related Projects:
Our pets understand us in ways we’re only just beginning to understand ourselves.
BarkThread is helping to close that gap - one bark at a time. Learn more here.
Music has always known how we feel - sometimes before we do.
TuneThread listens deeper, mapping emotion through sound and signal. Learn more here. Or BIASFilter our latest product - https://biasfilter.tonethread.com.
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