What ails Neville (New Topic?)

[jodel at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 43112

There have been a lot of speculations on just what is wrong with Neville 
Longbottom. The kid has clearly got fairly powerful magic which he is totally 
unable to control when he is working wandlessly (in Potions class) but, we 
are led to believe, doesn't ammount to much when he is using a wand. The 
favorite theory seems to be that he is suffering from a Memory charm gone 
wrong. 

Well the kid IS absent-minded. But I don't really buy it. I think the boy is 
sufferng from chronic low-level depression. He is absent minded because his 
attention IS absent. In his own mind he is off in some little world of his 
own where he isn't dragged off to a hospital every week to visit scary 
strangers who are determined to remain strangers. He isn't being terrorized 
by feckless uncles trying to make him perform magic and he isn't being 
bullied by his grandmother for his own good.

And depression probably wouldn't help him magically either, but it wouldn't 
account for the problems he is having. But something else might.

What if the boy was naturally left-handed? What if his grandmother (and, 
given wizarding lifespans, we don't know HOW many generations back she hails 
from) insisted that he be right-handed instead? Dyslexia doesn't happen to 
every child who has ever been forced to switch. But brain dominence is a 
messy and unpredictable thing to play around with. Forcing right-handednes 
upon a leftie forces the neurologic pathways to remap. When they do it 
sucessfully, no one notices but dyslexia is a common marker for a faulty 
remapping. (Note: there are other causes for dyslexia than trying to force a 
change in brain dominence too. Sometimes it even appears to be inherited.)

Now, we have no clear indication that Nevelle shows any particular signs of 
classic dyslexia, but neither do we have any idea what kind of havoc 
remapping brain dominance can play in a brain that needs to channel magic. 
Could this remapping have been why it took so long for Neville's magic to 
break through at all? Could it have something to do with why he can't 
properly focus it, through a wand or otherwise?

There is no indication that the Hogwarts staff was taken by surprise by 
Neville's incompetence at magic. If he is suffering from the magical 
equivalent of dyslexia they will have seen it before. (We certainly don't 
know whether the magical community has similar prejudices regarding 
left-handedness as our own grandparent's generation seems to have had, but 
but we certainly don't know that it doesn't! The symbolic baggage could be 
even heavier there.) But it would make sense that Herbology, which is 
hands-on, would be a subject that this form of neurological problem would not 
affect, enabling him to perform at his own true level.

-JOdel (who was set off on this track by a 3rd-grade teacher friend ranting 
over one child whose remapping was so spectacularly faulty that the kid 
cannot even function normally on a physical level. The girl is so clumsy that 
she cannot even walk backwards, and forget about trying to perform 
academically.)