Re: OT: One-question survey about how your brain works
- From: Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:13:51 -0500
On Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:36:47 -0500, Gregory Weston <uce@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
You know how sometimes people start off a description of a scenario by
saying "Picture this: ... ?"
To me that phrase has always just been kind of filler. I can't create
images in my mind. I was mildly surprised - because I had never even
really thought about it - to find out recently that apparently some
people can. What goes through my brain are lists. If I'm not actively
looking at something, it just kind of collapses to a collection of
statistics and other trivia. My mother can't either, nor can her sister:
an art teacher. My wife, on the other hand, was surprised to hear that
anyone couldn't. So I'm just kind of tossing it out to the group: Can
you close your eyes and establish a picture in your head?
I just made a pretty scary tyrannosaurus! Not sure if it's as palpable
as it would be for some others, but it's certainly green and toothy
and makes me feel like I could take a piece of chalk and copy it on
paper. I'm guessing that we all have to some extent the ability to
visualize . . . after all, we dream every night. But in some of us,
it's buried more than in others, and has to be cultivated. It may
correspond to the degree in which we can go into a trance state (light
sleep). Same thing is true of music . . . I know some people who say
they can hear a remembered symphony, say, as if they were hearing it,
but for me, the experience is wispy or cerebral (melody and harmony
without the details of orchestration).
There's some work which says that people tend to think either
visually, auditorily, or kinetically, one being the primary mode of
thought and another the secondary. Also, people's thinking ranges from
sensing to intuitive, that is, from an unthinking replay of perception
to a deep understanding of underlying pattern. And people vary in
their ability to manipulate complex geometric forms -- SGI artists
will tell you that some people can't rotate an object in their heads
while others are pretty good at it.
--
Josh
"What is it exactly that the V.P. does every day?" - Sarah Palin
.
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