Re: OT: One-question survey about how your brain works

On Thu, 5 Feb 2009 20:13:51 -0500, thus spake Josh Hill (in article
<rt2no4dnm3eqrbkmejf3346mjonu2prtp4@xxxxxxx>):

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. <<

I teach shamanic journeying -- for the sake of this discussion, it's a lot
like doing a guided meditation, but you're guiding _yourself_ -- and while
about 85% of the people relate their journeys in straight narrative mode with
descriptions of what they saw, we always get a few people who don't
experience it in that way. They go into the journey state (via some
repetitive music, drums or trancey soundscapes, depending on what we feel
like using that night), and when they come out of it and report their
results, they'll say that they only _felt_ things, or _heard_ things, but
didn't _see_ anything. Because most of the group always reports in that very
cinematic visual style, the people who work kinesthetically or in some other
way often need a lot of reassurance that they aren't doing it "wrong."

I remind them that people who are blind from birth can do a shamanic journey.
And they're certainly not going to report their experience in full visual
detail, like a movie. It's _different_, but it isn't wrong.

Amy
--
Ten Thousand Questions Blog:
A Question a Day for Journaling, Self-Discovery, and Transformation
"2009 is the Year of Questions"
tenthousandquestions.com

.

Relevant Pages

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