*thinks* I don't stop dreaming, during the day... it
just sort of slows down. In idle moments, or when I'm
sitting around, I dream while I'm drawing or writing.
Sometimes I get carried away, but not very often.
Pretty glad I'm not the type who talks in their sleep,
I get the feeling I'd be muttering to myself while
drawing or whatever. I can remember long strings of
things for a short period of time, also... when I was
a child, and I used to get really excited about
something I was reading (I was a big SF nut from about
four onwards) I would run into my parents room and
recite a page or two, the book hanging at my side. I
don't do that anymore, but once in a while I can
recall something fairly strongly that I shouldn't *be*
able to recall, knowing my normal memory. It doesn't
have to do anything with traumatic experiences or
anything like that. I remember the barcode off of one
of the posters in my health class two years ago... I
remember a conversation I had in nineteen eighty nine
while I was in a restaurant almost verbatim, though it
wasn't really about anything. I guess you could call
it occaisonal spontaneous eideticism... *sighs* wish I
had it all the time. Or when it would actually be
usefull.
--- Damien Broderick
<d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Natasha drew
>
> Amara doodled
>
> Greg 5-D'd
>
> Lucky buggers. Here's one of my recurrent
> obsessions: I believe most people
> take it for granted that everyone else in the world
> uses roughly the same
> kind of mental imagery protocols. We all know enough
> to distinguish
> extroverts from shy cerebrotonics, and the jocks
> from the willowy sensitive
> types, and the inarticulate from the freely
> babbling, but since the early
> 1960s, when I had an epiphany about all this, I've
> been informally polling
> people about their visual imagery.
>
> Most can form some kind of red triangle in
> imagination, and rotate it to
> the left, then to the right, and go on to make a
> picture of their dear old
> Maman, check the color of her eyes, and so on. Some
> are exceptionally good
> at this stunt, making elaborate flowcharts and
> tracking through them
> without moving a muscle (or maybe they twitch in
> sympathy). Others can
> `see' whole movies as they read a novel.
>
> Me, I've got *zero* visual imagery.
>
> The module's not there, apparently.
>
> This is presumably one reason I was regarded as a
> cretin in primary and
> most of secondary school. I couldn't spell very
> well, because I couldn't
> inwardly *see* the words. Eventually I managed to
> recognize stuff on the
> page, but answering `spelling bee' questions was
> utterly hopeless. Even
> though I soon knew five times as many words as
> everyone else, and more or
> less how to use them, I could not spell them orally
> because I couldn't *see
> them inwardly* (whatever the hell that is).
>
> Same thing with simple arithmetic and algebra, let
> alone geometry.
> Hopeless. Scribble scribble, tongue out the corner
> of my mouth, maybe by
> brute force I could work out what the fuck they were
> babbling about, but so
> much teaching was automatically pitched in the
> visualization mode that I
> was repeatedly stranded.
>
> So I never became a scientist, to my intense regret.
> I didn't hack it as a
> philosopher, either, once the notation started to
> dance on the blackboard.
> I need to turn everything into narrative, run
> compression algorithms on the
> word chunks, then fool around with those. This can
> be amazingly powerful,
> and many poststructuralists do just this, hence
> sound like posing wankers -
> and I suspect many of them must share my cognitive
> defect. Not all, though,
> now that movies and visual art and TV are such a
> major part of the pomo
> agenda.
>
> This has a very strange effect on my writing. Since
> I write a fair bit of
> fiction, often set in places where the settings are
> unfamiliar, I need to
> provide the cues and codes that switch on my
> readers' visual imagery
> machinery. Since that stuff doesn't work with me,
> from the inside, I'm in
> roughly the position of a deaf person learning to
> grunt out sounds
> painfully associated with meanings, with hardly any
> immediate feedback.
> It's weird, I tell you.
>
> And I reckon a lot of those smart people who never
> quite `achieved their
> potential' might have the same imagery structures as
> mine, or maybe other
> kinds that are equally alien.
>
> I'd like to hear from anyone else here with odd
> internal-imagery
> modalities. (I should add that I seem to use a kind
> of ancillary
> kinesthetic imagery, with bits of my body image
> *feeling* rotated, etc, in
> space; so I can score fairly well on those
> rotate-the-gadget-and-say-which-one-is-next tests in
> IQ trials, by turning
> myself into one and dancing. I almost immediately
> knew the answer to one
> famous question about tetrahedra, cited in an A. C.
> Clarke novel, that only
> geniuses are supposed to get. But I'm damned if I
> can *picture* a
> tetrahedron in my head...)
>
> Damien the high verbal
>
>
>
>
>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:04:22 MDT