From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Aug 03 2003 - 17:57:03 MDT
Actually, I have never been all that good at
manipulation of symbols as such. I was really
terrible at trying to prove the limit theorems in
honors calculus, for example, and I have great
difficulty even remembering purely symbolic material.
For example, it is a absolutely horrendus task for me
to memorize a poem, altho I can recall the meaning,
tone, implications, etc., quite well, indeed. There
are songs I play fifty or a hundred times as workout
tapes, and I couldn't tell you the lyrics for the life
of me, but I CAN whistle or hum them and be dead on.
However, although I have a lousy symbolic memory, I
can hold a kind of kinesthetic model of statements in
my mind, and work with that model intuitively to yield
proofs. The formal logic that I could handle so well
in college involved statements and their
relationships. I am really good at detecting failures
of implication, which is also how I scored so high on
the SAT's GRE's etc... Just eliminate the
non-answers... What's left has to be true - or what
the testors want to see selected.
>Paul Grant (shade999@optonline.net)
Date: Wed Jul 30 2003
As an aside; doctors have come up with a "disorder"
for people who excel at symbolic manipulations...
they're calling it hyperlexia. Personally I think
they're correct (insofar as the description and
general consequences), but incorrect in ascribing to
it a disorder status. How much is genetic vs
environmental is another issue...I do believe though,
that there are people who are inherently better symbol
manipulators than others. >
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Aug 03 2003 - 18:06:24 MDT