RE: Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ?

From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Aug 03 2003 - 17:57:03 MDT

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    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. >

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