From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Aug 05 2003 - 00:43:06 MDT
Paul writes
> [Lee wrote to Phil]
> > So you are not an example of what Paul was talking about,
> > "hyperlexia"?
>
> I'm hyperlexic, but I found discrete mathematics to be quite a pain to
> pickup; mind you I excelled at geometric proofs.
Getting good at geometry proofs doesn't fit with the
rest of your narrative. How old were you when you
got good, or were able to get good, at geometry proofs?
> Anyways, long story short, it turned out that discrete
> mathematics (as its taught generally) was too abstract
> for me (ergo too many directions to go in for a "short"
> proof sans need)
Well, according to http://www.hyperlexia.org/ my guess
is that you are/were only very mildly hyperlexic. Did
you show many of the symptoms listed there?
> I picked up discrete mathematics trivially, once I had found the key to
> organize it around (in this case turing machines/automata/grammers).
Have you ever read books like "The Number Sense" or "The
Math Gene"? They describe how most people evidently have
from a very young age an almost concrete number line built
in. It's much as if a little measuring rod were right there
in the head, and one can kind of directly compare numbers
like one and two to it. Babies appear to have it too.
> It was very clear to both me and my professor though
> that I didn't "learn" discrete math the same way other
> people did... It took a fundamentally different approach...
It's as though you had to hack up in software a number line
or something that others had built into their hardware.
There is a certain form of verbal reasoning that I'm no
good at, and have always felt that I had to "hack up" a
substitute for what came naturally to others. Or maybe
I just don't trust my native reasoning ability in addition.
> Another really interesting portion is that the symbolic processing extends
> into my kinesthetic system (its got a different name now, but I don't
> remember it off the top of my head).
Proprioception?
> I have extremely good sense recall when it comes to my
> skeletal muscular system, including the direction of
> said muscles when it comes to acquiring new skills. I
> have the equivalent of a shorthand grammar; I tell my
> muscles what I want them to do and they do it.
Again, it makes me think you have no number "feel" at
all, because otherwise the feature you are mentioning
would map right onto it, and you'd be very good with
numbers.
Lee
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