From: Paul Grant (shade999@optonline.net)
Date: Tue Aug 05 2003 - 22:47:27 MDT
I would hazard a guess to say the unfolding of a
natural ability. Mind you, everyone can benefit
to some degree from previsualization; I think the
difference between normal people and hyperlexic
people who have successfully encapsulated a sensitive
propiocentric system with the equivalent of a mental
grammer is the speed in which they both acquire new
skills, and maintain old skills. Its a biological equivalent
to a skillsoft (software acquired skills).. There is,
also as another aside, a remarkably interesting subgenera
of this type of programming, but based off of biofeedback
training.
I ran across some really interesting research as it relates
to conceiving of new ideas by some Russian scientist which
sought to qualify how creative people come up with solutions
to well-known problems... I have it saved somewhere. I'm
planning on core-dumping all my research on a website @
some point.
omard-out
To: extropians@extropy.org
Subject: Hyperlexia
What Paul was saying about kinesthetic sense is very
close to my experience as well. I "feel" statements
in a kind of internal universe as solid entities with
weighted connections to other objects. I also have
substantial ability to program my muscles, altho I may
have acquired that, rather than being born with some
special ability.
Around or just before 1960 I think it was that I read
Maxwell Maltz's excellent "Psycho-Cybernetics." There
were two parts that I really put to use.
Philosophically, his discussion of how our concepts
influence our reactions to perception - if you think
it's a man in a bear suit on a lonely trail at night,
you will behave very differently than if you think
it's really a bear, etc. It tied directly into what I
was getting from Rand when I read "Atlas Shrugged" in
1960 at age 12, when she discussed how people have
difficulty even conceiving of challenging their value
systems. Why? Largely because they have
shortcircuited the cognitive process by accepting
their values as givens, rather than conclusions to be
verified and challenged on the basis of data and
logic. Maltz gave another perspective to the same
line of argument, which I always find useful.
(One of the most useful takes on problem solving that
I've ever come across came out of basic algebra. If
you have n variables and m independent equations, then
the solution space has n-m dimensions, roughly
speaking (forgetting quadratics, etc., obviously). In principle,
getting a wide variety of takes on an issue, and looking for the
commonalities and contradictions among them can often yield more precise
and unexpected answers than an exhaustive analysis following a single
thread, altho both approaches certainly have their place. Given the
fuzziness of data so often in real world situations, additional
independent perspectives are often invaluable to getting manageable
solution spaces.)
Anyway, the 2nd thing I got from Maltz was his take on visualization. I
picked right up on that and found an immediate practical application -
knot tieing. I was active in rural Boy Scouts and a big part of our
somewhat impoverished troup life was taken up in acquiring relatively
costless proficiencies in areas like carving or knot tieing. I learned
that if I practiced Maltz's visualization that I could learn really
complex knots and learn how to do them really, really fast, which was
important, as a big use of knot tieing was in competitions judgeing both
correctness and speed.
At a summer camp, I recall learning a pair of complex
knots I had never seen before while waiting in line to
perform them in inter-troup competition. I visualized
every little step in tieing them in complete detail as
I moved up the line, and, fifteen or so minutes later,
I matched the camp record, even though I had literally
never seen either knot in my life. But I was just
playing back a tape in my head essentially.
The method also turned out to work rather well in judo
later in college, especially in getting out of jams,
as I could completely visualize my coming moves and
then execute them as a batch job, much faster than any
opponent could respond. It did not work very well in
karate, however, where instantaneous response is key.
So, the question is, did I learn a kind of basic
kinesthetic approach from those experiences, or was it
simply the unfolding of a natural ability?
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