brains, curious, visualization

[wispfox]

When you close your eyes, do you see something?


I was asked this at Thanksgiving, after a long conversation involving face blindness, the fact that I have no visual memory and only vague glimmerings - after a _lot_ of work - of visual imagination. My initial reaction was utter and complete confusion, to the point of asking if the person only asked to get that reaction from me. It was, in fact, a serious question, although the reaction was itself appreciated.

I see nothing at all. I didn't really consider that other people might see something.

Indeed, this makes me wonder if this is why I am so sound-oriented when navigating a dark room; at least some of the other people in the room apparently visualize the room they are in when their eyes are closed. And were, indeed, perplexed when I said that I _listen_ to get around places that I cannot see, in addition to feeling my way. In fact, making noise so other people know where I am actively interferes with my ability to not run into things, because I am no longer able to _listen_. (I can hear when I am near objects because the sound quality changes, especially walls and doors and such. Less so smaller objects, since they are not at my ear height, I suspect, and are less fully encompassing and thus causing echos that I can hear)

Comments

[siderea]

Actually, I'm a gustatory learner so I'm entitled to a IEP that lets me lick my professor's brain. :9

I'm in grad school in a branch of psychology, and I confess I rather don't approve of that paradigm, at least as it's escaped into the wild. It conflates learning modality with mental model with expressive modality -- it doesn't cope well with people like me who depend on visuals to learn, have no visualization ability, and are freakishly verbal in expression.

It also conflates conceptual processes with the concrete sensorium in a way that precisely reminds me of 15th century astrology mapping the magical properties of gemstones to the planets that "rule" them. I've written elsewhere about how I think, and I'm not a concretist, and it doesn't map to the sensorium; that makes it clear to at least me that the mapping to (merely some! of) the varieties of sensory stimuli is kinda arbitrary.

And, yes, it lumps a seven-minimum-sense organism's sensorium into three categories, wherein "kinesthetic" becomes the "other" category into which proprioception, tactility, gross and fine motor execution, empiricism, constructivism, etc are all ignomiously and indiscriminatly dumped. And then it fails to discriminate within a task, which category is really being invoked: if Jenny learns better by writing things down, is that because she needs to see them, or because she needs the kinesthetic experience of writing to remember?

Also, it seems to me to be a likely candidate of the Fundamental Attribution Error. I'm all about personality theory -- it's how I got into the field -- but this whole mapping of learning style preference to individuals sets two different sets of warning bells off in my head. For one thing, I think learning tasks are likely bound to a medium of study by culture, including microcultures. I note that as a musician who can both read and learn by ear -- which is the product of being trained in two traditions. For another, it simply seems likely that modal preferences in learning vary not just by person, but within a person by topic domain. It's not just that Timmy learns better when he can see it written down, he learns math better when he can see it written down, but still needs to read his Language Arts assignment aloud to parse it accurately, meanwhile Tina needs her math verbally presented, and to be allowed to see her LA assignments.

And, for another thing, it seems to confuse comprehension with memory. It seems to me in different areas, I have sometimes conflicting preferences. I can't memorize music from a score (I have to do it by ear), but I can't really understand it without one.

None of which is to suggest it's not great that you're conscientious about diversifying the sensory modalities through which the learning opportunities are provided. That is great. It's just not an adequate paradigm for thinking about how people of all ages really think, learn, express, or experience.

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the information. I was already aware of some of those distinctions, such as "how that fact is learned" vs "how that fact is recalled or employed", but some of that was new to me.

Also an excellent point that people learn different subjects in different ways. Actually some of my students come to me because they have a "math mode" which is dysfunctional, and I try to get them to reclassify the math I'm teaching to them as something in another category, so they can use one of their more functional learning attitudes on it.

You are quite right that I lump all the other ways of thinking and learning and knowing as "other" and vaguely put them in with kinesthetic modes because I don't understand any of them or have mental models of them--I'm not even familiar with some of the terms you were using. I just try to remain aware that there *are* other ways and hope to trigger them as needed.