[bookshare-discuss] Re: about the optacan
- From: "Kellie Hartmann" <hart0421@xxxxxxx>
- To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2006 12:13:35 -0600
I'm really amazed by people's ability to look at a diagram using an opticon one
piece at a time and mentally synthesize it. I've never been able to look at
something in pieces and imagine the whole. This inability sometimes hampers my
Scrabble playing. Incidentally, I was born totally blind. I won't even let
anyone teach me chess because I know that my inability to imagine the board and
the consequences of future moves would make me a terrible player, and who wants
to learn a game just so they can lose? <lol>
I do know one totally sighted person who says she can't visualize anything in
her head. I think it's a worse handicap when you're blind though because if
you're sighted you can actually look at something, such as a chessboard or
diagram, all in one piece instead of trying to take it in one little bit at a
time.
I am completely hopeless at looking at tactile 2/-d drawings and understanding
how they would be in 3-d. It was a big problem in middle school math. I also
can't make mental maps, although I can use tactile ones meaningfully. I like
tactile tables and bar graphs, but more complicated representations are
completely incomprehensible to me. I can't even visualize a simple object in my
mind and think at the same time. <lol> I've come to the conclusion that this
ability, or lack there of as the case may be, isn't necessarily related to how
much vision the person has, although it seems from discussions on the subject
that having more vision or having had more vision even in early life does help.
On the other hand, I can hear music in my mind in great detail, either things
I've heard before or things I mentally compose myself. I thought that everyone
could do this, until a really interesting discussion I had with a group of
people on the subject. One of the people definitely has much greater musical
ability than me, but he says that when he hears music in his mind it's
basically the sound of himself humming and that's all. I've heard one piece
that he composed, and it was incredibly complex--I really wonder how he can do
that.
Okay, enough of my ranting--I have a cold and am just sitting here at the
computer trying to distract myself.
Kellie
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