[bookshare-discuss] Re: about the optacan

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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