[bookshare-discuss] Re: about the optacan
- From: "Pratik patel" <pratikp1@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2006 13:40:36 -0500
Kellie,
I've found that learning is often a matter of transliterating when
necessary. If you're able to comprehend large pieces of music and remember
them, there may be hope for you yet. Visualization is often over-rated.
Learning and comprehension methods can be transferedd from one medium to
another if one can find a willing imagination in the teacher. Take chess,
for example: You can view the chess board as a musical scale. Combine
multiple instruments, multiple scales, or differentiate pieces and their
moves by notes from different octives. you can learn chess as easily as
someone who is a visual lerner. You only have to get used to the learning
style and may even need to create your own. I can volunteer to teach you
chess and its strategies in terms of music.
I have a cold too but don't think I'm wasting my time.
Pratik
_____
From: Kellie Hartmann [mailto:hart0421@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Saturday, February 11, 2006 1:14 PM
To: bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [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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