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From: msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader)
Newsgroups: net.med
Subject: Re: Re: Visualization of `time'
Message-ID: <1042@lsuc.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 18-Jan-86 02:30:08 EST
Article-I.D.: lsuc.1042
Posted: Sat Jan 18 02:30:08 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 18-Jan-86 02:54:28 EST
References: <1909@utcsri.UUCP> <796@petrus.UUCP> <714@kitty.UUCP>
Reply-To: msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader)
Distribution: net
Organization: Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto
Lines: 81
Summary: Most of us don't


What follows is from Rudolf Flesch's 1951 book "The Art of Clear Thinking".
Posted by Mark Brader, a nonvisualizer.
				*	*
| 
| Bernard Shaw, who considered himself a teacher rather than an entertainer,
| always insisted that he wrote his plays so that people would read his
| prefaces.  There, in the prefaces, is the theory behind the action on
| the stage.  How, for instance, does Shaw account for Saint Joan's visions?
| The preface has the answer:
| 
| > Joan was what Francis Galton and other modern investigators of
| > human faculty call a visualizer.  She saw imaginary saints just
| > as some other people see imaginary diagrams and landscapes with
| > numbers dotted about them, and are thereby able to perform feats
| > of memory and arithmetic impossible to non-visualizers.
| 
| Now who was Francis Galton and what is a visualizer? The answer makes
| rather an interesting story.
| 
| Sir Francis Galton was a 19th-century scientific jack-of-all-trades,
| a cousin of Charles Darwin, an explorer, meteorologist, anthropologist,
| and psychologist, the founder of the science of eugenics, and the man
| who is responsible for the general use of fingerprinting.  In 1883
| he published a book, "Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development"
| --a grand hodgepodge of miscellaneous fascinating information, from a
| description of a high-pitched dog whistle Galton invented to a poker-faced
| statistical study of prayer, particularly in the case of monarchs stricken
| with illness.  Among all these things, the book contained a long section
| on "mental imagery", the first study of this kind anybody had ever done.
| 
| What Galton was after was very simple.  He wanted to know what kind
| of pictures people carried in their heads, and so he wrote to a number
| of his scientific friends and asked what they saw when they thought of
| an object. ("Suppose it is your breakfast table as you sat down to it
| this morning.")
| 
| The results of this survey flabbergasted Galton.  Most of his friends
| wrote back that they didn't see a thing and asked what in the world he
| was talking about.
| 
| After this complete letdown by his fellow scientists, the bewildered
| Galton turned to "persons whom I met in general society".  They made
| him feel much better.
| 
| > Many men and a yet larger number of women, and many boys and girls,
| > declared that they habitually saw mental imagery, and that it was
| > perfectly distinct to them and full of colour ...  They described
| > their imagery in minute detail, and they spoke in a tone of surprise
| > at my apparent hesitation in accepting what they said ... Reassured
| > by this happier experience I recommenced to inquire among scientific
| > men, and soon found scattered instances of what I sought ...
| 
| After some more research, Galton found that pictures in the mind's eye
| are quite common among most people, but highly uncommon among scientists
| and abstract thinkers in general. He concluded that deep thinkers
| consider mental pictures a nuisance and get rid of all this imagery
| by disuse.
| 
| But Galton didn't stop at collecting mental pictures of breakfast tables.
| While he was at it, he also asked people how they saw numbers, the days
| of the week, the months of the year and the alphabet.
| 
| The answers he got make a weird collection.
| 
  [ But to see them, you'll have to find Flesch's book, which makes very
    interesting reading. (There, now this is a review so I can quote it.)
    It was reissued some years ago in a uniform set with two books on
    how to write, by the same author, which are also well worth reading
    and full of humor.  Or I suppose you could find Galton's book.  --msb]
| 
| ... Sir Flinders Petrie, the famous archaeologist ... calmly informed
| Galton that he habitually worked out "sums" with an imaginary slide
| rule.  He simply set it the desired way and mentally read off the result.
| 
  [ After enumerating more examples, Flesch remarks: ]
| 
| All this will seem strange to you if you are one of the majority
| of nonvisualizers -- or familiar if you are a visualizer like me.
| (My year is a little like Mr. Blackman's, only it stands miraculously
| on the tip of the oval; also it's black and white since I am color blind.)