Friday
Moderator
I had to teach my son to be able to do it... once we realized why he disliked reading was that he was having to memorise them, rather than using his mind’s eye to see the scenes. He “sees” maths, naturally, but words don’t transcribe. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, scene by scene, chapter by chapter.... over the course of about 2 years to master the skill set, although there were results from day 1 (he couldn’t “hold” the image in his mind from sentence to sentence for several weeks, and ambiguity annoys the f*ck out of him. Like “The girl stood by the water”. How old? What race? What time period? And 50 other Q’s infuriated him for the better part of a year, until paragraphs and scenes could be held in him mind. Even once he mastered being able to visualise what he was reading? He greatly prefers nonfiction & scripts because it minimizes the amount of visualisation required. Maths, meanwhile? Oh, that equation is representing the dynamic action of something fluid, from the viscosity? Probably water. It’s too regular for rain, far more likely to be an expression of a sprinkler. But either they screwed up the equation in the middle, or it’s describing a kind of sprinkler I’ve never seen before, in an environment without friction. Like maybe a vacuum sealed fuel injection system. But if so, their viscosity is weird.I’d never thought of visualising as a skill I could practise, I just thought it wasn’t the way my brain worked.
Whether a person is imagining -or attempting to describe- something mathematically, with words, with images, or in music, etc.? If you can find how you naturally THINK about things... I’ve yet to run across a therapy that can’t be altered to take advantage of that process. And rather than it being “wrong” to adapt the therapy to the individual? It’s infinitely more effective. Like having therapy in your native language, rather than in a language you don’t speak, or are just learning.