Good Lord! Aiyee! (a picture from India, in this news story: "Earlier on Monday soldiers in Bhuj dug Cham Paten Seth, 90, from the rubble.
They had survived because her head was protected by an old sewing machine. She
had been calling out and Sikh soldiers used their hands and crowbars to dig her
out.")
Story of another rescue
Saw this article about freelance writing: From a buck a word to $500,000 a year. (via Backup Brain) The going rates described there remind me of a quote my mom sent me when I was going through a nasty spell of The-!#$&%*?!-Book:
"Whenever I am asked what kind of writing is the most lucrative, I have to say, ransom notes."
--H. N. Swanson, Literary agent, Hollywood
(from "Ross Macdonald, A Biography" by Tom Nolan)
Visual Thinking Over the weekend, I heard an episode of a radio program, The Infinite Mind, that dealt with Autism. Many people with autism are visual thinkers, and for whatever reason are not able to think verbally (like the majority of people). So I did a Google Search on autism and visual thinking. Here's a book excerpt by a woman who was interviewed on the show, about the advantages of thinking visually that she puts to work as a designer of equipment for the livestock industry.
I credit my visualization abilities with helping me understand the animals I work with. Early in my career I used a camera to
help give me the animals' perspective as they walked through a chute for their veterinary treatment. I would kneel down and
take pictures through the chute from the cow's eye level. Using the photos, I was able to figure out which things scared the
cattle, such as shadows and bright spots of sunlight.
Once again, I find myself mulling over different styles of thinking. Over most of the last decade where I've been focused on writing, I've been strengthening my own connection to the constant narrative prattle taking place in my brain, capturing the stream of words and setting them down on paper or in ascii. Not that I always or solely think in words, mind you. But that verbal narrative is there. Then there's thinking visually, thinking in spatial relationships (kinesthetically), and thinking aurally (in sounds, where hearing dominates the other senses).
I've recently been conversing with a person who composes music, and I find myself boggled by the notion of thinking up (dreaming up?) all those musical notes and then somehow laying them down. You did that? Cool! ... I hear the music, and I like it, but I also suspect that there's some unseen mental process taking place in the composer's brain: like anyone who is highly skilled, a job well done appears effortless to the observer. Since it's way beyond my ken, I feel as though I can barely appreciate what's taking place, since, after all, it seems effortless. I've scant idea of what's *really* entailed in thinking aurally and musically. Oddly enough, my own prattling narrative of words is an auditory narrative; I hear the words spoken in my head; I do not *see* them on a page.
The rest of the book excerpt discusses other forms of thought, and the difficulties of thinking in abstractions for one who's so keyed to visual thinking. When I ponder these different thinking styles, especially for those who don't think in the more common or dominant forms, I'm amazed at the rich variety of possible ways of thinking, and more than a little amazed at the connections we are able to form across boundaries of different thinking styles.
LATER...and then the discussion of kinesthetic thinking is a whole 'nother thing. After writing the above, I described it in a conversation with a friend who stopped by for a wee bit. We compared notes on our different thinking styles. Kinesthetic thinking is spatially oriented, and in cases like this, I have a very strong sense of where I am in space and where everything or everyone else is situated around me. I described my kinesthetic-mode, complete with gesturing and turning behind or beside me for whatever I've referenced that is (or was) beside or behind me. I told how, in a recent reminiscence with some friends (on such-n-such an occasion, who was sitting where?), not only did I remember who sat where, but in the context of the conversation, the location of who-was-where happened to be to my left. So in this afternoon's discussion of the recent reminiscence, I turned and gestured to my left as I told the story. When I give directions, I'll tend to face this way or that (facing north when directing someone to head north, turning left when I tell the person to head west).
What are your dominant ways of thinking?
heh... more thinking styles...this time about Dads and computers. I've been doing Daughter Tech Support for my dad, who has successfully run Norton Utilities and fixed his wacked out catalog b tree leaves for the first time! woo hoo! Three-quarters of good fone tech support is being able to visualize what's on his computer screen and interpret his language accordingly "Okay, so now I hit the thing, right?" "Yep, dad, go ahead and double click that folder icon." Of course, after writing about computers, I tend to be extremely specific in the terminology I use--much moreso than the average computer-using bear.
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