Just Googling Around

I woke up much too early this morning thinking about sperm, eggs, superegos, and the loneliness of the human mind lodged in the lee of its senses. I couldn't go back to sleep so I got up, completed a ridiculously easy Sudoku, chewed on a Metamucil, and fell asleep in my chair.

The thoughts that woke me up this morning induced me to fire up my desktop and Google some of the stuff I'd been thinking about. I was well rewarded, finding most of the questions I couldn't answer without my personal digital memory machine! Naturally, I ended up in learning a few things I'd always wanted to know but hadn't bothered to find out.... about my brain.... yours too.

However, an example of my first Google tidbit was the following:  "“Every sperm is sacred. Every sperm is great. If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate,” goes the song from Monty Python’s movie The Meaning of Life. If the lyrics strike you as funny, it’s most likely because calling a sperm cell “sacred” sounds ridiculous when men can produce so many of them."

Maybe I'll discuss that nonsense at sometime and put it in some perspective... which, believe it or not, can be done even without using the Pauli exclusion principle.

But I really did run across some stuff about human perception and thinking which came as a pleasant surprise because I have long thought of myself as a "picture thinker"! Not that I can't manipulate symbolic logic, but I've never been very good at it. Yet I've heard for years that without language, man (animal) really can't think! Well, I found that Steven Pinker once observed that babies are not born with language, yet they learn to think quite early on. And, at another site, that "Researchers have demonstrated that the awareness of ourselves begins to emerge at around one year of age and becomes much more developed by around 18 months of age. I think language is pretty primitive at those ages.

At this point I'll stop trying to be clever and simply post excerpts of what I found interesting in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_thinking

Visual thinking has been described as seeing words as a series of pictures. It is common in approximately 60%–65% of the general population.[1]

"Real picture thinkers", those persons who use visual thinking almost to the exclusion of other kinds of thinking, make up a smaller percentage of the population. Research by child development theorist Linda Kreger Silverman suggests that less than 30% of the population strongly uses visual/spatial thinking, another 45% uses both visual/spatial thinking and thinking in the form of words, and 25% thinks exclusively in words. According to Kreger Silverman, of the 30% of the general population who use visual/spatial thinking, only a small percentage would use this style over and above all other forms of thinking, and can be said to be 'true' "picture thinkers".

Spatial-temporal reasoning (right brain) is prominent among visual thinkers as well as among kinesthetic learners (those who learn through movement, physical patterning and doing) and logical thinkers (mathematical thinkers who think in patterns and systems) who may not be strong visual thinkers at all.

Visual-spatial symptoms (dyslexia, Developmental coordination disorder, Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) and the like) arise in non-visual and non-spatial environments and situations; hence, visual/spatial learning is aggravated by an education system based upon information presented in written text instead of presented via multimedia and hands-on experience. 

This is a good argument for technical and trade schools.  We really don't need any more businessmen and lawyers!

I generally I translate printed words into what I'd call quick crude pictograms unless they actually represent an object.... and of course, I don't have to move my lips because they are no longer words. It does raise hell with my ability to remember prose and poetry, however.  

The big surprise to me is that 25% of folks think exclusively in words! That really explains a lot about some of my fellow man who are not capable of seeing our world as beautiful. And perhaps why our world is in such trouble.

Of course all answers breed new questions.  Such as, Is Obama a visual thinker and is Hillary not?  I'll bet that even Google doesn't know that!