Internal Mapping
As a child and a teen, my world was more visual than it is for me now, a more sensual place in general, full of smells, internal or external sensations like kinesthesia (feeling acceleration) or proprioception (awareness of body organs) that I didn't have names for but which affected me strongly and constantly. Nowadays, like everyone, I get to filter more of the world through learned behaviors, like language, logic, or conditioned reflexes.
"If your eyes see fine, how can you get any more visual?" someone asked me a month past. I'm trying to explain.
Years ago, I didn't have to see with my eyes to know where I was or where I was going. Karate, baseball, and basketball gave me a sense of motion and a mental map of the consequences. I learned to fall and not be hurt. I learned to anticipate a pass. I learned to track a curveball. Similarly, house construction with my father gave me a sense of how three dimensional objects rotated and how they fit together (and sometimes failed to fit).
Moving anywhere, in any way, gave me a map in my head of where I had gone and therefore how to get back. If I walked down a trail in the woods, even if I went off-trail, I walked back the same way. How could I not?
Writing changed this part of me, over time. Devoting myself to verbal expression dampened my visual sense, I think. Some of the changes became obvious.
Fourth grade:
In a geography test, Mrs. Kramer assigns the homework of drawing the continental United States. It takes a while but, unlike most homework, I can do it while listening to the television. It's fun. I use two-thirds of a box of crayons and when it’s done I hand in a map as big as my younger brother.
A couple days later, we have a test.
"You'll draw the United States from memory," she says. "Don't worry, you won't get them all. This is just to see how much you remember."
She allows us most of the class time for it. My drawing goes fast. Only the middle of the southwest gives me problems. Confused, I get dimensions wrong and find it's hard to make Colorado and Utah fit just right. But soon enough, it's done. I list all the state names. I include all the state capitals except for two. (In South Dakota, Pierre makes me laugh.) Most of my time, I spend coloring. I love shading the rivers deep blue. I love marking the forests green.
The next day, Mrs. Kramer hands back the tests. I don't get my page back.
"Where's mine?" I ask.
"Next week, we have parents' night," says Mrs. Kramer. "I have to hang yours on the wall to show your parents. Did you look at a map during the test?"
"No?" There was no way to do it, sitting in the middle. Besides, it's hard to make Colorado and Utah fit right even with an example.
She nods.
"The capital of Nevada is Carson City," she tells me. "Don't feel bad. Only the new girl got that one."
Tenth grade:
I'm in a calculus class. The teacher starts drawing a problem on the board. It's new to us, two trains moving toward each other on train tracks. He draws curves representing the varying accelerations. In an instant, I see the answer.
"It's seventeen!" I blurt.
The teacher pauses. He turns to stare at me. The rest of the class turns to look, too. A couple of them had been writing notes. I had no pencil, no notes, no book open in front of me.
"How did you get that?" the teacher asks. His voice seems stern.
In response, a kinetoscope of slides re-plays itself in my head. I don't understand the pictures completely. They have something to do with the areas under a curve I've been picturing. When I make the rectangles for the estimates narrower, the answer gets more accurate, I know. I see where it's all headed. It's definitely seventeen. I can't explain it, so I shrug.
"Well, that's correct," the teacher says. Now he sounds disappointed. "But the rest of us are going to step through the problem. I hope you do, too."
The summer between tenth and eleventh grades:
One of my friends likens the IQ test to a barometer. This feels wrong.
"I've always thought of intelligence as having a multi-dimensional shape," I tell him.
This isn't strictly true. I've thought this way for a couple of years. But it's entirely true I get pictures in my head for different personalities. When I concentrate, I see cross-sections of their heads interspersed with graphs and diagrams for the different features of their minds.
Some are yellow, geometric cores with green galaxy-graphs. Some are pale blobs with a bluish arrow running through. Some of the mind-views are in constant change as different personalities come to the fore during a conversation. Most of them are this way, in constant change. Some of the people who get called dumb seem very bright-minded in this view, albeit they are sometimes bright in a specialized way. Some of those called intelligent seem very rule-following and timid.
Some people, whatever their other traits, seem to have a part like a bicycle chain, a systematic approach, a logic, chug, chug, chug, which is sometimes slow. But it's inevitable, too.
By this point in my life, my mental maps are emotional. I don’t mean only that I get a mental shape of each persons mind when I concentrate. The maps come with emotions, too. My mental traversals of trails in the woods are reassuring. They smell wet.
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