Visual Computation
I’ve been thinking a lot about the learning process as of late. The techniques I’ve employed for my memorable lifetime involve visio-spatial skills which have formed the underpinnings of my intelligence since at least the 3rd grade, which is when they diagnosed my Gifted/ADHD blessing/curse for going to Pine View School for the Gifted. Apparently, I was acting out in sheer boredom of the age-appropriate curriculum with which I wasn’t well-challenged. I needed to be accelerated for everyone’s wellbeing, but most of all for my own. I can’t say enough positives about Pine View, however, it’s been fascinating to many girlfriends to overhear my mutterings when I’m solving math problems or similar and how I model solutions.
I also like to tell people how I never read when I was younger, and that I can only read “in one tense – as a verb and not a noun.” This is always received with some apparent disbelief. That being said, it is factual that I can’t read for any length, which I thankfuly figured out during my time working as an ophthalmic surgical nurse. The causation is such that I have no stereoscopic vision as a secondary consequence of an ocular motility impairment called a phoria, as well as some degree of convergence insufficiency. The end result is that when reading, my eyes tire quickly and begin to cross, and after between 15 minutes and perhaps an hour on the very extended end, my lids become heavy and I’ll start to fall asleep. It is without question a valid learning impediment, albeit one I’ve managed to side-step in most instances. Having evaluated thousands of patients ocular motility while working in ophthalmology, I can assure you there are many similar cases.
The interesting hypothesis I arrived at this past weekend is an answer to my decade-long question of how I can be measurably more proficient at solving visiospatial problems && have a complete absense of stereoscopic vision. In computer science, polling inputs and outputs for changing data is a well known bottleneck in computational power, especially when considered against a system which models the I/O data internally in the processor and doesn’t have to poll the peripherals. So, I postulate, do I have visiospatial Giftedness resultant from having a virtualized 3D vision that isn’t throttled by polling my photoreceptors in it’s processing cycle?
I think I’d rather be able to read … so far.
