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| Monday, April 05, 2004 Luck In The 7th Dimension:
Watching Ruby, I wonder what she thinks of the world that surrounds her. She concentrates on things that I don’t see or hear, and she smiles at my serious statements and cries out when I’m trying to be cute or silly. There is quite a lot of research showing that infants can differentiate between all possible human speech sounds. This is not true of you and me. We have gradually honed in on the different sounds used in our respective languages and lost the ability to discern the nuances of sounds used in other language groups. For example, when Paul worked at the Siamese Hut, he was trying to learn Thai, but there were several words/sounds that he couldn’t tell apart. The sounds were the same even to his discerning linguist ears, but to his Thai friends, they were separate and distinct. Researchers watch babies’ eye movement and their heart rates while playing a series of repeating sounds. The babies react when the sound changes. E.g. .… “Ba Ba Ba Ba Ta Ta Ta” etc… and the babies react at the break between Ba and Ta… Of course, we would too, but there are many diphthongs, stops, and fricatives that our adult ears have lost the need and the ability to tell from one another. I wonder what other things she is tuned into that I don’t see. Cory said that he was convinced that his daughter was seeing things in other dimensions when she was young. She’d dart her eyes about and look at stuff that Cory couln't percieve. That didn’t mean that she was seeing things not there, necessarily. Watching Ruby, I think he might be on to something. She is certainly processing information to which I have no access. I have no memories before language, or at least none that I can bring to the surface. Actually, I’m sure that many of my core feelings and the foundations of my intellect are built upon reflections of my youngest times, but the first memories that I can concretely retrieve are from much later in my life. Ani and Paul told me that they have visual memories from before they could speak, maybe even from the crib. They both think in pictures; I don’t. I have read that there are three main ways that people process their thoughts: visually (or pictorially), verbally, or emotionally. Most people use a combination of these methods but lean more heavily on one or the other. I cannot make pictures in my head unless I am on the verge of sleep or dreaming. I can’t close my eyes and “picture” my mother’s face. I can describe it in detail (using words), and I understand how it looks, but I can’t create a mental imgae of it. I think that this is why drawing has always fascinated me, and why I need to understand the structure of anatomy in order to draw it. I can’t create an image in my head and then copy it onto paper. I don’t run movies through my mind; instead, I use narratives. I am constantly in dialogue with myself. People who think in pictures think this sounds crazy, but it is fairly common. Surely someone out there reading this processes information the same way. My earliest memories however, seem to evoke the hint of images, much more so than memories of last week. I can't quite picture those early moments, but I can come very close. It's like seeing a blurry image through a dark window. I remember talking with my mother on the stairs of our house and pretending to draw on the wall with my finger. I can almost see my little finger tracing a truck or an animal on the wall. I remember standing in the kitchen of the same house and my father picking me up for my weekly visit and telling me refrigerator was not pronounced fraderder. I remember the smell in his apartment, with a painting leaning on the floor against the wall next to his bike. Was it orange? Mom and I didn’t have bikes inside our house, ever. I can see my grandmother’s cool cat-eye glasses and a look of mock surprise as we played a game. I can’t arrange those events chronologically. I don’t even know how old I was for them. I guess I could piece it together with clues: We only lived in a house with stairs once. I think my dad left his apartment and bought a house when I was pretty young. Grandma didn’t wear those rad glasses forever. I
wonder what Ruby’s first memory will be. Ani? The Dink? Me? Something
in the 7th dimension? PS:
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