Re: OT: Spatial thinking (WAS: Re: Letf / Right, was Re: Count and mass nouns)

People speculated, and I noted:

> Interesting reading.
>
> Now, it, as is only to common, made me go off on a tangent and think of
> something other I've been wondering about for a long time:
>
> My mother has described me as a person who can see before his inner eye a
> colour map of Europe with all borders and capitals indicated, and under
the
> names of the capitals are the population numbers written, and moreover can
> zoom and rotate the map at will. Now, except for the population numbers
thing,
> that pretty much true, and I was in my late teens before I came aware
there
> are apparently people who can't pull this, to me, pretty much trivial
feat,
> and not for lacking knowledge of geography.
I'm absolutely horrid at (real-life) geography. It takes me forever to even
label a map of the United States from memory. I've had several jokes at my
expense for wondering what many consider such trivial things as where
Germany is in Europe. On the other hand, I'm amazing at reading maps and
matching them to real-life phenomenon. And I could draw a layout of almost
any house I've been in once, even ones that I haven't been in in a decade. I
think it's more I need the spacial aspect to be able to remember what
something looks like map-wise. And looking at a map of Europe (for
instance), I have little conception of how things relate to one another.

On the other other hand, I have very little trouble visualizing in my mind a
mathematical equation, and working it out without actually writing anything
down (though it really helps if I pretend to with my finger). I always have
considered it a trivial feat to do math in my mind, as well, and found it
odd that people couldn't do things like add 47+69 in their head really
quickly. (116, for those who care).

>
> Probably relatedly, what for me was the big step in linear algebra was
going
> to higher than three dimensions, for the obvious reason I can't visualize
it
> easily anymore. Saying this rather surprised some of my fellow students,
who
> had been solving problems by pure number crunching all along.
Calc III is where I really faltered, for the same reason. Until that point,
I was able to visualize graphs, but suddenly we had to do things in 4
dimensions, and I got confused. I kept wanting to get some sort of visual on
what we were doing, and the professor had a hard time explaining it. The
other students got it quickly by number-crunching. I always found it hard to
just "number-crunch" without understanding what was going on. (The upside of
the story is that I aced the final because I had finally gotten an
understanding of all of it)

>
> From this, and various other experiences, I draw the less than
revolutionary
> conclusion that people's propensity, and likely also innate ability, for
> visualizing spatial relationships varies wildly. What I'd like to know is
if
> there any much data on this, and in particular if the "mental map" thing
is
> rare, or my family (they all claim not to be able to do it) just happens
to be
> poorly equipped in that area.
And there's different kinds of spatial relationships. Mine is a very kinetic
thing (although in math I can work abstractly).

Just like some are good at languages, some are good at math, some are good
at dancing, some are good at painting, some are good at doing nothing...

I, too, would be fairly interested in any data on distribution of talents
and spacial thinking in the general population.

-Keith

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