[Blindmath] Math in your head

[Sarah Clark]

I do think memory can become strong through needing to rely on it for some 
reason such as as a result of blindness.  As an example, not math related, 
but I played piano for many years as a child starting at the age of 8. I was 
partially sighted, but with our piano, I could not read the sheet music 
sitting in front of me as I played from my position sitting on the bench. 
It was too far away from me. So the only way I could play a song was by 
leaning up to read a few notes, sitting back to play them, then leaning up 
to read the next few notes, and then sitting back and playing all up to that 
point, and so on.  As a result, I in effect had to memorize every single 
song I ever played, and this made my memory extremely strong, so that later 
as I progressed through school I could memorize anything. I recall often 
memorizing class notes in high school and college word for word.  Though I 
had a pretty good memory even prior to the piano, I strongly believe that it 
was my visual impairment and the need to compensate for it in that way that 
allowed, and in fact required my memory to develop to that degree.

Sarah











----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John G Heim via Blindmath" <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
To: "Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics" 
<blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: "John G Heim" <jheim at math.wisc.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2015 6:29 AM
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Math in your head


>A faculty member here at the UW sent me this link to an article from the 
>web site of the American Mathematical Society. It talks about blind 
>mathematicians relying more on memory and something like visualization than 
>typical mathematicians. IMO, relying on your memory is not a bad thing. I 
>think of it as a skill blind people develop similar to listening to 
>synthesized speech at a really high rate. As for visualization, when people 
>ask me how I do geometry in my head, I often call it feelization. It's not 
>visual. But feelization is an inadequate term because it's just made up and 
>I always have to explain it. English doesn't have a word for visualizing 
>something without vision. Anyway, here's that link:
>
> http://www.ams.org/journals/notices/200210/comm-morin.pdf
>
>
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