Analyzing “Visual Intelligence” by Amy E. Herman
In the framework of Armenian Science and Technology Center project by TSD
“Art is art and life is life, but to live life artistically; that is the art of life”[1]. Living life artistically. It is a magnificent feeling that I can’t express. When there are lots of colors and splash of emotions when you look at a glass broken into pieces and imagine what will be its next transformation. When you look at a tree and feel how the warm breeze plays with its leaves. Have you ever heard what trees “speak”? When being in a car-ride I observe their behavior and what they speak with each other, as in the motion, they open up more clearly. Art becomes life and life becomes art when each of us feels as a work of art like Whistler said: “An artist is not paid for his labor, but for his Vision”.
When I was a child, I used to paint. First, they were panorama, then separate objects, then people and now abstraction. When I first wanted to paint, I remember my feeling: I wanted to create the reality I saw but on a paper, and at the same time I wanted to create it in my own way. Of course, it was not possible. Then I understood that my style of drawing is not realism but the mixture of impressionism and abstract expressionism namely subconscious and surrealistic recreation with enlightenment. Picasso used to say, every child is an artist: the problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. To remain a child we need to remember how we were doing a specific task in our childhood, it can be learning a lesson or playing a game. That time we will remember our behavior, our outstanding characteristic features: how we were thinking or how we perceived the world.
The way we think, the way we look at objects, the way we perceive the world reflects our inner connection with outer space. “Your perception of the world is ... really a fabrication of your model of the world. You don't really see light or sound. You perceive it because your model says this is how the world is, and those patterns invoke the model. It's hard to believe, but it really is true”[2]. Maybe. There was a time when I mostly lived in my world and couldn’t find a connection that distracted me from reality. I even lost the time-space, I mean I perceived the information the way I wanted to hear and had a subjective feeling of the time zone. But, it had its positive side effect, because during that time I analyzed myself more deeply and started to feel people differently, observe their worldview in a brand new angle[3]. Wayne Dyer says: “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”[4]. Again, when I was a child I liked to analyze people by their handwriting: I looked at letters and wanted to find out how the letter felt, how it communicated with its neighbor, how it expressed itself in teamwork, and such kinds of exercises developed my emotional memory. For example, I can remember the whole book with small details IF it can shock me, second IF I imagine the situation as a picture. Because I can’t remember the plain text or data if it doesn’t arose a feeling in me. The question is how to control it?
To know how to control it, first I need to know how to free it. And, to know how to free it, I need to understand how I perceive it. Now, I know that I perceive the world through images namely I have emotional, imaginative, visual, and eidetic memory[5]. So, to find out whether it is right or not I have decided to take a myriad of psychological tests on world perception and visionary and memory[6]. According to test results, I had eidetic memory[7] However while passing the test, I spotted my problem - I remember when I want to remember, if I am lazy, I fail. So, I understood that to accomplish a test I need stimuli that must be very high. That’s why I always failed my school and university exams both and expressed myself more naturally in practical works. Because recalling theoretical works seemed very dull and useless – it is when you repeat what has already been saying.
Another interesting test that I came across describes your personality with straightforward questions[8]. What did I like about the test? The questions are really creative and build a platform to think and evaluate how you can make a connection and interrelation between non-identical objects. This kind of test is an example of the “contraposition method”[9] which is used to reveal the extent of someone’s awareness. If someone with a standard mind is asked the question: “What do a crow and a desk have in common?” they’ll probably answer “Nothing.” To some extent, they’re correct. In general, these two things can’t be compared. Someone with schizophrenia, on the other hand, immediately searches for less prominent, deeper connections between the two objects. Without too much thinking they might exclaim that people write letters at their desks, and a crow has feathers that can be used to write with. But how can you tell the difference between a schizophrenic person and a real genius? The difference is that the former will answer such questions immediately, whereas a genius will need to concentrate, discard the first, most obvious, and least interesting ideas that come into their head and come up with a truly unique answer. I answered to four of the questions, but thankfully, I THOUGHT then answered.
While reading “Why No Two People See Things the Same Way”[10] part of the book, I saw the cow immediately and when the author mentioned that Rorschach inkblot test reveals a secret about our psyche, I took courage to pass it. That will give me an opportunity to know more about my personal and psychological condition and to examine my emotional functioning[11]. At first, I thought It would help. But see what has happened. According to the test results taken online[12], my Sickness Quotient is 99%. WHAT? Actually, to tell the truth, the images of the test are constructed to irritate fear or it is my perception. However, while taking the test I felt destruction, fear, and feeling of the fight. Maybe, this is the purpose of the test - to arise the silent fears and obsessions. WEIRD. I took an extra test for sickness, mental status and other psychological stuff, it was OK, but WHY Rorschach test showed such a result, remains a question for me. Maybe, my perception of each inkblot was unique, because I didn’t choose from the mentioned points or I took the test online because it is considered to be taken by colored card (the online version was a sketch). Really, AWE-FULL.
Originally, the Rorschach Inkblot test was not intended to be a projective measure of personality. Instead, it was meant to produce a profile of people with schizophrenia (or other mental disorders) based upon score frequencies. Rorschach himself was skeptical of his test being used as a projective measure. It is, at its most basic level, a problem-solving task that provides a picture of the psychology of the person taking it, and some level of understanding the person’s past and future behavior. Imagination is involved most often in the embellishment of a response, but the basic process of the task has little to do with imagination or creativity[13].
Because many people respond to the inkblots in a complicated, detailed way, the scoring system uses the concept of “blends” to account for complex answers that take into account multiple objects or the way used to describe the object. The organizational activity of the response assesses how well-organized the response is. Last, form quality is assessed — that is, how well the response fits the inkblot (according to how the person taking the test describes it). If an inkblot looks like a bear, and a person describes it as a bear, this might take an “ordinary” form quality — perfectly acceptable, but not especially creative or imaginative. As I took an additional few tests on creative-thinking and problem-solving stuff – two paragraphs above, I will prefer to feel myself a genius than a schizophrenic. Through asking people to express what they see in a simple set of ten inkblots, people can often show a little bit more of themselves than their conscious selves may have intended — leading to better insights into the underlying motivations of the person’s current issues and behaviors. Well, let’s go back to how emotions affect our worldview, situation analysis, and memory because I became mixed with these tests and maybe I can find an answer.
But, WAIT. Now, that I have calmed down to see the picture more clearly, I understand that indeed this is a subjective test. I forgot that I have researched the way the test had originated, the purpose of it and analysis that is provided to each recipient individually because of each object associates with a subjective perception of the world[14] (this happens in Freud case too - “Interpretation of Dreams”[15]). You, see what has happened. I took the test, I saw the score 99% and didn’t even think to dig more deeply with why-questions. I just reacted to the information, and forgot about Who? What? When? Where?[16] I just thought AWE, I’m schizophrenic. Hysteria. I even intended to take all psychological tests to find out whether it is true or not. And, now really awful. Maybe both my real asset and the problem lies in EMOTIONS, and to direct them appropriately will lead to the wanted result. But, the question again remains how?
“Just because someone says something is a fact doesn’t make it so … To make sure a fact is a fact, you need to verify it every time”[17]. Indeed, the second lesson that I got from this situation mentioned above is that I believe what society thinks about me. I can listen, I can analyze the criticism but I should not let society’s opinion make my reality. This will take me to destruction and modify the formation of my opinion. For example, I had such a serious problem when I was passing from 14 to 16: I listened too much to the opinions and directions of others that at some point I could not differentiate my reality from the general one. That was the time when I started to live in my own world and gradually integrate into the general one. To find only the proven in the haystacks of information that often lie before me, I must set as my first goal in assessing a new scene or environment, the collection of all the facts. By definition, a fact is “a truth known by actual experience or observation.” I always need to use an open mind, and look past the obvious, but focus only on what I can observe to be true, not what I assume to be[18].
Guessing and assuming? Yes, it is always easy to guess and assume what will happen. It is a comfort zone, which I don’t want to border[19] because I don’t want to burden me with additional information and analysis. It is much easier just to guess. Of course. But why I don’t think that it is a magnificent feeling to discover something, to make the hidden visible, to think about something that nobody has thought before? “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought”[20]. But sometimes, this guessing and assuming stuff happen when we want to shift the topic or just ignore the statement. But, is ignoring something that makes it less real?
Effective communication means being able to talk about any pertinent subject, even that which is uncomfortable, unusual, or unsettling. I may not like something, I may have a personal aversion to it, but that doesn’t mean I can ignore it. It’s fine to be uncomfortable. However, it’s not fine to ignore it, because it does exist. It’s when I ignore the facts or choose not to believe what I see that bad thing happens [21]. For me, the perfect example to talk about sensitive topics openly implying a hidden message is when as a private citizen, Ka`iulani – Hawaii princess[22] did eventually had a private meeting with the President of the United State and could eloquently refer that their intervention demolishes her country: “Cumin has no place on hen”[23].
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”[24] If life is an art then we are artists. And, to act as an artist we need to remember the child sleeping in us, as Picasso said: “Every child is an artist: the problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up”. So, could I remain a child?
The book was very flexible, productive, and captivating and I will read it on and on again. I even thought to reproduce it practically by forming psychological tests to make it more readable and interactive.
Sources
[1] Peter Altenberg (9 March 1859 – 8 January 1919) was a writer and poet from Vienna, Austria. He was key to the genesis of early modernism in the city.
[2] Jeff Hawkins is the American founder of Palm Computing (where he invented the PalmPilot) and Handspring (where he invented the Treo). He has since turned to work on neuroscience full-time, founded the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience (formerly the Redwood Neuroscience Institute) in 2002, founded Numenta in 2005 and published “On Intelligence” describing his memory-prediction framework theory of the brain.
Amy E. Herman. “Visual Intelligence”. An Eamon Dolan Book Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston New York, 2016, pp. 188-203.
[3] Imbd., p. 107.
[4] Wayne Dyer (May 10, 1940 – August 29, 2015) was an American philosopher, self-help author, and a motivational speaker.
Imbd., p. 119.
[5] Larry Cahill. Chapter 15, Human Brain Imaging Studies of Emotional Memory: Uncovering Influences of Sex and Hemisphere, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3906/
[6] National Geographic videos, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4UEOihyo4Q
[7] Eidetic memory (sometimes called photographic memory) is an ability to vividly recall images from memory after only a few instances of exposure, with high precision for a brief time after exposure, without using a mnemonic device. Although the terms eidetic memory and photographic memory are popularly used interchangeably, they are also distinguished, with eidetic memory referring to the ability to view memories like photographs for a few minutes, and photographic memory referring to the ability to recall pages of text or numbers, or similar, in great detail. When the concepts are distinguished, eidetic memory is reported to occur in a small number of children and as something generally not found in adults, while true photographic memory has never been demonstrated to exist.
[8]Personal Awareness test, https://brightside.me/inspiration-psychology/only-geniuses-and-schizophrenics-can-answer-these-three-questions-correctly-251910/
[9] Methods of Proof - Contrapositive, https://jeremykun.com/2013/02/22/methods-of-proof-contrapositive/
[10] A. E. Herman. “Visual Intelligence”, pp. 40-59.
[11] Imbd., pp. 40-42.
The Rorschach test is a psychological test in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person's personality characteristics and emotional functioning. It has been employed to detect underlying thought disorder, especially in cases where patients are reluctant to describe their thinking processes openly. The test is named after its creator, Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach. In the 1960s, the Rorschach was the most widely used projective test.
Informative video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUELAiHbCxc
[12] Online Rorschach test, http://theinkblot.com/testresults.htm
[13] Rorschach Inkblot Test By Jane Framingham, https://psychcentral.com/lib/rorschach-inkblot-test/
[14] How to Interpret Your Rorschach Ink Blots, http://psychwatch.blogspot.am/2009/07/how-to-interpret-your-rorschach-ink.html
[15] "Freud's book, "The Interpretation of Dreams" released 1900". A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries. PBS. 1998. Retrieved August 21, 2012.
[16] A. E. Herman. “Visual Intelligence”, pp. 64-71.
[17] Imbd., pp.62-63.
[18] Imbd., p. 64.
[19] Imbd., pp. 72-74.
[20] Imbd., p. 94.
[21] Imbd., pp. 170-175.
[22] For the last 100 years, Princess Victoria Ka`iulani Cleghorn may have been known as tragic because she died young, and was never permitted to serve the office for which she was trained, Queen of the Hawaiian Islands. It’s difficult to know why, but for unknown reasons, the story of her heroism has been forgotten. Few people know of Ka`iulani's stand for her people, and fewer still, know that she was a ‘daughter of a double race’, half Hawaiian – half Scottish. Ka‘iulani was, in fact, a warrior - she fought for the truth.
Princess Kaiulani . http://thekaiulaniproject.com/about_princess_kaiulani.htm
https://sites.google.com/a/hawaii.edu/ndnp-hawaii/Home/historical-feature-articles/princess-kaiulani-touring-the-us-mainland
[23] An extract from the movie: “Princess Kaulani” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1185344/quotes
[24] Edgar Degas was a French artist famous for his paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings.