I used to read for enjoyment when I was a very small child, before the school started, but as I got older, I quickly drifted away from reading. I remember asking my parents to buy a book I saw in the bookstore. The books eventually piled up and I got my first bookshelf. What changed between my early childhood and school? The number of pictures in the books I was reading quickly decreased when I entered school. Looking back on this experience, I realized that the reason I was reading a lot as a child was not because I enjoyed the words on the page, but it was because I wanted to see my favorite superheroes in action as I flipped the pages. My mind worked mostly in images or moving parts, but when school began everything was in words. There was conflict that I had to resolve in my mind.
I started to view reading and writing almost like a puzzle because of this conflict. I was taught through reading, whether that be economic textbooks, math textbooks, biology textbooks or our latest novel in English class. My assessments were all written: Explain the process of cellular respiration, evaluate the role of government intervention in the balance of trades or to what extent did nationalism cause World War I. I was surrounded in a sea of papers filled with words that lacked images, and I had to find a way to take words and convert them into images to understand and learn. I then had to convert the images into words for any assignments I had.
When I say images, I do not really mean “images”. It is more of an ambiguous placeholder for what goes on in my head. My mind Is like a giant network of clouds. I search this network of clouds almost like a data base, and often one cloud leads to others, which leads to others. This is how I sometimes I can get lost in thought because I go on various mind tangents. But each of these clouds can be morphed into my thoughts. Often times I can morph these clouds into actually physical shapes. Whenever I am reading a biology or chemistry textbook, I try to convert the words into physical moving objects in my brain. I find it easier to understand and recall knowledge when it is not text-based. But a lot of the times my mind thinks in terms of a wind that is characterized by a particular feeling. Especially when I play violin, often times the way I play the music is based on how I feel this ‘wind’, where the wind is the music. Strangely enough I also have an internal monologue, but that is not used for deep thoughts.
In this weird and strange stormy network of thoughts, it is difficult convert them into words. It is like navigating this storm and trying to look at it from the outside, like an observer looking at a painting. The last difficult thing is shattering the painting into fragments of words. The next hardest part is piecing the fragments into a coherent text. I do this every single time I am asked to write something, whether that be a biology exam, or history essay. Even when I learn, I must do the reverse process, where I take the words and turn them into images in my head to understand things.
Rizky Eng 181 