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My Visual/Spatial and Language Skills
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My Visual/Spatial and Language Skills As I type this, it is the mid August 2017 on Long Island, New York when the weather has been hot since June. My paternal grandfather who was Roy G. Metcalf was a railroad engineer who also took up the hobby of oil painting after his retirement. He lived to be very old, dying at the age of 98 in 1995. My father also named Roy only lived to be 85 and he was an English major in college and was first employed as a reporter for the New York Mirror newspaper in the late 1950s and 1960s. Then later he worked as the newspaper editor for the Housing Authority Journal in New York City until his retirement. My younger brother was also an English major in college and graduated from Columbia University in Manhattan, NY. Now, I seem to have inherited a substantial amount of verbal, mathematical and visual/spatial ability. When I was a in high school, I achieved a high score on the SAT (scholastic aptitude test). In middle and high school, I had no trouble at all in picking up the principles of mathematics in classes including algebra, geometry, trigonometry and later calculus in college. In verbal ability, I have almost completely mastered the English language as well as taught myself Russian, German, French, Spanish and Latin to an adequate level. I actually never really learned much Spanish in middle school, I only picked it up after teaching it myself from books as an adult. In the human brain, the left cerebral hemisphere specializes in arithmetic/verbal ability while the right cerebral hemisphere specializes in visual/spatial ability. For me, both hemispheres appear to work equally well. Even when I was a and since then, I have absolutely no trouble at all in reading maps and then walking or driving around hitherto unknown areas. I have gone on a number of job interviews and blind dates into previously unknown areas on Long Island and have absolutely no difficulty in getting to know my way around. In my 20s, I visited Mexico City, Los Angeles, CA and central Florida and within a few days became very adept at knowing my way around those other regions of North America. In March 1994, I became obsessed in figuring out how to solve the original 3 x 3 Rubik's Cube. I was attending my last semester at S.U.N.Y. at Farmingdale taking Technical Speech. I went to the campus<b> library </font></b>and took out some puzzle and mathematics books on the subject. I thoroughly studied the instructions on the sequences of how to turn the 6 cube faces and was able to solve it and I was even able to memorize the instructions well enough to solve it without looking at the puzzle manual. The goal is to make each of the 6 sides of the cube a solid color and there are over 4.3 quintillion possible configurations of the 6 cube faces. In the summer of 1999, I became interested in pencil drawing, mainly because I had been driving my mother to a local art supply store on Long Island the previous spring and saw all the various art media supplies for sale in the store. For 3 days a week, I rigorously practiced in my house basement on a 11" x 14" white paper sketchbook and I did achieve a considerable level of skill in being able to depict accurately still life subjects like tools. model planes and items of furniture, etc. But I still have yet to master the ability to draw landscapes or portraits accurately. I did read a lot of art technique books from the local libraries in Nassau County, Long Island, NY. When I was a , I started playing my father at chess and became well enough to beat him. In the winter of 1981, I bought my first portable chess computer and have since bought a dozen more and well as over 70 chess books. Over the last year since spring 2016, I have played the Fritz 14 chess computer on my desktop computer over 2,300 times and I haven't beaten it once. The MacBook Pro computer I am using now comes with a built in chess program and I still haven't beaten it. I find that playing chess is a terrific test of visual/spatial skill. I once saw the Russian Grandmaster Boris Spassky give a simultaneous exhibition at the Freeport Library on Long Island, NY of about 30 games but I didn't stay until the conclusion in the evening. I have also become very adept since the summer of 1994, at using electronic graphing calculators which can all do advanced problems in algebra, calculus and geometry which hitherto as a in the 1970s, I was completely limited to using pencil and paper to solve those problems in middle and high school. I almost forgot to mention that as a in the 1970s, me and my younger brother used to build plastic polystyrene model kits and a few balsa wood model kits of most of the airplanes used in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War and a few from World War I. I also build a few ship, submarine and World War II armored tank models. It takes a lot of skilled manual dexterity to be able to build model kits like those and following the sometimes complicated instructions that explain how to assemble them. It was a very educational experience in learning about the various military hardware used in the wars of the 20th century, almost like reading a history book. A couple of years ago, I bought from a toy store, a plastic block set that was derived from the Soma Cube puzzle developed back in the 1930s. The puzzle box kit includes a set of three or four connected small green plastic cubes and a set of instruction cards that have a diagram on how to assemble the various cube sets into these different geometric constructions as well as how to assemble all nine cube combination segments into the original large Soma Cube. I spent all night working on it and achieved perfect success in being able to assemble almost all of the geometric combinations that came in the puzzle kit. I don't think that there exists a more definite proof of excellent visual/spatial ability. When I was a back around 1970, my mother made me take recorder lessons, a recorder is musical instrument similar to a flute. When I was in middle school in Glendale, Queens, NY, in the spring of 1972, they said I had great instrumental musical ability as in being able to play the drums or other percussion instruments. I have studied on how to read musical notation from books. But I have never seriously pursued any musical ability in my life. I have never sung in my life, except to sing "Happy Birthday" very badly.       |
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