Here’s an interesting self-observation, that I’ve never really noticed before this year: I have a much more difficult time processing auditory information than I do visual. I have a very easy time with absorbing written and pictorial data, and when I think, my thoughts tend toward abstract forms that are more visual and spatial than anything else. This has served me pretty well and it fits right in with the general vision-dominated culture.
But since starting to pay attention to exactly how I process information with my senses, I’m realizing that I can’t fit things together very quickly when I hear. I sort of have to translate spoken words in my mind; it’s like a different language. When I listen to a teacher lecture, my mind tends to wander unless I actively translate.
This makes sense to me. Sound is temporal, it vanishes quickly. Visual and written forms of communication are much more static. They stay around; I can contemplate them and get into them from many different angles. It fits my slow-paced nature and my Earthy, methodical, plodding mind. I’m pretty smart, but it takes me a while to fit it all together. I can get caught up in subtle points.
I guess this explains why I wasn’t as good at high school debate as I would have liked. I had a hard time processing all of that auditory data coming at me at a hundred miles per hour, let alone put together an organized counterattack in one minute.
Spoken, live communication continues to be a weak point. The most frightening class I’m currently taking in school is Communication in Therapeutic Relationships; our big assignment was due last week, in the form of a ten-minute speech, performed to the class as if we were acupuncturists doing informational presentations to various groups. I picked a fictitious audience of skeptics — I thought that if I had to do something scary, I might as well go all out!
It turned out pretty well, but it was definitely scary as hell. This is my weakest area. Interestingly, I think it’s more of an emotional weak point than a practical one; with some public speaking background, I do fairly well whenever I do speak, but I feel vulnerable precisely because speaking is quick and in the moment, and I’m most comfortable in a slow world.
Guess that’s also why I prefer pool to ping-pong.
Anyway, even though this all seems obvious, it hasn’t been clear to me until recently when I started getting into some basic ideas from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) that address this very issue, and began to notice the modes that I’m most comfortable in.
Fascinating stuff; and very applicable both to learning how to communicate better with others, and to identifying weak areas to strengthen.
[...] A couple of weeks ago I mentioned in a post that I had done an oral presentation to my class addressing skepticism toward Chinese medicine. I just adapted it into a short essay. Here’s a taste: One of the basic theoretical foundations of Oriental medicine is the theory of qi. The word can have many interpretations, but in Oriental medicine it can best be thought of as energy, which flows through a network of channels or meridians throughout the body. The idea is that disruptions in this network cause illness; and that acupuncture and herbs restore the flow of energy through these channels and thus restore health. [...]
[...] to give two or three oral presentations in acupuncture school, which always made me nervous. The first one was a faux-marketing speech, which made me especially nervous. So I decided that since I was [...]