Quote:
Originally Posted by mrscoach
It seems that, often, poor readers do not 'see' what they are reading in their mind. They aren't making that connection in their brain and are too hung up on reading the words of a story. The good readers tend to picture the characters and action going on, just as if they were watching a movie.
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Apparently I'm a poor reader yet I have two college degrees.
I can tell you exactly why I am a 'poor reader.' I have no ability to visualize... at all. If you ask me to think about an apple and describe it I have to recall variations of apples that I have memorized and relay hard information like shape, dimensions, color from a single example I've chosen. I can't see an apple at all. I can't draw anything from visual memory. I can only draw what I've memorized and my drawings are extremely two dimensional.
For most of my life I have never done any pleasure reading because, for me, I consume the words as if I was preparing for an elementary school reading test. Pleasure-reading for me was anything but pleasurable because I would memorize everything. I would tend to stick to things I wanted to learn and short magazine articles because long material would fatigue me terribly.
I have a friend that is a psychiatric nurse and we were discussing this years ago. He didn't believe that I have no ability to visualize. He ran me through a series of tests and, on several, he would be looking directly at me and ask me to visualize a (insert item here) and explain what that item looked like to me. He was watching for thought processes and eye responses. At the end he said, "Holy xxxx, you really can't visualize at all."
It took until about 6 years after that until I was able to 'visualize' anything and it has only happened a few times. I will get an extremely brief 'flash' of an image from something long ago. I can't focus on it or it will not happen. It's rather like catching something out of the corner of your eye. It's there and gone and you never got a good look at it. Best i can describe it is when, in movies, the director shows a flashback of some event that lasts only a fraction of a second. That's all I've ever had and it's only happened maybe five times in my life and all within the last four years.
On the upside, as I've grown older my brain can't do the memorization any more. When the Kindle came out I decided to try reading from it and found that I could actually get through books... many books... and not grind through memorizing them. I still can't visualize but at least I can walk through the story. This is why I'm a movie fanatic. People often say that books or old time radio shows are like the theater of the mind. I would always respond to them that in my theater I'm sitting in the dark and someone forgot to start the movie.
On the downside, I still can't visualize. People who have been in my life are just a filed-away statistical memory. My parents are dead and have been for years. If you were to ask me what my mother looked like I would have to go to the mental card-catalog that is my memory and pull out the card for some particular age that has features (hair color, eye color, height, weight, etc.) that I've memorized but to actually 'see' her I need a photograph. She doesn't really exist to me other than traits.