From: Mitchell Porter (mitchtemporarily@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Mar 22 2006 - 13:53:23 MST
Philip Goetz said
> > "Kim has a double photographic memory and can recall everything he has
>ever
> > read. He speed reads by scanning opposing pages at the same time, one
>page
> > with each eye. "
>
>I don't believe that. The fovea - the only area with enough
>resolution to read -
>is projected onto both left and right occipital lobes. If left and
>right eye were
>focused on different areas, the signal would overlap in the brain.
Perhaps it's possible to read interleaved lines of
So subjectively, what he sees is the superposed
text and maintain the necessary double
sum of the two visual inputs. If he can parse
narrative context, without too much backtracking;
that image into a bistable figure/ground scene,
in principle, it's just a novel form of syntactic
in which the two text-gestalts take turns in the
processing, like using a memory stack to deal with
foreground, then he has a perceptual foundation
nested clauses. Only here there's a Tower-of-Hanoi
on which the necessary semantic processing can
problem, so sorting and memory management will
occur. If the subject of a commissurotomy can learn
also come into the picture. The heuristics appropriate
to drive a car, then I have no trouble believing that
to this unusual problem-domain are not obviously
someone can speed-read even in a situation of
relevant to anything else in life, which may help to
doubled vision. (For one thing, speed-reading
explain why such "Mentiflex" prodigies don't usually
in my experience does not involve deep thought
exhibit ultra-high levels of achievement as adults.
about the subject matter; this should make it easier.)
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