Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thomas G. West is a writer, lecturer and consultant based in Washington, DC. In connection with In the Mind’s Eye, he has been invited to provide over 200 presentations, interviews and documentary segments for computer, business, education, art, design, scientific and medical groups in the U.S. and fourteen countries overseas.

More on In the Mind's Eye can be found at http://inthemindseyedyslexicrenaissance.blogspot.com/.

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IN THE MIND'S EYE

Prometheus Books

Contents

Foreword Oliver Sacks, M.D.............................................................11Preface to the Second Edition...........................................................13Preface to the First Edition............................................................191. Slow Words, Quick Images: An Overview................................................212. Dyslexia and Learning Difficulties from the Inside...................................633. Constellations of Traits, Some Neurological Perspectives.............................954. Profiles, Part 1: Faraday, Maxwell, and Einstein.....................................1295. Profiles, Part 2: Dodgson, Poincar, Edison, Tesla, and da Vinci.....................1636. Profiles, Part 3: Churchill, Patton, and Yeats.......................................1837. Speech and Nonverbal Thought.........................................................2158. Patterns in Creativity...............................................................2259. Images, Computers, and Mathematics...................................................24910. Patterns, Implications, Possibilities...............................................293Epilogue................................................................................309Symptomatology..........................................................................355Sources of Information..................................................................363Notes...................................................................................369Bibliography............................................................................429Acknowledgments.........................................................................483Copyright Acknowledgments...............................................................487Index...................................................................................491

Chapter One

An Overview

In the summer of 1841 Michael Faraday, the self-educated blacksmith's son who came to be recognized as one of the leading scientific minds of Queen Victoria's Britain, was on holiday in Switzerland. He had journeyed from Interlaken to the falls of the Giessbach, on the lake of Brientz. As he watched the cataract shoot down a series of precipices, Faraday noted his impressions in his journal. At the base of each cataract, the water was shattered into foam and then tossed into "water-dust" in the air.

August 12th, 1841.-To-day every fall was foaming from the abundance of water, and the current of wind brought down by it was in some places too strong to stand against. The sun shone brightly, and rainbows seen from various points were very beautiful. One at the bottom of a fine but furious fall was very pleasant,-there it remained motionless, whilst the gusts and clouds of spray swept furiously across its place and were dashed against the rock. It looked like a spirit strong in faith and steadfast in the midst of the storm of passions sweeping across it, and though it might fade and revive, still it held on to the rock as in hope and giving hope. And the very drops, which in the whirlwind of their fury seemed as if they would carry all away, were made to revive it and give it greater beauty.

These were brief notes jotted down by Faraday in his personal journal on an afternoon's excursion during a restful summer holiday. Faraday had no serious intent. He wrote for himself and perhaps a friend or two. It was a habit of journal-keeping developed to provide detailed records of his extensive experiments and to compensate for an especially unreliable memory.

Yet these few lines provide us with a small window into the mind and way of seeing of a great and curious visual thinker who lies close to the center of the story that will unfold in the chapters that follow. In Faraday's description, the major image is the rainbow, a form that, while brilliant and strikingly beautiful, is not really there. A form without substance, it consists of the refracted light bouncing off the tiny water droplets, perceived in a broad, arcing pattern. But the pattern is formed by the light and the perspective of the observer-for there is no pattern, no arc, no rainbow, in the random motion of the droplets that fill the space. Without the light and the observer, the pattern is not there. Yet, it is a stable and enduring form that moves as the observer moves, strangely seeming to draw strength from the ferocity of the spray from which it is made and which allows it to be seen.

It is this paradox to which Faraday draws our attention. The more wild and furious the spray, the more bright and clear and well-defined and beautiful is the form that is seen. It is the wildness and the chaotic confusion that provide the clearest image of the form and at the same time teach us seemingly contradictory things-that our clear view of the form relies upon the fury and the wildness-and that a form without substance can be strong, steadfast, and enduring. When the fury and wildness are gone, the clear image of the form disappears as well. Yet the more the fury and the wildness threaten to tear the form to pieces, the stronger the form becomes and the more brightly it shows forth, "steadfast in the midst of the storm ... as in hope."

Faraday was one of the greatest scientists of his age, perhaps of any age, yet this description and the mode of thought it shows is more like that of a poet. As in the best poetry, the simple metaphorical image illuminates, in a fresh way, a larger and apparently unrelated truth. Whether in the countryside or the laboratory, Faraday used his unusually powerful visual imagination to take the stuff of experience and experiment and form fresh, original models of reality in his mind, in his mind's eye-unconcerned that these models did not correspond to any of the accepted scientific ideas of his day. Yet it is just these same models of reality-especially the idea of the electromagnetic field-that provided the essential basis for the later theories of James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein.

One of the central perspectives of this book is that a powerful visual imagination such as Faraday's seems sometimes to come at a cost. Sometimes (but not always) great proficiencies in some areas can involve surprising and unexpected deficiencies in other areas. This is not seen as a cruel trick of fate, but rather a basic quality of design: what is optimized (deliberately or inadvertently) for one function may involve fundamental elements that make it unsuited for another function; a special proficiency in one area sometimes involves a corresponding deficiency in some other area.

It is the intent of this book to indicate something of what is being learned of how this process works and to indicate what an understanding of this process can mean for the way we view ourselves and those around us.

The story we will be telling provides evidence that, historically, some of the most original thinkers in fields ranging from physical science and mathematics to politics and poetry have relied heavily on visual modes of thought. Some of these same thinkers, however, have shown evidence of a striking range of difficulties in their early schooling, including problems with reading,...