As a visual artist who had always had an uncomfortable relationship with schooling, and hence with the idea of intelligence as judged by teachers in schools, I always pride myself on my visual intelligence - for example my visual memory. I have been known to choose a bra from a display in a shop from some metres away, and on at least one occasion, found it to fit perfectly. On another occasion, when living in a workers' cottage, I bought a traditional tin window shade from a restoration station, without measuring the window of the cottage first. The carpenter hired to attach it to the house looked at the window and said, "I don't think it's going to fit." But it fitted perfectly.
I don't mean to sound immodest when I say that that was not mere coincidence. It was, I reasoned, attributable to my visual memory - or spatial memory perhaps. Who knows which. Still, neither are really taught or rewarded in school.
I don't mean to sound immodest when I say that that was not mere coincidence. It was, I reasoned, attributable to my visual memory - or spatial memory perhaps. Who knows which. Still, neither are really taught or rewarded in school.
I was therefore a little bemused to hear on Radio National during the week that a prize winning scientist had been studying a sea creature - was it a squid-like creature? Perhaps. And very small. Without a brain in fact.
Yet the scientist claims to have found that this creature, while without brain but with many eyes, is capable of responding to visual clues.
Sure, I am not a tiny brainless squid with many eyes, but it makes one think, doesn't it? Perhaps there is a message here for visually gifted or oriented creatures. Were schools right after all? To recall visual data expertly may not in any way be worthy of academic reward - if one were a brainless squid, that is ...
