Summary
You cannot force people who have completely different cognitive processing frameworks to learn the way that other people do.
#FirstCoffeeThoughts
There’s been some viral videos recently about Gestalt Language Processing when it comes to autism, and I wanted to piggyback on this by offering some insights on Gestalt Cognitive Processing from the perspective of someone with aphantasia …
Firstly …
“The whole is more than the sum of its parts” – this sentence is the foundation of Gestalt Psychology.
Gestalt psychologists have a macroscopic view of psychology … that the pieces or the smaller aspects viewed individually are meaningless. The psychological “whole” has priority and that the “parts” are defined by the structure of the whole, rather than vice versa.
Simplistically you can view Gestalt Cognitive Processing in a similar way; needing to understand the whole FIRST, before being able to understand the PARTS.
There are many neurodivergent people that process cognitively from macro to micro. The public process of educating DOES NOT account for this kind of thinking. We generally learn pieces first and then combine those into a whole part.
Not everyone can understand this way, including me.
Specifically, as an aphant, I cannot picture things in my mind’s eye that I have never seen and have no physical visual reference for. Trying to explain to me that pieces of this, pieces of that, etc add up to something completely new that I have no way of visualizing is pointless. If you physically SHOW me the end result then I have a better chance of understanding how the smaller pieces became that end result. I need the end in order to UNDERSTAND the steps it took to get there.
I often come across incredibly ignorant people who believe that everyone learns in the same way or that everyone is capable of learning the same way as everyone else. This is simply NOT true.
Trying to explain to me that pieces of this, pieces of that, etc add up to something completely new that I have no way of visualizing is pointless.
You cannot teach everyone the same things in the same way and you cannot force people who have completely different cognitive processing frameworks to learn the way that other people do.
Brains work differently for all kinds of reasons, and you cannot force them into new processing configurations.
My strengths are convergent, divergent, abstract, and critical thinking. Due to aphantasia my greatest weakness is creative thinking. No amount of teaching, berating, or forcing will make me a better creative thinker given I have NO MINDS EYE and NO ability to IMAGINE things I haven’t seen.
My brain works DIFFERENTLY and that’s not a bad thing.
For example …
As an aphant I am PERFORMANCE MINDED rather than RESULTS MINDED. (I wrote an entire post on this previously.) Because I cannot IMAGINE a final result and have no concept of what that looks like or even means unless I have a concrete example for reference, I have to focus on the PROCESS, PERFORMANCE, and JOURNEY of getting to an unknown end. I value that journey and the wisdom I gain more than some imagined result.
In many ways I think this is a much better way of doing things because there is no pressure of trying to obtain something that you cannot even see or imagine. You can only move forward with the process and assumption that you will get to an end result based solely on what you are DOING TO GET THERE … not on a preset idea of what the outcome is going to be.
I am PERFORMANCE / ABSTRACT type.
RESULTS / CONCRETE types …
Concrete thinkers tend to focus more on the procedures involved in how a task should be performed.
Results minded focuses on an imagined end goal that determines your overall value.
The process is irrelevant for results focused people and they tend to get overwhelmed easily because they don’t understand individual things and only care about the result. They have much more stress, health problems, and mental dysregulation than performance/abstract types.
One of the reasons I don’t interact with writers or participate in writing communities is because I have a completely different writing process than others.
Writers like to tell you what they think you should do or offer advice on how to write or how to overcome obstacles. If you aren’t a writer with aphantasia then you have no idea how difficult it is for me to write or what my writing process is like.
You cannot advise me at all.
Try being a writer with no imagination. Seriously try it.
If you can’t possibly imagine what it’s like to be a writer with no ability to imagine things … then congratulations that’s aphantasia.
