Curiosity about modes

[mrissa]

Story research, sort of, and sort of personal curiosity. Define terms for yourself, but if you think you're defining them idiosyncratically, please let me know. Nuance in the comments! Nuance in the comments is always welcome. (The first two questions may not be entirely clear. Basically I think there's a huge difference between being a very visual person and having good eyesight, that kind of thing. Also, you define what senses you feel you mess with in your art or craft. If you write poetry and experience that as a "hearing" art or a "sight" art or a "hearing and sight" art, whatever: put down your perception of it. Thanks.)

[Poll #730569]

Comments

[songwind.livejournal.com]

My "correctable impairment" is mostly an anemic lexicon of taste building blocks with which to create new combinations with any reliability. A skill I intend to learn rather than a malfunction.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So you're saying that you feel your ability to create taste combinations reliably is impaired by your inability to identify what you've got in the first place in so many words? That you can't, say, go to a restaurant and say, "too much basil, needed more oregano"? Or have I misunderstood you here?

[zellandyne.livejournal.com]

For that last question I picked every sense, but I could just as easily have picked none. For me, writing touches all the senses, because, hopefully, you convey enough to have a reader imagine from all the senses. At the same time, they don't really touch, taste, see, or hear the actual art form. I mean, you can argue sight because they read it, or touch because they touch the book, but the creation isn't precisely physical.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sure; I think different people interact with writing in different ways.

I'm interested that you only thought of writing, though, and not some of the stuff you've been making for skin etc. lately.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking about that yesterday: how writing employs all the senses - and it made me realize that also applies to the other arts.

As a visual artist I'm paying attention to the whole range of my experience and trying to convey what I understand through all my senses in visual terms. As a singer, likewise. I think that's one of the things that makes the arts valuable: that ability to convey in a particular mode more than the mode itself contains - it's a way to get through to people who may be overly stuck in some one mode. The literary art can convey the whole world of the sense to people who are overly stuck in a verbal mode.

[wychwood]

For the last question, I said "sight", because that's true of most of the "creative" things I feel invested in. But I also perform music (singing), and I wasn't sure whether to put that in (I didn't). It's not creative, per se, it's performance of someone else's music, but still...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am not a creativity nazi; I have listened to different enough interpretations of the same song that I can hardly believe some creative effort wouldn't be involved.

[aet.livejournal.com]

It is a sad one for me, as all my senses seem to be a bit faulty.

I sometimes suspect that this constant shortage of sensations is why I hate to wear gloves (usually it has to be -10 C outside and even if I do know better, I hate working in gloves and often forget) - to give away even MORE of something I so lack is so hard.

It can look cute from outside, though - used to look like caring when I had to ask everyone to taste the food I was cooking. Well, used to look less good when I had people around and asked often : "Please sniff it - is it spoiled or not?"

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think it still is caring if you have everyone taste the food you're cooking. If you can't taste the difference, making sure people who can are well-served is a considerate thing.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

For the last one I picked hearing and sight to represent writing because I know quite a few people who say "I hear the words as I read them." I'm still not sure if that was the right thing, and in spite of reading being a skill that largely relies on vision (except Braille), I don't feel it is a visual thing.

I'm so confused right now...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sometimes confusion is a good thing, thinking about stuff we'd taken for granted. I don't think there's one right answer on this.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

My sense of smell is hypersensitive. I don't know if this is an impairment. It's a damn nuisance. I bake a lot -- is that a smell-focused craft? I regard it so, despite its impermanence. (Well, a song is gone even quicker, and I recognize that as craft. Oh, well.) My sense of hearing is changing, in massively inconvenient ways. I don't think of it as "impairment" exactly, but it is interfering with some uses. I can hear perfectly well. It just takes a lot more work for me to differentiate the sound I want to hear from background noise, and the work is stressful and tiring (the visual equivalent would be squinting all the time) and sometimes it does not seem possible.

More later as time permits.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I would say of course baking is a smell-focused craft, but I know that's not everyone's experience. And impermanence is no impediment to art or craft, I don't think.

More later as time permits will be much appreciated.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I'm a very tactile person with a strong visual sense. Therefore, I do radio. (Oddly, that's a serious answer.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I put down sight and touch, although the touch is really movement - I experience music, art, poetry, and writing kinesthetically. That's one of the reasons I love linework, because I can "feel" it better - smooth sine-wave undulations, or staccato, slashing lines, and so on. I think that's also why I like big, brassy classical music and 80s pop/dance music, and techno remixes of songs and loud, rhythmic percussion - because I can feel the movement in my head, and to tie the visual in - I can visualize a music video or a scene that it could be a soundtrack to.

Surprisingly for all that, I'm not much of a dancer, but I think that's more from not getting the right sort of music to dance to as a child in ballet and tap lessons, and then having friends who just don't dance much. :) I liked the dances when I was in the SCA, and I enjoyed ballroom dancing in college, but when you're not that good at meeting and interacting with new people and nobody you know goes dancing ... well, you don't dance much.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I put down sight and touch, although the touch is really movement

Yes!

Well, not about the sight. But I was trying to figure out how to say that for me above, touch = movement/awareness of space.

Oddly enough, I also Don't Dance. Though I watched Mad Hot Ballroom the other day and now I want to make some friends go do this with me:

http://heyletsgo.com/event-60854

[zalena.livejournal.com]

As a daughter of the Romantics, I am highly moved by interior, subjective, "feeling" which is different from touch, being an emotional tone. All my senses serve my attempts to describe this completely subjective experience.

I have exceptional sight. I thought I was losing it when in NYC because there was no horizon to look to. I was growing near-sighted because the only things to look at were up close.

I have a "good ear" but have struggled with hearing problems through out my life. Sometimes I think that the "good ear" thing is compensatory.

[greykev.livejournal.com]

I experience transitory times when hearing or touch (or very infrequently smell) are on par with my vision, but they usually pass very swiftly.

Because I'm nearsighted, I'm oriented toward form, color, and motion. The edges, boundries, and most fine-textures are too blurry for me to make out until I'm fairly close-up. (Conceptually I'm intrigued by where things bleed into one-another, and the fine-distinctions. perhaps I'm compensating?)

Touch hasn't been even a tirtiary sense for me. I'm aware of heat/humidity, but beyond my own body/clothes I only notice touch if I'm specifically investigating something (ie when shopping for clothes or furniture), or if the sensation is painful/dangerous. Even then the impression is usually fleeting and filed away as information rather than direct perception: 'feels good', 'feels rough', 'feels soft', etc. Touch is just not a way I generally relate to my surroundings.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

I lied--I forgot that I knit and sew. Touch and sight, I guess...unless I mess up, when you would definitely hear something. And is cooking a craft? OK, I lied twice.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, cooking is definitely a craft.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I wanted the kinesthetic sense to be listed, too, though I suppose I could have grouped that with touch. I sense movement well, and use it in my writing (which is why I like writing fight scenes, and dance scenes too). I have shit for vision, but certain kinds of visual things will draw my attention and enter my work. My hearing is normal, but with a strong sense of pitch. My sense of smell is very strong, to the point where I won't smell the milk if there's any chance it's bad -- I'll make somebody else smell it. Otherwise, I'll be having revolting scent flashbacks for two days. This feeds my sense of taste, obviously, but taste doesn't much enter into my work.

[redbird]

I suspect I may have a slight correctable hearing impairment, but haven't had this tested (well, not since grade school, when my hearing tested as fine); I'm not sure why, other than that hearing aids are expensive and not covered by my insurance.

I went back and changed my answers to include "taste" rather than none of the above in the last question, after reading adrian_turtle comments [thank you, love]. I write, usually nonfiction, but I don't consider that focused on a specific sense, the way I do it. The words and concepts can be things in themselves, not sounds or images. [And this ties in with conversations I've had in email with rysmiel.]

[blythe025.livejournal.com]

Some of this I was unsure on, but I know I'm a very visual person. Most of the writing I do, I visualize in my head before I write it down on paper. I have a tendency to notice details about things other people around me sometimes do not. (And yet, I can be so in my head sometimes that I don't notice anything around me).

I write a lot of poetry too. So while I don't think of my self as specifically hearing orientated (I can tune out sound very easily), I do love the sound of words. But that's not really accurate. It's not so much how the words sound to me, as how they taste, so my favorite phrases and words have a great shape to them orally. For example, I love the words bollocks, the way I have to touch the tip of my tongue to the roof of my mouth, almost like shaping a ball in my mouth, then releasing and openeing my mouth, so that the sound can come more from the back of my mouth, only to jump forward again to make the "cks" sound. Such a great wor, so much fun to say.

And when you say xie xie (chinese for thank you), pronounced "SHYEH SHYEH", I keep my teeth closed and let it kind of come from the back of my mouth and the throat.

More favorites: "cellar door" and "figure female framed crookedly," both of which sound nice, but also taste marvelous to me in the different movements it forces my mouth to perform.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

For me, it's something not listed: kinesthesia and related senses.

Complicating factors: ecolocation and synesthesia.

And: I realized earlier this year that I'd been using "worry" as if it was a sense.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Should be "echolocation"

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

The acuity of my hearing has been a running joke in this house ever since I was driven up the wall by the sound of ants chewing, which I could hear even over an extraordinary loud computer fan. I've been known to write poetry, which I experience mostly as a sound art. In college, I used to amuse myself on quiet evenings sometimes by wearing cloppy-heeled boots and echolocating myself across campus.

I can sculpt pretty well for somebody who's never put much effort into it. And I learned to draw pretty well by imagining myself touching the curves of what I was seeing, and then translating those curves to my pencil. But I am totally at a loss when it comes to painting. I have little memory for color.

I have never, never, ever been able to stand clothes that were even slightly itchy or binding or clammy (I'm looking at you, polyester). I don't care how good they look. Touch takes precedence.

I keep being told this by people who'd know, so I guess it's true: I have unusually good proprioception and body awareness. I've filed that under "touch", but to me it really seems like its own thing. I do yoga and Pilates with some seriousness; yoga is a sort of art or craft to me.

My orientation toward sight was pretty strong when I was in school, but has lessened in the last several years. More than anything, I've grown to depend on getting feedback from multiple senses when I'm learning something new.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

I chose touch and sight and taste as the senses I craft for. I make jewelry and love to cook for people. Cooking and beading both satisfy touch in the doing thereof.

Sight is odd for me; I am very sight oriented in some areas and not in others. Color is my most important sight perception and it hits before anything else. At this point in my life my vision is not fully correctable to 20/20 and so often fine detail is lost. And I almost never see pictures when I read (though I do some when I write); I hear words.

I'm a touch dominant communictor and touch is very important to me. Which can get pretty tough in museums. My first instinct on seeeing something interesting is to reach out and touch it.

MKK

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

They're adjusting museums for children to account for touch-dominance or even touch-interest, but museums for adults seem to lag sadly behind on that front.

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

I don't think any of my senses can be considered acute - they are not impaired, to my knowledge, either. Just very average. I mostly go by sight in life - then tough and smell. Smell brings the strongest feeling of time and place though.

[ckd]

My "craft", such as it is, manifests itself in patterns of pixels and movement of megabytes. It's a utilitarian craft, though I find the problem-solving aspects of it rewarding most of the time.

I suppose it could be argued that my textual communication skills are a closely related craft, using natural language instead of more algorithmic approaches. Either way, sight is clearly the involved sense.

[cpolk.livejournal.com]

I chose both "acute perception" and "correctible impairment" in sight because:

I am myopic -2.25 and slight astigmatism, -3.50 and not flattened. I don't venture very far without my glasses or some kind of distance vision correction.

I've got a good depth perception. i've got a pretty good useable wide-range vision (better with contacts of course.) and I'm a bit weird for visual pattern recognition - to the point where it makes clinicians ask if I have asperger's syndrome.

i've never been tested for that, but I doubt it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I doubt it, too. I think those clinicians are treating something as linear that's multidimensional.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, I wanted to answer this. Heh.

I /notice/ sight and hearing, in general, more than other senses, although I do have a good connection to touch. (A lot of how I eat is tied up in the mixture of taste and textures, so I guess that counts as touch, too.)

I tend to /think/ I have a bad sense of smell, and I do, but for a long time I didn't rely on it at all, which meant that I didn't focus on it, which meant that, of course, I couldn't train it/understand it/use it effectively.

I'm trying, nowadays, with some success, to understand the world of scent, and to understand how I connect to it. (I often describe scents in terms of how they 'feel'. This seems to be because that's how I'm used to describing things in general, but it's also slightly synasthetic.)

Also, in terms of the last answer, I play around with colors, and also, I sing. (And play instruments.)

[thorintatge.livejournal.com]

Like cpolk,I selected both correctible impairment and acuity for sight. I'm near-sighted and require moderately strong glasses for it. But at the same time, I can read very small print without trouble, identify color variations well, and see pretty well in the dark.

My sense of smell is poor and that makes me sad, especially when reading your posts about it. I feel like an incomplete animal. I sometimes enjoy the scents of nature, food, and so forth but I never ever notice the smell of people. I couldn't identify the scent of a single person, other than myself.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I do wonder how many people who might otherwise have said they had acute senses of smell backed away from that answer because it was my lj. But I'm sorry to make you sad about it.

It has drawbacks, I promise.