Daniel Newsome

Agreed. But I don't quite want to call it intuition, but I can understand how that word sort of feels right. I can recall the front of my childhood home. I could draw a reasonable representation of it. The windows, roofline, the chimney, the front door, the basketball hoop. I can recall how the materials felt and the splinters from the raw and weathered wood and the sandy stone, but I don't see it. No image what-so-ever. But... I do seem to feel textures... I think??? I can sort of feel the sensation of scratching frozen frost from a window pane... how it lodges under your fingernail... how it is cold... then melts and you feel the pressure it made under the nail relax and just become wet.

Yeah. I know what my friends look like. I have some sort of recognition of them... a very distinct recognition. For example, I'm very good at recognizing relatively unknown actors. I'll say, "That guy was in an episode of [blank]." And I'm almost always right. But... I don't seem to have any ability to visualize. Nothing. And yet I feel that I sort of do... but not as an image. I can evoke a feeling of recognition by thinking about someone, but I don't see anything in my mind. It's so weird.

Re: Robert Avila. Robert wrote, "I can remember ways of figuring things out far easier than I can remember things." Bingo. I teach college calculus. I can remember the stuff I use all the time... the first derivative of sin x, cos x, and tan x... or the power rule, but I still derive a lot of the other formulas. I simple cannot remember them accurately. I can't spell either. I'm pretty bad with recognizing directions in a city. Names take a long time.

I draw when I read... in the margins. I think I'm trying to visualize, but because I can't visualize in my mind, I draw.

I was given fentanyl at the hospital a while back, and I didn't respond to it well. For about 2 weeks I was able to conjure up all sorts of images out of thin air. And every time I closed my eyes I would see these morphing symmetrical geometric patterns. It all went away after a couple of weeks. Really wierd.