Saul Bellow calls what I do being “a first class noticer”; which, with a talent for complex spatial reasoning, you could call “wraparound” thinking: using parallel/multilevel strategies to conceptualize the entirety of 3D experience.
Sometimes when I start thinking about a problem, it sits in there for a while, and then (after minutes; and sometimes months or years if there is a lot of other research to do besides) I get an answer. Which is not an “answer” really; it is a key clue/source/cue/root cause for a simpler experiment – a process that is much like what Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava (designer of St Nicholas Church on Ground Zero) calls de-coding.
I have taken no math beyond high school. Nevertheless, right now (January 2015), I am thinking about something that could be termed ‘isometric geocohedrons in n-folding quadrille space’. And got this description of what I am thinking about by thinking about another problem and getting this as the answer [Note 1].
Simply put, spatial thinking and imagined space can be sticky for me–to reduce the complexity of understanding, usually I describe this as being able to enter imagined space and sometimes become the space/problem/challenge.
My lesson in exercising the mind’s eye illustrates this further. Also the note about Cloudboxing (Project #5 at the ‘wicked problems’ page)
Note 1: To me, this describes the motion of the nexus object on a offset path curving along and then down the inside of a teacup of space to a right angled path, accompanied by a arraycloud of data particles moving along a concave curvature of near-distant space towards an imagined collapsing unifying convergence point with the right-angled path.
