Learning Styles, Modality and Sense Dominance

Much has been said recently concerning the idea of 'learning styles', and specifically the idea that different people may have different preferences and cognitive ability that make it easier to take in information from a particular sense as opposed to any other, which are often delineated into the Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic learning styles. I believe that there is much truth to this line of thought, and I want to be able to get closer to the bottom of why people might find themselves relying primarily on a given sense to understand the world.

You see, for most of my life I've been strongly visual thinker. Vision has predominantly been the sense which I used to take in and grapple with the world and solve problems in general. However, after my activation of Encompassing Voice, I began to see (or hear) what a person whose experience was primarily auditory based might be. I believe that the transition to Encompassing Voice enabled me to alter my primary sense from vision to hearing and that this allowed for a number of changes in how I took in my perception of reality. So first, in order to better understand in what this difference might consist, I will bring up the concept of spatial feeling.

Spatial Feeling (and thinking), is an intuitively felt sense of 3D space that arises out of our sensory experience, but which is in principal independent of each individual sense. It is through this that we intimately feel the vast openness of the ocean, how far apart the cars in front of you might be along a long stretch of road, what might be contained in the room next to you and the relative positions of these things, and how the spaces in a building might connect. There may be many different aspects to this. There is the 'pure', static sense of how un-moving spaces relate, along with the impulsive sense of how a thing might potentially be able to change its motion and where it might subsequently be able to move to in an instant. You may consider these separate things, but for now, and for convenience, I'll consider them aspects of a single kind of sense/imagination modality.

This vivid feeling of spacial relation is something through which a person, who is focused on receiving it through their field of vision, might experience what I have mentioned in the previous paragraphs. However, one might not need to see or even imagine visuals in order to feel or understand things in a similar way. I have encountered people said they had no ability to voluntarily visualize images in their mind's eye, yet who claimed they still imagine spatial forms in an abstract way all the same. A blind man might build up the perception of this same sense of spatial imagination through their touch, and the ability to hear the position of things can allow the same in those who are appropriately sensitive to their hearing. If you are interested in understanding this concept on a deeper level, this book: (Learning to Think Spatially: GIS as a Support System in the K-12 Curriculum) discusses the idea in greater detail in chapter 4.

So, having established this, which I hope agrees with your personal experience, we can get at what having a primary sense means. As a visual thinker, sight has mainly been my primary sense for the greater part of my life. It is through sight that I have been able to immerse myself in sensory experience and feel vividly that the world we exist in is a place with tangible spacial structure. It is also the sense modality which I mostly used to imagine things in order to grapple with them most easily when I want to accomplish something (i.e. in programming, building up understanding of relations between concepts and general problem solving). So, we can say that, for me and anyone who possesses the same level of activation as I have had in the past:

a) Sight is a modality that is and has been available as a primary sense.
b) Sense modalities that are not currently available primary senses, but which could potentially be in the future, are dormant or candidate primary senses.
c) Because of sight being available as a primary, when I allow my visual sense and what I receive from it (as opposed to any other sense, or the visual plane in my mind's eye as an equivalent alternative) to be the dominant focus of my conscious mind, I become immersed in the structures, (notably spatial structures) that arise from my mind processing the input to my vision and base my current sense of reality and sense of relatively 'being in the world' off the feelings that result from this. Focusing on a sense that is primarily available in some way enables awareness of these higher level structures, and doing so renders the sense active.


But even though vision is available as a primary sense in this way, I can choose not to use it like this; I can decide to mentally focus on something other than my field of vision, or simply close my eyes, and in doing so these visceral feelings of space may subside. This is important, as it is only by doing this that the mental 'processing power' or focus that would otherwise be used for the visual sense can be harnessed for other modalities, which can allow you to concentrate on immersing yourself in structures built off those perceptions instead. You see, though vision was one of my primary senses prior to the activation of EVP, the sole one as far as I know, hearing was not, and while I could experience deep emotion connection and understanding through sound, whether it be music or speech, it was never something that dominated over sight, nor was it something that I could get the same feelings of structural reality out of, even if I deliberately concentrated on investing the same level of focus in it. Yet the ability to cast away this focus was still there, and there are specific subjects of attention that you can concentrate on in order to deliberately induce this kind of focus changing if you are unsure of how to do this or what it feels like (which I will call Focus Switch Induction techniques). So even if vision is the only sense that is actively available as a primary focus (as was the case for me several years ago), it is still possible to try to alter your focus, to concentrate on other things so that vision is no longer as fully active, and in doing so, possibly trigger mental transitions that allow other sense modalities to become available as primary senses. *

This is what seems to have occurred when I activated EVP. On the day I gained Encompassing Voice, I had the odd experience of feeling that I was 'space blind', that my normal sense of surrounding 3D space that I'd get through looking at things was all of a sudden overwhelmed by all the information I was getting from sense of hearing instead. Because of this, when I decided to drive my car for the first time after the transition began, I actually felt the need to open the windows to hear other cars passing by me, almost out of fear. It was now hearing and the sense of where sounds came from through which I primarily build up my feeling of the surrounding environment. I was aware that I had switched my primary sense from vision to hearing and could no longer rely on my vision for the feeling of the space around me and the objects within it, even though I could otherwise navigate the world the same. It was a strange experience, but one that I eventually overcame as I learned that through active concentration, I could swap between primary modalities, though only slowly and over the course of a few minutes could I properly refresh my mental state in order to do this.

I wouldn't properly gain control of the ability to quickly, and with relatively little effort, change the degree to which sense was more active and dominant until a few years later, when I unlocked Super Grammar. Doing so allowed me to switch active focus between available modalities far more easily and rapidly, along with all the other benefits it gave. With SGP activated, it even became possible to focus on aspects of multiple primary senses actively at the same time, though doing so reduces the concentration available to each and doesn't allow the same quality of awareness compared to when most of your focus is in one.

I should add that spacial immersion isn't the only thing that switching primary modality to hearing achieves though; you can also choose to immerse yourself in the dramatic structure of a piece of music in ways that are not possible without that modality being primary and active, in much the same way you might follow the dialog on a film and build up in our mind an impression of the plot.

So in general, I have good reason to believe that individual candidate primary senses need to be unlocked to be available as primary senses, that unlocking enables a direct association of that sense modality with spacial feeling and immersion and that transitioning to EVP is effectively equivalent to unlocking hearing as a primary sense, which should influence a person's learning capabilities strongly in specific ways, and more mildly in others.


* I will note that since I assume that vision is something that I have had available as a primary sense for most of my life, I can't say I'd understand what the significance of having it available would be compared to what it would be like for it to be be dormant, or what that would imply, nor can I say what kind of Focus Switch Induction techniques might be effective at rendering it active. This is something to be investigated further.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell

How to tell if you have Encompassing Voice 1

Actually finding out whether or not someone has activated a given modality is a difficult, yet interesting and worthwhile task, and methods of doing this are something that I want to experiment with. So, to that end, I'll be throwing out small exercises which I hope will allow people to better understand the nature of their own modal thought processes.

Here are two videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZn_VBgkPNY

https://youtu.be/GphBC2f70TY?t=22s

Beginning each of them is an example of the same piece, the Bach Cello Suite No 1.

I will straight up say now that I greatly preferred Yo-Yo-Ma's rendition of this when I didn't have EVP and I expect that everyone without EVP will find Rostropovich's interpretation to be rushed, stilted and lacking in emotion.

After gaining EVP though, I could understand what it was that made the latter work and why he plays the music in this way, as opposed to the romanticism of the former. I can feel now how each phrase is played to fits in to one another in order to clearly continue on the structure of the piece, and I suspect that other people who have developed EVP will likely feel the same.

That is all I really need to say here, so I hope that this might make it easier to understand what level of development you are at. This is not a test and there is no need to worry about anything. Just feel, and be honest with yourself.

Commonality of Imagination

Is it common for people to have mental abilities that for whatever reason simply cannot be accessed, but which lay there in their mind dormant and waiting to be unlocked? I suspect that not only is this so, but that it is likely common for people to be very different in their capacity to perceive and imagine things in particular ways, to the extent that that certain kinds of thought may be impossible unless specific mental connections are made which allow these latent capacities to be unlocked.

Let's assume that people do reprieve the world in radically different ways, and that they also have very different capabilities in their ability to imagine things. There are many good reasons to do so, but the main reason I'm writing this in the first place is that I have personally experienced changes myself which have radically altered my own perception of the world, but naturally I can't expect to my anecdotes alone to convince people, so I will call to my aid the experiences of others, although I don't think it's as unusual as it might seem to suggest that some mental phenomena which might otherwise be commonly considered to be continuously variable actually have discreet phases. An already existing example of something possibly of this kind is perfect pitch, some people have it and can recognize absolute pitches intuitively and independently, while others do not; though in this instance I'm not aware of any piece of music that would actually require it in order to be fully appreciated, and since I don't have perfect pitch myself, I have no way of experiencing what it would be like to. In addition, some people have what might be called visual aphantasia [1], meaning that they have no "mind's eye" or visual plane on which to imagine things, so they could not actually, say, picture a bird in their head if you asked them to. Similarly, many people (mostly women, or more specifically, people with lower levels of androgens [2]) seemingly lack the ability to directly imagine rotatable 3D spaces that aren't currently in front of them. In addition to this, Clive Bell's theory of 'Significant Form' includes the proposition that certain people seem to be able to perceive 'Significant Form' [3] (the referenced article on which also contains a highly relevant section about Bell's relative of musical understanding) and experience its special kind of beauty aesthetically, while others seem to simply not be able to. In this way, visual perception and imagination apparently involves a number of different facets of awareness that may be active in radically different ways in different people. Some people will have some, while others will not. For yet another example, Bob Milne's [4] remarkable abilities may provide an example of a rarer kind of perceptual imagination. I have little doubt that an enormous quantity of argument has stemmed from people possessing different perceptions of reality and yet not being aware of the actual causes of this.

I believe that in addition to the kinds, there are other distinct levels of perceptive and imaginative abilities related to different senses and ways of combining them into ideas and feelings. In various music education circles there are references to certain ideas, that of training the 'inner ear' (i.e. a person's mental processing of sound), of appreciating 'pure musical' form of 'absolute music' and things of that nature, relating to the possibility of developing a person's ability to appreciate more complex combinations of sound than they are currently able to. The various references to phenomena of this nature make it clear that exposing listeners to various kinds of musical material and/or having them undergo forms of musical training in order to attune their ears to more advanced or exotic musical forms is a commonly accepted practice. It is also quite well observed that different cultures and cultural practices often produce very different types of music, which can sometimes be unintelligible to people who haven't grown up exposed to the specific circumstances that allow them to become immersed in a given musical culture.

Yet despite all this, there is a lot to be said about the specific nature of these mental differences that is not discussed and which there seems to be very little awareness of. Proponents of western classical music, for instance, are often perplexed as to why it is the case that their listenership has dwindled over the years leading up to the present and why so many people simply cannot stand listening to 'art music' in the first place. Many of these people also find that conversely, they themselves cannot bear the music that those who don't enjoy what they advocate listen to and find pop music (in a broad sense) to be unpalatable.

[1] https://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/medicalschool/research/neuroscience/docs/theeyesmind/Lives_without_imagery.pdf
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3270350/
[3] http://www.denisdutton.com/bell.htm
[4] http://www.radiolab.org/story/301427-head-full-symphonies/