I continue reading through Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” and he has some interesting thoughts on visual perception. Particularly, he has a bunch of mental experiments anyone can do where take abstract geometric shapes, and convert them into recognizable objects. For example…

Imagine the letter D. rotate it 90° to the right. Put the number 4 above it. Now remove the horizontal segment of the 4 to the right of the vertical line.

What should you see? A sailboat. (This, in and of itself, is pretty interesting. It’s not really a sailboat, of course; it’s a bare-bones outline of some of the shapes common to sail boats, and yet we recognize it as a sailboat.)

Here’s another…

Imagine the letter K. Place a square next to it on the left side. Put a circle inside the square. Now rotate the figure 90° to the left.

I had trouble with this one. It’s supposed to be a television set. Eventually I realized I wasn’t following the instructions — for whatever reason I was putting the square to the right side of the K.

The very fact that I made a mistake here got me thinking. Clearly my ability to design images in my mental space is not what it could be. And other people have similar issues — they can visualize an object in their minds eye, but have trouble rotating it, or flipping a top to bottom or synchronizing it with some other object in their visual space. And these might seem like pointless skills, but they’re pretty useful when it comes to reading a map, or mentally walking yourself through the process of driving from the dentist office to the library, or observing abstract art.

And we’re just talking about one sense. Your sense of hearing and touch etc. also require these kinds of subtle abilities. People with deficient hearing skills, for example, might have trouble differentiating one person’s voice from another’s.

You might call these skills “micro-skills.” There are the basic building blocks of the skills required to navigate your way through life. Up until this point in history, we’ve never really trained ourselves on these skills — we’ve just picked them up as we go along. But I’m wondering whether it might make sense to offer people “micro-skill education” — to educate them how to think and perceive better.