hardly picture anything at all: they remembered the scene as they would a poem, but they saw nothing. Mr. Galton also finds that form is pictured better than color; that a high degree of visualizing power is apt to be hereditary; that scientific men as a class are poor visualizers, owing to their busying themselves with abstractions and generalizations, in which such a faculty would be inconvenient and thus fail to be cultivated; and many other interesting conclusions. When properly trained, and prevented from checking the plastic growth of mind, this faculty should be as useful an educational aid as the possession of a strong memory; like the latter, it is no mark of high intellectual capacity, but can be made a means of attaining it.
Some extreme and almost abnormal forms of this visualizing power are interesting in this connection. Examples of its extreme development are found in chess-players who play many games at once while blindfolded; in orators who "see" the pages of their manuscript as they speak; in mechanicians who picture every detail of construction and action of a machine in process of invention; in "lightning-calculators," who do their work on an imaginary blackboard; in artists painting a portrait or copying a painting from memory; and in countless others. Perhaps the crowning example is that of two chess-players, both gifted in this way, who could play a game of chess as they walked the streets; each announcing his move, and securely and readily picturing the result on their imaginary chess-board.
A strange development of this faculty (which, when it occurs, occurs almost always in conjunction with a strong visualizing power) is seen in certain imperative associations between colors or forms and sounds. The most common example is what Mr. Galton terms a "number-form." Many persons, when hearing or even thinking of a number or of a series of numbers, see these numbers arranged in definite shapes in a definite part of space. Some see them in the form of a circle; some as a broken line, the numbers 10, 12, 20, and 100 usually standing at the angles; and others have a variety of more complex and fantastic shapes. The letters of the alphabet—especially the vowels—the names of the months, of the days of the week, of persons and places, musical sounds, and so on, are associated in this realistic way with forms and colors. One gentleman has actually a whole alphabet of sound-colors, and can paint the sounds of v-i-s-u-a-l-i-z-a-t-i-o-n in colors, or read words out of wall-paper patterns.[1]
That such powers easily shade into the morbid is not hard to believe. Many of the chess-players who play blindfolded are
- ↑ Further examples and much interesting information are to be found in Mr. Galton's papers, loc. cit. (where are also illustrative diagrams and plates), and in "Zwangsempfindungen durch Licht und Schall," by Bleuler and Lehmann, 1881, a small monograph.
