Perception

A friend and I were at a café, talking about the three typical ways of learning: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. A visual learner absorbs information by seeing, reading, or writing it; an auditory learner absorbs information by hearing or saying it; and a kinesthetic learner absorbs information by physically engaging in a task. People generally make use of all three modalities, but each of us tends to have one that predominates.

“Which are you?” she asked.

“I’m kinesthetic,” I said. “I usually learn best by doing.”

“No way you’re kinesthetic,” she said. “Kinesthetic people go out and use their bodies — they hike; they swim; they ski. You never even leave the house.”

She clearly knew me well. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the place where I could most often be found was sitting at my desk. Unless I had some specific reason to go out — to attend the theater or a concert, to spend time with a friend, or to go to work — my default was to stay home, sometimes for days at a time. As far as “doing” things, most of the tasks I engaged in, and certainly the ones I learned the most from, were done on my computer.

Does work accomplished electronically count as “doing”? I don’t know what the experts would say, but I’d claim that it does. In the early days of audiovisual production, I used to write in longhand, edit reel-to-reel tape with a razor blade, and use an X-Acto knife and hot wax to prepare mechanicals for printing. By the turn of the current century, I was doing all of those tasks on a screen. Either way, my learning process was the same: I’d observe how others accomplished a task, try it myself, and learn by trial and error. If my original learning style was kinesthetic, I’d have to say that my later-in-life learning was as well.

Even my way of engaging with written material is basically kinesthetic. When I worked in educational publishing, one of my responsibilities was to hire freelance writers to draft classroom materials. It often happened that after a writer submitted a manuscript, I’d read through it, decide it was OK, and give my approval for the writer to be paid. Then, when I sat down to edit what they had written, I’d find myself correcting a single sentence, then finding another sentence related to that one that had to be changed as a result, and eventually discovering whole chains of reasoning that didn’t make any sense. In essence, I couldn’t really see what the writer had been saying until I was inside the piece of writing, palpably pulling out words and sentences and replacing them with others.

If you’re willing to concede that kinesthetic learning can apply to virtual activities as well as physical ones, then I’d have to say that my entire approach to life is kinesthetic. It’s difficult for me to accept anything as real unless I’ve personally experienced it. If what I know intellectually is different from my own experience, I automatically give more weight to my experience.

I remember telling my psychotherapist about a worksite I would pass each day on my way to and from teaching, where a construction crew was building a highway overpass. As I watched the project progress over the course of a year, I had the sense that I was seeing something that was impossible.

“What do you mean by ‘impossible’?” he asked.

What I meant, I said, was that in my experience, something like that overpass couldn’t be built. Each member of the crew was a human being, and humans like me are fallible. Nothing I ever do or make comes out right the first time, and even repeated attempts can never result in anything perfect. People have good days and bad days, and on their bad days, when they’re unmotivated or preoccupied, they tend to do things sloppily or incompletely. On top of that, a project on such a large scale requires cooperation among many people, and we all know that interpersonal communication doesn’t work very well. Words are ineffective and subject to misinterpretation. Information passed from one person to another is bound to degrade. People’s feelings about one another affect their ability to work together. Plans made with even the best of expertise can never anticipate all of the real-world contingencies. Under those circumstances, how could anything as massive and complex as a freeway overpass be built?

My therapist took that as an opportunity to explain to me, in some detail, the process by which civil engineering projects are designed and constructed. His explanation was useless. I had to tell him that of course I understood the meaning of the words he was saying, and that they made perfect sense, but that they didn’t constitute a picture that felt real. Of course I know that a freeway overpass can be built; I drive on them all the time! But the process that he was describing seemed like magic to me.

He and I came to refer to this as “the freeway problem,” which severely limits my ability to participate in the world. For me, every institution — from business to government to community — feels like a freeway overpass. I see an input and an output, but what happens in between is a black box, essentially unknowable, because nothing I can imagine in there seems possible. Those who understand the inner workings of the black box try to explain it to me, but there’s nothing in my experience that matches up with their explanations. If I can’t feel it in my body, I can’t take it in. That’s why I tend to be most comfortable with jobs where I can do everything myself. As a faculty member at Chabot College, I was supposed to be heavily involved in the process of self-governance, and minutely aware of the details of how the institution functioned. Most of the meetings I had to attend dealt with large-scale organizational issues. It all went over my head, as if I were trying to watch a foreign-language movie without subtitles. The only place I felt comfortable and competent was in my classroom, where everything I was responsible for was physically present. I understand that most people don’t feel this way, but even that fact doesn’t feel tangible to me.