[ Home | Contents | Search | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Jasper Garrison
T1: [email protected]
Category 3: Category 1
Date: 03 Aug 1999
Time: 09:11:12
Remote Name: ncache1.ford.com
Yeah Charlie -- good eye.
For me it was the row of tiles inside the gate on the edge of the dirt. They are more like half-tiles--rectangular rather than square--and they don't line up with the gate post.
The thing is, we are experts on this case. I am an expert in scale and proportion. Yet, it took a concentrated effort on your part and mine to figure out what anyone should have been able to see at a glance. You'd have to have the eye of an artist (like Mark Fuhrman) and a con man (like Fuhrman) to pull that off. It's the same eye that gave us Ron and Nicole facing each other in profile on their sides. Without this exchange, either of us might have decided at any given time that the letter and doll were on the inside or the outside of the gate and thought nothing else of it. It takes an eye for detail and an eye for artistic composition to do that. In fact, a techique taught in art school for checking the proportions of your drawings is to look at the surrounding shapes--
It just hit me: Ambidextous people like Fuhrman have much in common, perceptually, with dyslexics like me apart from any schooling in art and composition...
I have taken so-called creativity tests in which the object was to flip ambiguous drawings back and forth in your mind as quickly as possible. You've seen the drawing of the white vase in the center of the page which is also a black silhouette on the left and right of two people facing each other in profile, or the old woman with a large nose which can also be a young woman with a big hat. Those are the kinds of pictures I'm talking about. The faster your brain can make the adjustment from the vase to the faces flanking it, or the old woman and the young one, the more creative you're supposed to be. I doin't know why it's called a crativity test. It takes zero imgaination to do it. For dyslexicis like me, it's a struggle to keep anything that can be flipped around from doing so automatically. It's a real problem. Under the stress of a test the problem gets worse. That's the down-side for doing "simple" arithmatic. 6 and 9, 5 and 2, even 8 and 3 can look like the same numbers. Reading and writing require an extra step. Because we can't see things the way normal people do, we have to use logic to supplement our vision--to figure out what must be there from all of the context clues we can see. We would not make the best military officers or coropration executives because we pay too much attention to detail and it takes us too long to make up our minds.
The up-side of seeing things the way we do is that it makes us good problem-solvers. We notice things that other people don't have to notice to perform "simple" chores like telling right from left. We are therefore more likley to see possible solutions to problems in the flip side of things that most people never get around to looking at. We see patterns in everything because we need them to navigate. If we aren't careful, we can get so good that we don't think anyone can do what we can.
That's where Fuhrman hangs himself. The same patterns the killer left on the crime scene are repeated in Fuhrman's observations, his "solutions" and in the "tribute" he pays to the victims (take another look at what I what I was able to do with "Adam"). I know how Fuhrman solves complex problems because I do it the same way. But there are people just as smart as we are who don't have to rely on a hundred little tricks to keep from flipping things around. They can see some things we can't. There are mistakes we will make that they wont and by working together we can nail the bastard to the wall.--Jasper