
However, of most note to parents of special needs kids was this bit from This Is Your Brain On Manga:
and played But as a Westerner without deep experience with manga, I displayed the hallmarks of what we might call a "prose mind." My eyes herked and jerked across each page, stopping to linger over any text I encountered — almost as if I were scouting for words rather than absorbing pictures. a Then he asked one of his research assistants, 29-year-old NakamichiKeito, to step up. Keito was asked to read a passage from Yanki-kunMegane-chan, a series he doesn't usually follow. When NakazawaKeito's video, it was a revelation. His eyes slalomed smoothly from page edge to page edge, rarely stopping at the text. In fact, there were portions of pages that his eyes never touched — because, as Nakazawa explained, Keito was either processing the words through his peripheral vision or simply imputing what was there. Like a seasoned skier, he moved with great speed yet remained acutely aware of his surroundings.As a parent of an Auspie, I'm now thinking about manga differently.
Keito has a "manga mind," capable of understanding context, supplying missing information, and interpreting word and image as one.
While I originally barely tolerated anime, I did learn to twist that obsession of hers into the manga books -- hey, it was some form of reading. (And it did reignite her passion for reading after a several year hiatus.) But now I wonder if this "manga mind" thing, where a person views and interprets differently, is some key to further understanding how my daughter receives information.
Perhaps it will lead to more insight. Perhaps not.
But it does mean I will be moving more quickly on screening the piles of manga books and anime videos I have laying about the house.
2 comments:
Hi, I'm the person who wrote the blog on comics that you quoted. I'm glad you liked it. I honestly don't know the first thing about the reading habits of children with special needs, but I will say that reading comics when I was young was definitely helpful to me for HOW it made me see the world, and how I constructed images of plain text. Meaning --I can remember being frustrated in Grammar school Reading classes because simple short (text) stories didn't provide enough information. I couldn't imagine what was being described as easily. With comics, one is given visual cues --even if it is a simple "establishing shot" of , say, a castle, I could then imagine the castle better. But because I read comics I COULD imagine the castle even without any "establishing shot" or at least thought I could "see" it better because I had this sort of need to be able to "see" it clearly. I've always thought that reading comics as a child did wonders for my ability to sort and re-imagine information in my brain. And as someone who reads alot of books (not comics) I feel that everyday I still exercise this unique perspective because of HOW comics shaped my reading habits. Good luck with everything. All the best --Frank
Thanks so much for stopping by! I appreciate you adding your thoughts to my musings... Esp since I'm not sure they mean much of anything ;) I did leave you a comment too...
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