I’m not quick going from words to meaning, and the limitations on my short term memory spam are also a problem. Something can be explained to me, but understanding can be completely blocked by this weakness. Understanding, in this case, means transiion of the datum from word space to meaning space.
I’m really quick going from meaning to meaning, but the transitions aren’t necessarily correct. Meaning space is like dreamspace — it follows its own rules for transitions, and those rules don’t conform to logical consistency.
In fact, I think dreamspace and meaning space are very similar, maybe at some level they are the same.
Transition is also another tricky word — what do I mean by that? I think I mean the flow of attention/awareness from one perspective to another. My awareness, as it were, surfs through the dark substrate of my mind like a firefly, a single firefly in an enormous darkness. The firely’s path is governed partly by its own relatively simple rules, and the content of the volume that it is illuminating. If I’m following a logical train of thought, the rules and the content are fairly well aligned, and progress follows a single path from state to state, with simple decision points. But if the content is non-logical, or if I’m asleep or tired or distracted and the firefly rules are relaxed, the transitions from place to place can be bizarre, incoherent, discontinuous, insane.
The enormous dark part of my mind isn’t quiescent, though — it is changing all the time on its own in ways that I will never understand. I won’t understand for several reasons: 1) there are many changes happening all the time, and I can only understand what’s directly before me; 2) the individual changes in many if not most cases are complex or subtle beyond my understanding; and 3) the changes may have a span far wider than my small firefly glow can illuminate.
But I have become aware of some of these changes over time. I know that my current self is different in many ways from previous versions, and sometimes I have been aware that a change was taking place, though I didn’t know (and I still don’t know) what actually was involved. I remember one case, for example, where the content of my actual visual field just changed. All the same information was still there before my eyes, but things looked different somehow — at the time I thought of it as a softening of edges, or perhaps more an awareness of soft edges that were always there, but I now noticed. Perhaps I also became more aware of pastel colors, and similar things. But it was much deeper than just a visual change — it was a thoroughgoing awareness of softness, of finer gradations, of the grays vs the black and whites. It all happened in a matter of seconds — my mind just changed (*)
(*) in the social realm, the wide spread acceptance of gay marriage was a similar phenomenon — society just changed, in a relatively short span of time — like the collective mind just sort of woke up and realized that getting worked up over this was a complete utter waste of time. In societies case the transition wasn’t complete or uniform — I’m sure that is true in my individual case, as well — my "lizard brain" keeps its uncivilized thinking style no matter what.