This is my post for day 3 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.

I think I’ve been making a mistake when learning history.

I rely strongly on visualization when I think. When I read fiction, I will naturally visualize everything happening. It doesn’t really even feel like an option; it just feels like part of what it means to be reading. It’s not photo-realistic or anything. In fact, it has the same kind of blurry sense that dreaming has. I assume it’s the exact same machinery.

When I read about history, I do the same thing. I naturally visualize the people and events that I’m reading about. Because, again, that just feels like part of what it means to be reading and understanding the content.

At some point it occurred to me that this modality of visualizing is, for me, different from what happens when I visually recall memories. It has a different feeling somehow. And maybe a different visual style; it’s hard to tell.

I would like to say that this realization happened from something like watching a historical movie, or seeing some of those colorized historical photos.

But I’m pretty sure that it actually happened because I’m now old enough that some of my actual memories are becoming historically relevant.

I’m being confronted with video from 9/11, or depictions of floppy disks, or visual styles changing and being like — hey, hang on. That’s not a historical artifact, that’s a thing that actually hap– and then, yeah, realizing that I’m that old. The quality of photography and video also changed noticeably as I grew up. So I can look at my own childhood photos and realize that even though they have a colorization characteristic of a particular decade, they did in fact happen, and I can compare that to my memories of them happening.

So it has occurred to me that I could try to extrapolate this effect in the opposite mode. (Of course, you can also try this even if you’re not old.) When you read about Darwin, don’t think of that one picture we’ve all seen where he has a long beard. Just try to imagine some actual professor you had, and maybe he happens to have a beard. Somehow, when I say to myself “visualize this as if you remember it” I get an actually different experience in my brain.

It makes it easier for the history I’m learning to connect up to all the mental models and beliefs I already have about real people that I have experienced. I’m more likely to consider that perhaps certain people throughout history may have been autistic like some of my friends, or warmly charismatic like some other friends, or narcissistic demagogues like some people whose choices I may have been witnessing unfold on the news in real time.

This bridging obviously gets way harder if the history in question is further away from my experience. If I wanted to really truly feel the cruelty of King Ashurbanipal slaughtering his enemies from a chariot, I’d have to do a fair bit of work to bring up the right “memory” visual. Not only because the chariots & armor would be foreign to me, but also because I’ve never seen anyone get slaughtered.

I probably can’t afford to do this for all the history I read, but I think it’s very valuable to do so for a select sample. I want my models of history to be fully integrated with my models of my life experiences. Human nature was not different in the past. I want to have fully informed beliefs about things like what disasters may come, and what people’s responses to that might look like.