In 1981 Niilo and I were visiting. As he sat on my couch he noticed a paperback on history of close to 400 pages in length. It had taken me six hours of dedicated reading from start to finish the book. Niilo picked up the book and began reading it. He was literally seeing whole pages in one glance. It took him 35 minutes to read and finish the book.
\nI then asked him questons about the book. He understood the book far better than I did so I asked him how he did it. Niilo said he had taught himself to read as a young boy after his mother used to read the comics
\nto him from newspapers of his day. Eventually Niilo was able to teach his
\nmind to see and read whole pages rather than individual words.
\nNiilo also described his ability to record complete conversations in his mind of up to three hours. He could repeat these conversations verbatim for several days, then would in effect erase the conversations in his mind to allow for other conversations to be recorded.
\nIn the mid 80s I was visiting Niilo while he was serving as an elected
\nrepresentative in Juneau. I caught up with him as he entered a budget hearing and decided to stay. Shortly after the hearings began I looked over at Niilo and his eyes were closed as if he were sleeping. Forty minutes into the hearing a question arose, someone asked Niilo if he knew the answer and without opening his eyes Niilo went on to give a detailed history of the problem then outlined several possible solutions.
\nFollowing the meeting I asked Niilo why he kept his eyes closed during the hearing when he obviously wasn\u2019t asleep. Niilo said by closing his eyes he was able to more fully concentrate on what was being said. In his own way he was recording the hearing.
\nI have always so enjoyed watching this amazing mind work. dick farris<\/p>\n
2008\/06\/20 at 3:35 PM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 1981 Niilo and I were visiting. As he sat on my couch he noticed a paperback on history of close to 400 pages in length. It had taken me six hours of dedicated reading from start to finish the book. Niilo picked up the book and began reading it. He was literally seeing whole […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/koponenalaska.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/koponenalaska.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/koponenalaska.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koponenalaska.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koponenalaska.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/koponenalaska.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/koponenalaska.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koponenalaska.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koponenalaska.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}