as I scanned a map of California my Aunt Hazel and Uncle George Jacob had loaned me and my wife, Karen, a few names of communities actually lifted off the page before I had consciously read the names. I had literally just opened the map. One was Bostonia, where my mother, Helen Mary Higbee Wheaton, was born. Another was Santee where my Aunt Gladys and Uncle Bob had lived. My Grandpa Higbee lived there as well. I lost track of the others. It was such a bizarre experience. It happened only one more time when I was looking at a book at Barnes and Noble shortly afterward in Ann Arbor. It was a quote about drowning. I was so taken back that I bought 2 copies of the book of quotes, but they are packed away since we moved to a condo. My sister, Joyce,before she died, said she experienced this once when an ancestor’s name lifted off a page when doing genealogical research. This was a very positive experience in contrast to when words move off the page when a child is struggling to read.The experience with immediately seeing the whole map without realizing it was a very strange experience. Historically I had trouble finding what I was looking for on maps. My field of focus was so narrow that I had trouble finding the name of roads I was searching for. And it was easier to use a yellow highlighter to see how to get from point A to point B. For this reason I began the habit of printing routes with all the correct turns using Mapquest or Google Maps.
This experience of seeing a whole map instantly at a glance reminds me of an amazing device called the Eyecon. I observed it at a pharmacy in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on March 28, 2008. A pharmacy technician scanned the bar code on a bottle of prescription medication and then poured lots of pills on a flat tray on top of this device. It instantly displayed how many tablets were on the tray; like 90 or 100 tablets. I had seen pill counters before but nothing like this.