4 ms·

A very important difference: someone who is good at throwing a basketball (or any sport, really) will "switch off" their brain while doing so. There's various w

A very important difference: someone who is good at throwing a basketball (or any sport, really) will "switch off" their brain while doing so. There's various words for this, e.g. "being in the zone". Ask the person to think about something while throwing, and they'll likely miss. It takes years of training to teach the brain to do the correct motions while " switched off". Using language, on the other hand, requires us to really think.

will_pseudonym 11y ago
Actually if you look at research done on freestyle rappers, you'll find similar mechanisms as those found in great basketball players. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/11/the-neuroanatomy-of-freestyle-rap/265414/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/11/the-neuroa... Being in a flow state seems very similar to being in the zone.
- mbrock 11y ago
  And then consider that freestyle rapping is a formally demanding way of speaking, and that speaking is something people do all the time without much mental effort. Impressive rappers can produce rhyming and alliterating verses in "flow" but a normal dinner conversation is in flow by default (depending on how neurotic your dinner guests are).
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
    Do the more neurotic dinner guests rhyme a lot?
mbrock 11y ago
Language doesn't seem to require conscious thought either. Philosophers like Heidegger and Wittgenstein talked about that a lot. The postulating of an internal thought process "behind" everything is basically what Heidegger spent his life refuting, from what I've read of Dreyfus's book... And Wittgenstein explains language as a tool that people use to get things done, more or less. You can talk without "really thinking", people do it all the time. Grammar is natural in that sense. Pinker's "The Language Instinct" mentions studies that show higher educated people in some situations tend to make more grammatical blunders and to be slightly less "fluent," maybe because of second guessing their language instincts. (Any errors in this comment due to the fact that I wrote it without thinking.)
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  I must admit I was thinking more about the mental process of constructing the content of e.g. an argument than of the process of putting the content into grammatically correct sentences. I completely agree you can talk, and even be gramatically correct, without really thinking.
bonzini 11y ago
> Using language, on the other hand, requires us to really think. I'm not sure I agree, not entirely at least. "Thinking while speaking" is something I associate to speaking a second language that you don't really master. Then you really think in one language, think about the translation, and speak. If I speak in my native language or in English, I don't think about the words I'm saying or about how I'm using the language, there's a much bigger component of instinct and thoughts can be much more impulsive.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> Using language, on the other hand, requires us to really think. Not consciously, no. I mean, do you really think about what you say when you speak in your native language, or do you just say it? It's actually a milestone in learning a foreign language - switching from thinking in native and translating into foreign to just thinking in foreign. If you find yourself running your internal monologue in a foreign language then you know your brain groks it. And generally, mastering a task means switching it to unconscious mode. A good driver doesn't consciously think about turning the steering wheels or pressing pedals; they think about car (or rather, car+themselves system) moving faster or slower, going here or there. A soldier is trained until most of his tasks are muscle memory. A programmer doing what they really knows how to do will find themselves in the state of flow, etc. Mastery of a task is mentally abstracting it into just another basic capacity, just like breathing or moving your hands.

will_pseudonym 11y ago

Actually if you look at research done on freestyle rappers, you'll find similar mechanisms as those found in great basketball players. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/11/the-neuroanatomy-of-freestyle-rap/265414/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/11/the-neuroa... Being in a flow state seems very similar to being in the zone.

mbrock 11y ago
And then consider that freestyle rapping is a formally demanding way of speaking, and that speaking is something people do all the time without much mental effort. Impressive rappers can produce rhyming and alliterating verses in "flow" but a normal dinner conversation is in flow by default (depending on how neurotic your dinner guests are).
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
  Do the more neurotic dinner guests rhyme a lot?

mbrock 11y ago

Language doesn't seem to require conscious thought either. Philosophers like Heidegger and Wittgenstein talked about that a lot. The postulating of an internal thought process "behind" everything is basically what Heidegger spent his life refuting, from what I've read of Dreyfus's book... And Wittgenstein explains language as a tool that people use to get things done, more or less. You can talk without "really thinking", people do it all the time. Grammar is natural in that sense. Pinker's "The Language Instinct" mentions studies that show higher educated people in some situations tend to make more grammatical blunders and to be slightly less "fluent," maybe because of second guessing their language instincts. (Any errors in this comment due to the fact that I wrote it without thinking.)

semi-extrinsic 11y ago
I must admit I was thinking more about the mental process of constructing the content of e.g. an argument than of the process of putting the content into grammatically correct sentences. I completely agree you can talk, and even be gramatically correct, without really thinking.

bonzini 11y ago

> Using language, on the other hand, requires us to really think. I'm not sure I agree, not entirely at least. "Thinking while speaking" is something I associate to speaking a second language that you don't really master. Then you really think in one language, think about the translation, and speak. If I speak in my native language or in English, I don't think about the words I'm saying or about how I'm using the language, there's a much bigger component of instinct and thoughts can be much more impulsive.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

> Using language, on the other hand, requires us to really think. Not consciously, no. I mean, do you really think about what you say when you speak in your native language, or do you just say it? It's actually a milestone in learning a foreign language - switching from thinking in native and translating into foreign to just thinking in foreign. If you find yourself running your internal monologue in a foreign language then you know your brain groks it. And generally, mastering a task means switching it to unconscious mode. A good driver doesn't consciously think about turning the steering wheels or pressing pedals; they think about car (or rather, car+themselves system) moving faster or slower, going here or there. A soldier is trained until most of his tasks are muscle memory. A programmer doing what they really knows how to do will find themselves in the state of flow, etc. Mastery of a task is mentally abstracting it into just another basic capacity, just like breathing or moving your hands.