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One of the most important realizations I've had about dealing with other people is that "thinking" is a generic term and does not describe the same method of ac

by ken 7y ago

One of the most important realizations I've had about dealing with other people is that "thinking" is a generic term and does not describe the same method of action in everyone. As but a few examples: - Richard Feynman described an experiment he did to time himself counting to 60. He could do it while reading, but not talking. His friend John Tukey could talk while counting time, but not read. - Temple Grandin described thinking of a word as seeing every individual example of that item she's ever seen. - Some people claim to be visual thinkers, but there are blind people who are still perfectly able to think. Likewise with deafness. Clearly neither of these can be the only basis for thought. This was an "a-ha" moment that explained a lot of human behavior. For example, why does my manager put me in a noisy room and still expect me to write software, and propose "headphones" when I complain about the noise? He doesn't use silence as a scratch space for thinking. On the flip side, I don't understand why he cares if the lights are on. That's decidedly less important to me than whether we have extra toilet paper. This article does confirm that thinking is not merely talking to one's self, which seems obvious to me but apparently is not a universal belief. Questions like "Multi-linguals, what language do you think in?" puzzle me because I don't generally think in any language, up until the point where I need to generate words. It's like asking what language a(n instrumental) symphony is written in, or what the key signature is of a painting. The question is a type error.

friendlybus 7y ago
Another example is that some people describe thinking as needing to talk out a problem with others and if you can't speak freely you can't think. I don't know where the meeting point of all these descriptions of thinking meet, but we're rapidly just ending up with information in > information out.
goto_self 7y ago
> Some people claim to be visual thinkers, but there are blind people who are still perfectly able to think. Likewise with deafness. Clearly neither of these can be the only basis for thought. I don't dispute your conclusions, but I think you might be taking the idea of visual thought too literally. It doesn't necessarily mean a rendered view of a scene, but rather can encompass abstract visual-like spaces such as control flow graphs when thinking through the proof of a program's correctness
- ken 7y ago
  You may be right. Though, I recently ran across the concept of "aphantasia", e.g., [1]. Apparently not being able to visualize what my friends and family look like is not normal! Or being unable to recall colors. There's even this [2] "test", which claims that most people when told to imagine a red star will "see" an actual image, which I'm still trying to understand. I can think about control flow graphs in my head, but it's not exactly visual. (You could also represent any graph as a table, of course, but I don't think of it in tabular form, either.) The visual is more like the means of communication. Similarly, in math, equations and procedures aren't always how I do work, but they are often how I communicate what I've done. I wonder if that could be what other people mean when they speak of visualization. When I'm asked to compute 19*21, I'm not literally expanding (x-1)(x+1), but that's essentially what I'm doing, and if you asked me to explain, that's probably what I'd say. Thoughts are simply a different medium (than words or graphs or equations or music), and every serialization method I've tried so far is extremely lossy. [1]: https://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/cant-visualize-you-may-have-aphantasia.html https://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/cant-visualize-you-m... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_aphantasia_test/eepc14o/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_a...
patorjk 7y ago
When asking what language you think in, they're probably referring to your Internal Monologue [1]. Not everyone has one. It's kind of strange that some of us have it and others don't, it kind of makes me wonder how and why it evolved. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_monologue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_monologue

by ken 7y ago

friendlybus 7y ago

Another example is that some people describe thinking as needing to talk out a problem with others and if you can't speak freely you can't think. I don't know where the meeting point of all these descriptions of thinking meet, but we're rapidly just ending up with information in > information out.

goto_self 7y ago

> Some people claim to be visual thinkers, but there are blind people who are still perfectly able to think. Likewise with deafness. Clearly neither of these can be the only basis for thought. I don't dispute your conclusions, but I think you might be taking the idea of visual thought too literally. It doesn't necessarily mean a rendered view of a scene, but rather can encompass abstract visual-like spaces such as control flow graphs when thinking through the proof of a program's correctness

ken 7y ago
You may be right. Though, I recently ran across the concept of "aphantasia", e.g., [1]. Apparently not being able to visualize what my friends and family look like is not normal! Or being unable to recall colors. There's even this [2] "test", which claims that most people when told to imagine a red star will "see" an actual image, which I'm still trying to understand. I can think about control flow graphs in my head, but it's not exactly visual. (You could also represent any graph as a table, of course, but I don't think of it in tabular form, either.) The visual is more like the means of communication. Similarly, in math, equations and procedures aren't always how I do work, but they are often how I communicate what I've done. I wonder if that could be what other people mean when they speak of visualization. When I'm asked to compute 19*21, I'm not literally expanding (x-1)(x+1), but that's essentially what I'm doing, and if you asked me to explain, that's probably what I'd say. Thoughts are simply a different medium (than words or graphs or equations or music), and every serialization method I've tried so far is extremely lossy. [1]: https://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/cant-visualize-you-may-have-aphantasia.html https://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/cant-visualize-you-m... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_aphantasia_test/eepc14o/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_a...

patorjk 7y ago

When asking what language you think in, they're probably referring to your Internal Monologue [1]. Not everyone has one. It's kind of strange that some of us have it and others don't, it kind of makes me wonder how and why it evolved. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_monologue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_monologue