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I think this depends a lot on the person. For example, my brain is apparently good at completely memorizing a biology book. I fill in gaps in my knowledge (whic

I think this depends a lot on the person. For example, my brain is apparently good at completely memorizing a biology book. I fill in gaps in my knowledge (which seems to exists as a series of images and animations in my head, call it a "world" model perhaps) with what I read. It all makes sense. Maths however... It takes me seemingly endless amounts of energy to grasp things. My PhD was in Biophysics, and my colleagues were mostly physicists and they felt the other way around. They didn't understand how it could be harder to derive almost everything from basic principles and techniques than to memorize a colorful story about how life works. Together we could do nice things though, me drawing pictures on one side of the white board, colleagues writing equations on the other side. It was a nice time.

albrewer 4y ago
> which seems to exists as a series of images and animations in my head, call it a "world" model perhaps This is how most things are in my mental model of almost all higher-order concepts and subject areas. Mostly for math, but also for programming/electronics, biology, chemistry, history, etc. The thing that usually stops me from forming this kind of picture is missing a fundamental concept, or not being able to conceptualize enough of them in my limited exposure to the subject. The thing to realize is that this isn't a thing that just happens, it's something you can build yourself as you're learning something. Since the visuospatial parts of your brain are the most powerful, it can be an enormously useful thing to do to fit subjects together and reason about them. Anecdotally, the "easiest" math/engineering classes I had in college were the ones with robust visual representations (control systems with the transfer function block diagrams and mechanism design with a simple graphical way to design linkages where we learned the math afterward).

albrewer 4y ago

> which seems to exists as a series of images and animations in my head, call it a "world" model perhaps This is how most things are in my mental model of almost all higher-order concepts and subject areas. Mostly for math, but also for programming/electronics, biology, chemistry, history, etc. The thing that usually stops me from forming this kind of picture is missing a fundamental concept, or not being able to conceptualize enough of them in my limited exposure to the subject. The thing to realize is that this isn't a thing that just happens, it's something you can build yourself as you're learning something. Since the visuospatial parts of your brain are the most powerful, it can be an enormously useful thing to do to fit subjects together and reason about them. Anecdotally, the "easiest" math/engineering classes I had in college were the ones with robust visual representations (control systems with the transfer function block diagrams and mechanism design with a simple graphical way to design linkages where we learned the math afterward).