7 ms·

I strongly suspect this effect is correlated with a weakness in short-term or working memory. Independent of general intelligence is the necessity for those wit

I strongly suspect this effect is correlated with a weakness in short-term or working memory. Independent of general intelligence is the necessity for those with a weak short-term or working memory to compensate by relying on long-term, in depth understanding in order to JIT the necessary short-term structures into being on the spot, (often repeatedly as these images decay rapidly) in order to solve a problem. Whereas those with a short-term memory advantage can simply rely on memorized sets of arbitrary relationships to address the problem. In other words if you have a weak short-term or working memory you have to, by necessity, deeply think through everything - whether simple or complex. This may allow spotting the rare inconsistency or opportunity others may not, but as it comes at a performance and time penalty which, under circumstances commonly encountered in one's educational career (timed examinations) it more typically results in filtering such people out of fields where excursive, highly lateral modes of thinking would be beneficial. To survive this filter one must either acquire (or be gifted with) the talent of exceptionally swift traversal of a large and heterogeneous general knowledge graph, as one cannot rely on a handful of tightly knit but relatively isolated silos of memorized specialization.

coldblues 3y ago
A lot of replies here talk about short term memory, needing to truly understand information on a deep level and have the "why?" question answered, using software to externalize information and a lot more that I can't really mention right now on a phone in the middle of the night browsing HN and coming across this gem. A lot of this stuff seems highly related to ADHD. I exhibit them, and have done quite some amateur research myself on these behaviors and others seem to relate as well. P.S: I am also an i3wm user btw ;)
growingkittens 3y ago
I have a childhood brain injury that affects my working memory and sequencing ability, among other things. I think in pictures with a verbal commentary, although words disappear soon after I think them. My brain stores information everywhere it can fit: in emotions, music, patterns, movement, etc. Interpreting reality is fraught with error. You describe the effect very well. I am working on a personal knowledge system to compensate. What are your ideas on this subject? Popular PKS systems expect the user to adapt to "the system," rather than adapting to the user's particular set of needs. I consider each user to be a unique combination of common components.
binnacle 3y ago
I strongly relate to your analysis, as I have often found myself overwhelmed due to a lack of working memory capacity, which has often resulted in failing a whiteboard interview, or being unable to provide a short answer to a question that I have never thought about before. I am more comfortable with deep thinking, or reflection, which allows me to come up with more complex analysis, while this process translates quite well when I have homework challenges. I used to test some of my mental capacity with pseudo-IQ tests and realized that the factor that would penalize me the most was lack of time.
maximus-decimus 3y ago
Everything I've read about IQ says that short-term memory correlates to long-term memory. Well, except for the fact short-term memory goes down from the age of 25 and long-term memory goes down only much later around 60.
diego_sandoval 3y ago
Interesting. I've always hypothesized the opposite: IQ is basically the same as working memory. If you do a quick search for "IQ vs working memory", all the results show a positive correlation. On the other hand, if my hypothesis was true, we would have discovered it already, so it's probably wrong.
aendruk 3y ago
The way I’ve always thought about it is having a small working memory has forced me to approach problems algorithmically from an early age. For small to medium sized problems this puts me at a speed disadvantage, but when problems grow large enough to exhaust everyone’s working memory, the wholistic thinkers stumble while I am at home.
purplepatrick 3y ago
Hmm. So, we don’t know if working and short term memory are even the same thing. We also cannot say for sure that the same type of processes would be handled by short term and long term memory, so it’s not clear that you can substitute one for the other or for the same stuff. Both memories could just be feeding working memory and other structures for processing but serve different things. It also may well be that the opposite is true — STM is prioritized by people who haven’t learned to properly recruit for profound structures. Speed may well have been a survival advantage a million years ago, but it’s not clear that this hasn’t changed since. We also don’t know if the computing model of the brain is even appropriate at all. Humans have always assumed that the latest state of technology can represent the brain: clay and waterworks, mechanics, computers, etc. At the end of the day, we don’t know how much we actually know about how the brain works because we don’t know what we don’t know…
visarga 3y ago
This explanation fits me to a T.
Solvency 3y ago
I struggled in math in HS for this reason. Every time a concept was presented to me I felt like I needed to deeply understand it at the most universally root level and create a painstaking mental model of it, to a degree that I imposed on myself for some inexplicable reason. To answer "but WHY". Almost like a form of self-sabotage in hindsight because I think there are decreasing returns in "truly, deeply" grokking math if you're not going to be pursuing math as a career. But I also abhor rote memorization. Not because I don't think it's valuable, I just hate extremely repetitive tasks. Close friends of mine with zero interest in the subject just took everything at face level and preferred to rote memorize everything and slap it down as needed. And they tested much better than I did. Neither I or they are more intelligent than one another and these days we all excel at our own areas we enjoy. But for that subject in particular, in a rushed classroom standardized testing situation, I think their approach was "better".
- painted-now 3y ago
  I had a very similar experience studying physics and I still have some form of that in my current job as software engineer working on a quite large code base: I really can't operate on things for which I don't have a deep intuition. If I really have to treat something as a blackbox, I need to explicitly spell out the assumptions and "compress them enough" (which is actually probably also just about building an intuition on those assumptions). I envy people a lot that can just "copy & paste" some knowledge in their thinking. I think I now got to the point where I accepted that to be a part of me and made it "my brand" and I see that I can add value with being different in this aspect. I often wonder how it must feel like to be able to "copy paste" knowledge. If you painstakingly have to sweat through all kinds of things that others can just "copy&paste", it can feel like others are "cheating" - but in the end it's just me being jealous.
- noisy_boy 3y ago
  This is like reading my life story. I dropped out of my masters in Statistics because after a point, I had questions and due to circumstances, couldn't find answers by myself and couldn't find help (this is before the days of youtube explosion). Eventually through serendipitous circumstances, I enrolled in a computer course and realized that I no longer had this "why" problem anymore when it came to programming - I could get answers quickly AND it allowed me to express myself the way I wanted. Didn't turn back after that.
bowenjin 3y ago
In my experience short term and long term memory recall speed and accuracy are strongly correlated. It's unlikely someone will be able to swiftly traverse a large long term memory graph, in a manner that would allow you to derive deep insights not just recalling a single piece of information, but have a poor short term memory. However I do believe long term memory is more robust so if you're in a mentally compromised state, such as having a headache, it will be less affected. So if you have to work through a hard problem on a deadline but have a headache, you can rely on heuristics stored in long term memory rather than deriving everything in short term memory.
- nwienert 3y ago
  Correlated but at what level of the bell curve? I think they are correlated but vary a lot within similar bands, to the point where the broad correlation is actually not interesting and the within-band correlation is much more so. Adding on, there's a definite weird trade off going on between memory and creativity that I think is very under-appreciated. I think memory acts as a bind on creativity, and it's really easy to make this intuitive with any number of examples whether it be youth or marijuana/psychedelics. When you reduce your ability to access memory you seem to gain an ability to explore new spaces. Likewise the more you learn and build structures in your brain around concepts, the harder it is to accept and process novelties. Feels like there's some similar trade offs going on as with this deep vs fast thinking.
fwungy 3y ago
My big stumble in math came when I stopped being able to self-prove everything I saw. At some point you must memorize in math.
- chongli 3y ago
  You have to remember things in math. You don’t have to memorize by rote. I’m very close to finishing a degree in pure and computational math and I’ve never sat down to consciously memorize anything. I don’t really study much for exams either. I just work on the assignments and then show up and do my best for the exams. My grades are pretty much average but they’re not a priority for me. For me, memorizing math means just working on problems until the theorems and definitions are like muscle memory. I know other people get by on flash cards but I can’t stand them. Heck, I just wrote a midterm in network flow theory today and they gave us a sheet with all the theorems and definitions in the course up to this point. Needless to say, memorizing that sheet wouldn’t help you at all on the proofs. You have to actually practice writing proofs to get good at it.
- anyfoo 3y ago
  That point is very early. Math finally really took off for me when I realized that, no, it's not enough to understand an equation, or a set of requirements, etc., when I'm introduced to it. I have to actually memorize it. Literally with a flashcard app that I open every day. By rote memorization, it is available in my head immediately, and I can use it to reason through things, without having to derive anything. It helps tremendously. Then, at some point, it will become so familiar and understood through working with it, that the rote memorization becomes superfluous. For example, I've worked with the Laplace Transforms and the various Fourier Transforms (FS, FT, DFT, DTFT) so intensely by now, that I can absolutely just recite them by concept and understanding of why they are what they are. But until then, rote memorization is basically a necessary tool to work with math. The moment that made me realize that was when I saw a math genius at university, one who clearly understood the topics extremely well, going through his flashcards.
  - dvwobuq 3y ago
    I can entirely relate to this. About three weeks into my first undergraduate class on abstract algebra, it dawned on me that the instructor wasn't giving me math tests. He was giving me vocabulary tests. In that class, most of the answers to questions flow straight from the definitions. Once I broke out the flashcards and started memorizing definitions, that class became almost trivial. I used flashcards in all my classes after that to memorize terms, definitions, and concepts. Math and engineering are, for me anyway, like a foreign language. To converse in that language fluently, one must be very comfortable with the vocabulary. It just makes sense.
tikhonj 3y ago
My pet theory is that this is closely related to the "two cultures" in mathematics with "problem solvers" vs "theory builders": is it easier for you to put more strain on your working memory to solve a problem, or would you rather put in more up-front conceptual effort to reduce that strain? I'm not a mathematician, but I've seen a similar bifurcation in programming styles and preferences: something like "debuggers" vs "abstraction builders". Would you rather have less to learn up front at the expense of needing to track more details as you're working, or would you rather spend time learning or developing a conceptual foundation to reduce ongoing pressure on your working memory? I figure this is why discussions about keeping programming "simple" are so unproductive: people end up talking past each other because one camp values reducing up-front complexity, the other reducing ongoing complexity, but everybody talks about it as if there's only one simple–complex dimension.
- growingkittens 3y ago
  A distinction you might find interesting: Systemic thinking - considering the system as a whole. Systematic thinking - considering the components of a system step-by-step.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  It's not that people disagree about which approach is more effective, it's about whether the person cares more about theory or practice (or in what balance, people are not binary). The theory hat doesn't like practice, and says "theory improves practice" as a fig leaf. The practice hat doesn't like theory, and says "practice improves theory" as a fig leaf. Of course both are important at a global scale. But one person can focus on one side and make an contribution.
- hawski 3y ago
  I think I am almost grasping what you are saying, but am not sure. Those short memory people (who I think I may be among) that GP said about relate to which group of mathematicians and programmers? I am one of those that prefer to reduce complexity and prefer lower level programming. I think that such a type of person likes C for example.
beepbopboopp 3y ago
This is a really interesting idea. I throw some money toward seeing this hypothesis tested or further explored. Ben Stiller do it meme
ldehaan 3y ago
[dead]
MSFT_Edging 3y ago
I've always felt like I have awful short term memory. I use tiling WMs so I can see information side-by-side. If I need to type something exactly, I forget the exact details almost immediately. I need to derive things to understand them, ie music theory. I'm jealous of people who can memorize and take at face value but if I'm looking at a chord, I need to know the components that create that chord, which gets frustrating because music has a lot of rules that seem to be based on vibe and closeness. Two things can be identical but distinct based on their context. It used to take me 2-3x as long to do homeworks or labs compared to other classmates. Same with work assignments. It often triggers an imposter syndrome type feeling. Yet I have proof that I'm capable of solving complex problems, I understand certain things almost immediately compared to others, other things I need to study for a long time. I tend to rarely know an answer on the spot, but I know how to determine many things, by knowing how to find the information needed. I don't pretend to be a genius, but I have proof via a degree, others opinions of me, and material results that basically say I'm intelligent to a point. Once I get into a flow I can retain a fairly complex system in my head but before or after that state, it's a terrible blur where I can barely focus my eyes.
- ilc 3y ago
  Source: Principal Software Engineer, 25+ YOE. You are far smarter than you think. Learn to get into flow, and also figure out how to get your state back faster... Once you do, it is a super power. Simple things like leaving your editor/IDE open, create the same situation you left. I personally use music + IEMs to help me block sound and focus. -30-35 DB off the IEMs, and +70DB off my music... yeah, I don't hear anything. I learned the editor trick recently, though I'd probably done it un-intentionally for years. I stopped, and I was wondering what the inertia I was facing was. It is only 2-3m to get setup... that's 2-3m to lose my thoughts, etc. Good luck.
  - cookiengineer 3y ago
    The reason I love vim and i3/kitty so much as a combination is exactly this. I have 4 monitors in the exact state I left them when I get back, with the last TODO comments I added and what the problem was (that I thought about deeply overnight). For me the best way to get into the flow is by directly getting back to where I left. If I take time to wake up, make breakfast or anything else I usually lost my ideas already and it takes me hours to get back to them.
ajkjk 3y ago
Agree with this; also, it feels like you are reading out the same theories I have somewhere in my brain and that's a weird sensation. A related theory: being good at math, especially mental math, correlates with aphantasia (not being able to see pictures in your head). People who can see images in their head learn to do arithmetic early on with visual algorithms, which are fundamentally not good for understanding as well as rather error-prone (because the brain remembers gestalts, not finicky details like where a decimal is). Aphantasiacs are forced to learn to do math differently, and use some different part of the brain as 'scratch space'. In my case it's the language brain: calculations which are set aside live in the same part of your brain that can repeat what was said a moment to you without understanding it. Turns out, though, that this verbal part is quite _accurate_ at remembering things, and this makes it easier to juggle multi-step calculations without paper.
- xigency 3y ago
  > A related theory: being good at math, especially mental math, correlates with aphantasia (not being able to see pictures in your head) This is the kind of condition I wonder if I have. Because on one hand, if I do a visualization exercise I would describe it as foggy at best. Then again, I struggle to understand how our brains could be wired that differently from person to person, that we could have or lack certain mental senses. I would suggest that everyone has some latent capability, whether they recognize it or not. After all the visual cortex is quite important. In the context of your example, those good at mental math might see a chalkboard like image of the problem with all the detail. Those who struggle might be distracted visualizing the items that are being counted themselves, and all their detail. For another riddle, consider the question of whether one recognizes their thoughts as an internal monologue or not, and how that relates to communication and action.
  - ajkjk 3y ago
    I would emphasize that people who are good at mental math tend to not see a chalkboard, while those are less good at it tend to. Relying on visualization is, I have noticed from asking around, a weakness. Of course it's just anecdotal but the pattern seems pretty pronounced to me. (I polled a hundred people at one point and saw this pattern reflected in the responses) I agree, though, that visualization is probably latent even in people who can't do it. I notice it when half asleep for instance.
brazzledazzle 3y ago
Am I projecting or does this sound like an compensating strategies for an intelligent person with an executive dysfunction disorder?
- coldblues 3y ago
  To someone with ADHD (me) it does look like it. I seem to be one of the few people who want to discuss the correlation between ADHD and all of these traits, but unfortunately one of my replies didn't garner the attention I wanted.
  - brazzledazzle 3y ago
    Yeah same here. I sometimes wonder if these coping strategies result in a late diagnosis (if diagnosed at all).

coldblues 3y ago

A lot of replies here talk about short term memory, needing to truly understand information on a deep level and have the "why?" question answered, using software to externalize information and a lot more that I can't really mention right now on a phone in the middle of the night browsing HN and coming across this gem. A lot of this stuff seems highly related to ADHD. I exhibit them, and have done quite some amateur research myself on these behaviors and others seem to relate as well. P.S: I am also an i3wm user btw ;)

growingkittens 3y ago

I have a childhood brain injury that affects my working memory and sequencing ability, among other things. I think in pictures with a verbal commentary, although words disappear soon after I think them. My brain stores information everywhere it can fit: in emotions, music, patterns, movement, etc. Interpreting reality is fraught with error. You describe the effect very well. I am working on a personal knowledge system to compensate. What are your ideas on this subject? Popular PKS systems expect the user to adapt to "the system," rather than adapting to the user's particular set of needs. I consider each user to be a unique combination of common components.

binnacle 3y ago

I strongly relate to your analysis, as I have often found myself overwhelmed due to a lack of working memory capacity, which has often resulted in failing a whiteboard interview, or being unable to provide a short answer to a question that I have never thought about before. I am more comfortable with deep thinking, or reflection, which allows me to come up with more complex analysis, while this process translates quite well when I have homework challenges. I used to test some of my mental capacity with pseudo-IQ tests and realized that the factor that would penalize me the most was lack of time.

maximus-decimus 3y ago

Everything I've read about IQ says that short-term memory correlates to long-term memory. Well, except for the fact short-term memory goes down from the age of 25 and long-term memory goes down only much later around 60.

diego_sandoval 3y ago

Interesting. I've always hypothesized the opposite: IQ is basically the same as working memory. If you do a quick search for "IQ vs working memory", all the results show a positive correlation. On the other hand, if my hypothesis was true, we would have discovered it already, so it's probably wrong.

aendruk 3y ago

The way I’ve always thought about it is having a small working memory has forced me to approach problems algorithmically from an early age. For small to medium sized problems this puts me at a speed disadvantage, but when problems grow large enough to exhaust everyone’s working memory, the wholistic thinkers stumble while I am at home.

purplepatrick 3y ago

Hmm. So, we don’t know if working and short term memory are even the same thing. We also cannot say for sure that the same type of processes would be handled by short term and long term memory, so it’s not clear that you can substitute one for the other or for the same stuff. Both memories could just be feeding working memory and other structures for processing but serve different things. It also may well be that the opposite is true — STM is prioritized by people who haven’t learned to properly recruit for profound structures. Speed may well have been a survival advantage a million years ago, but it’s not clear that this hasn’t changed since. We also don’t know if the computing model of the brain is even appropriate at all. Humans have always assumed that the latest state of technology can represent the brain: clay and waterworks, mechanics, computers, etc. At the end of the day, we don’t know how much we actually know about how the brain works because we don’t know what we don’t know…

visarga 3y ago

This explanation fits me to a T.

Solvency 3y ago

I struggled in math in HS for this reason. Every time a concept was presented to me I felt like I needed to deeply understand it at the most universally root level and create a painstaking mental model of it, to a degree that I imposed on myself for some inexplicable reason. To answer "but WHY". Almost like a form of self-sabotage in hindsight because I think there are decreasing returns in "truly, deeply" grokking math if you're not going to be pursuing math as a career. But I also abhor rote memorization. Not because I don't think it's valuable, I just hate extremely repetitive tasks. Close friends of mine with zero interest in the subject just took everything at face level and preferred to rote memorize everything and slap it down as needed. And they tested much better than I did. Neither I or they are more intelligent than one another and these days we all excel at our own areas we enjoy. But for that subject in particular, in a rushed classroom standardized testing situation, I think their approach was "better".

painted-now 3y ago
I had a very similar experience studying physics and I still have some form of that in my current job as software engineer working on a quite large code base: I really can't operate on things for which I don't have a deep intuition. If I really have to treat something as a blackbox, I need to explicitly spell out the assumptions and "compress them enough" (which is actually probably also just about building an intuition on those assumptions). I envy people a lot that can just "copy & paste" some knowledge in their thinking. I think I now got to the point where I accepted that to be a part of me and made it "my brand" and I see that I can add value with being different in this aspect. I often wonder how it must feel like to be able to "copy paste" knowledge. If you painstakingly have to sweat through all kinds of things that others can just "copy&paste", it can feel like others are "cheating" - but in the end it's just me being jealous.
noisy_boy 3y ago
This is like reading my life story. I dropped out of my masters in Statistics because after a point, I had questions and due to circumstances, couldn't find answers by myself and couldn't find help (this is before the days of youtube explosion). Eventually through serendipitous circumstances, I enrolled in a computer course and realized that I no longer had this "why" problem anymore when it came to programming - I could get answers quickly AND it allowed me to express myself the way I wanted. Didn't turn back after that.

bowenjin 3y ago

In my experience short term and long term memory recall speed and accuracy are strongly correlated. It's unlikely someone will be able to swiftly traverse a large long term memory graph, in a manner that would allow you to derive deep insights not just recalling a single piece of information, but have a poor short term memory. However I do believe long term memory is more robust so if you're in a mentally compromised state, such as having a headache, it will be less affected. So if you have to work through a hard problem on a deadline but have a headache, you can rely on heuristics stored in long term memory rather than deriving everything in short term memory.

nwienert 3y ago
Correlated but at what level of the bell curve? I think they are correlated but vary a lot within similar bands, to the point where the broad correlation is actually not interesting and the within-band correlation is much more so. Adding on, there's a definite weird trade off going on between memory and creativity that I think is very under-appreciated. I think memory acts as a bind on creativity, and it's really easy to make this intuitive with any number of examples whether it be youth or marijuana/psychedelics. When you reduce your ability to access memory you seem to gain an ability to explore new spaces. Likewise the more you learn and build structures in your brain around concepts, the harder it is to accept and process novelties. Feels like there's some similar trade offs going on as with this deep vs fast thinking.

fwungy 3y ago

My big stumble in math came when I stopped being able to self-prove everything I saw. At some point you must memorize in math.

chongli 3y ago
You have to remember things in math. You don’t have to memorize by rote. I’m very close to finishing a degree in pure and computational math and I’ve never sat down to consciously memorize anything. I don’t really study much for exams either. I just work on the assignments and then show up and do my best for the exams. My grades are pretty much average but they’re not a priority for me. For me, memorizing math means just working on problems until the theorems and definitions are like muscle memory. I know other people get by on flash cards but I can’t stand them. Heck, I just wrote a midterm in network flow theory today and they gave us a sheet with all the theorems and definitions in the course up to this point. Needless to say, memorizing that sheet wouldn’t help you at all on the proofs. You have to actually practice writing proofs to get good at it.
anyfoo 3y ago
That point is very early. Math finally really took off for me when I realized that, no, it's not enough to understand an equation, or a set of requirements, etc., when I'm introduced to it. I have to actually memorize it. Literally with a flashcard app that I open every day. By rote memorization, it is available in my head immediately, and I can use it to reason through things, without having to derive anything. It helps tremendously. Then, at some point, it will become so familiar and understood through working with it, that the rote memorization becomes superfluous. For example, I've worked with the Laplace Transforms and the various Fourier Transforms (FS, FT, DFT, DTFT) so intensely by now, that I can absolutely just recite them by concept and understanding of why they are what they are. But until then, rote memorization is basically a necessary tool to work with math. The moment that made me realize that was when I saw a math genius at university, one who clearly understood the topics extremely well, going through his flashcards.
- dvwobuq 3y ago
  I can entirely relate to this. About three weeks into my first undergraduate class on abstract algebra, it dawned on me that the instructor wasn't giving me math tests. He was giving me vocabulary tests. In that class, most of the answers to questions flow straight from the definitions. Once I broke out the flashcards and started memorizing definitions, that class became almost trivial. I used flashcards in all my classes after that to memorize terms, definitions, and concepts. Math and engineering are, for me anyway, like a foreign language. To converse in that language fluently, one must be very comfortable with the vocabulary. It just makes sense.

tikhonj 3y ago

My pet theory is that this is closely related to the "two cultures" in mathematics with "problem solvers" vs "theory builders": is it easier for you to put more strain on your working memory to solve a problem, or would you rather put in more up-front conceptual effort to reduce that strain? I'm not a mathematician, but I've seen a similar bifurcation in programming styles and preferences: something like "debuggers" vs "abstraction builders". Would you rather have less to learn up front at the expense of needing to track more details as you're working, or would you rather spend time learning or developing a conceptual foundation to reduce ongoing pressure on your working memory? I figure this is why discussions about keeping programming "simple" are so unproductive: people end up talking past each other because one camp values reducing up-front complexity, the other reducing ongoing complexity, but everybody talks about it as if there's only one simple–complex dimension.

growingkittens 3y ago
A distinction you might find interesting: Systemic thinking - considering the system as a whole. Systematic thinking - considering the components of a system step-by-step.
hgsgm 3y ago
It's not that people disagree about which approach is more effective, it's about whether the person cares more about theory or practice (or in what balance, people are not binary). The theory hat doesn't like practice, and says "theory improves practice" as a fig leaf. The practice hat doesn't like theory, and says "practice improves theory" as a fig leaf. Of course both are important at a global scale. But one person can focus on one side and make an contribution.
hawski 3y ago
I think I am almost grasping what you are saying, but am not sure. Those short memory people (who I think I may be among) that GP said about relate to which group of mathematicians and programmers? I am one of those that prefer to reduce complexity and prefer lower level programming. I think that such a type of person likes C for example.

beepbopboopp 3y ago

This is a really interesting idea. I throw some money toward seeing this hypothesis tested or further explored. Ben Stiller do it meme

ldehaan 3y ago

[dead]

MSFT_Edging 3y ago

I've always felt like I have awful short term memory. I use tiling WMs so I can see information side-by-side. If I need to type something exactly, I forget the exact details almost immediately. I need to derive things to understand them, ie music theory. I'm jealous of people who can memorize and take at face value but if I'm looking at a chord, I need to know the components that create that chord, which gets frustrating because music has a lot of rules that seem to be based on vibe and closeness. Two things can be identical but distinct based on their context. It used to take me 2-3x as long to do homeworks or labs compared to other classmates. Same with work assignments. It often triggers an imposter syndrome type feeling. Yet I have proof that I'm capable of solving complex problems, I understand certain things almost immediately compared to others, other things I need to study for a long time. I tend to rarely know an answer on the spot, but I know how to determine many things, by knowing how to find the information needed. I don't pretend to be a genius, but I have proof via a degree, others opinions of me, and material results that basically say I'm intelligent to a point. Once I get into a flow I can retain a fairly complex system in my head but before or after that state, it's a terrible blur where I can barely focus my eyes.

ilc 3y ago
Source: Principal Software Engineer, 25+ YOE. You are far smarter than you think. Learn to get into flow, and also figure out how to get your state back faster... Once you do, it is a super power. Simple things like leaving your editor/IDE open, create the same situation you left. I personally use music + IEMs to help me block sound and focus. -30-35 DB off the IEMs, and +70DB off my music... yeah, I don't hear anything. I learned the editor trick recently, though I'd probably done it un-intentionally for years. I stopped, and I was wondering what the inertia I was facing was. It is only 2-3m to get setup... that's 2-3m to lose my thoughts, etc. Good luck.
- cookiengineer 3y ago
  The reason I love vim and i3/kitty so much as a combination is exactly this. I have 4 monitors in the exact state I left them when I get back, with the last TODO comments I added and what the problem was (that I thought about deeply overnight). For me the best way to get into the flow is by directly getting back to where I left. If I take time to wake up, make breakfast or anything else I usually lost my ideas already and it takes me hours to get back to them.

ajkjk 3y ago

Agree with this; also, it feels like you are reading out the same theories I have somewhere in my brain and that's a weird sensation. A related theory: being good at math, especially mental math, correlates with aphantasia (not being able to see pictures in your head). People who can see images in their head learn to do arithmetic early on with visual algorithms, which are fundamentally not good for understanding as well as rather error-prone (because the brain remembers gestalts, not finicky details like where a decimal is). Aphantasiacs are forced to learn to do math differently, and use some different part of the brain as 'scratch space'. In my case it's the language brain: calculations which are set aside live in the same part of your brain that can repeat what was said a moment to you without understanding it. Turns out, though, that this verbal part is quite _accurate_ at remembering things, and this makes it easier to juggle multi-step calculations without paper.

xigency 3y ago
> A related theory: being good at math, especially mental math, correlates with aphantasia (not being able to see pictures in your head) This is the kind of condition I wonder if I have. Because on one hand, if I do a visualization exercise I would describe it as foggy at best. Then again, I struggle to understand how our brains could be wired that differently from person to person, that we could have or lack certain mental senses. I would suggest that everyone has some latent capability, whether they recognize it or not. After all the visual cortex is quite important. In the context of your example, those good at mental math might see a chalkboard like image of the problem with all the detail. Those who struggle might be distracted visualizing the items that are being counted themselves, and all their detail. For another riddle, consider the question of whether one recognizes their thoughts as an internal monologue or not, and how that relates to communication and action.
- ajkjk 3y ago
  I would emphasize that people who are good at mental math tend to not see a chalkboard, while those are less good at it tend to. Relying on visualization is, I have noticed from asking around, a weakness. Of course it's just anecdotal but the pattern seems pretty pronounced to me. (I polled a hundred people at one point and saw this pattern reflected in the responses) I agree, though, that visualization is probably latent even in people who can't do it. I notice it when half asleep for instance.

brazzledazzle 3y ago

Am I projecting or does this sound like an compensating strategies for an intelligent person with an executive dysfunction disorder?

coldblues 3y ago
To someone with ADHD (me) it does look like it. I seem to be one of the few people who want to discuss the correlation between ADHD and all of these traits, but unfortunately one of my replies didn't garner the attention I wanted.
- brazzledazzle 3y ago
  Yeah same here. I sometimes wonder if these coping strategies result in a late diagnosis (if diagnosed at all).