"... I spend a lot of time thoughtless, just living life. At the same time, whenever I speak, ideas condense out of the mental cloud...."
"My head isn’t entirely word-free; like many people, I occasionally talk to myself in an inner monologue. (Remember the milk! Ten more reps!) On the whole, though, silence reigns. Blankness, too: I see hardly any visual images, rarely picturing things, people, or places. Thinking happens as a kind of pressure behind my eyes, but I need to talk out loud in order to complete most of my thoughts. My wife, consequently, is the other half of my brain. If no interlocutor is available, I write. When that fails, I pace my empty house, muttering.... My minimalist mental theatre has shaped my life.... I’m scarcely alone in having a mental 'style,' or believing I do. Ask someone how she thinks and you might learn that she talks to herself silently, or cogitates visually, or moves through mental space by traversing physical space...."
Writes Joshua Rothman, in "How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?Some people say their thought takes place in images, some in words. But our mental processes are more mysterious than we realize" (The New Yorker).
Rothman quotes questions — from psychologist Linda Silverman — that test whether you're a visual thinker (but don't seem to test whether you are a verbal thinker):
Do you think mainly in pictures instead of words?
Do you know things without being able to explain how or why?
Do you remember what you see and forget what you hear?
Can you visualize objects from different perspectives?
Would you rather read a map than follow verbal directions?
Rothman answered "no" to almost all of that.
Is it better to be a visual thinker?
The imagistic minds in [Temple Grandin's] “Visual Thinking” can seem glamorous compared with the verbal ones depicted in “Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It,” by Ethan Kross, a psychologist and neuroscientist who teaches at the University of Michigan. Kross is interested in what’s known as the phonological loop—a neural system, consisting of an “inner ear” and an “inner voice,” that serves as a “clearinghouse for everything related to words that occurs around us in the present.”
If Grandin’s visual thinkers are attending Cirque du Soleil, then Kross’s verbal thinkers are stuck at an Off Broadway one-man show. It’s just one long monologue.
Ha ha. Great metaphor! Didn't Rothman need to be a somewhat of a visual thinker to picture that? Or maybe he didn't picture it. He just thought it in words... or thought nothing, but just typed those words.
Frankly, I know the feeling! I don't have much of a voice in my head or any clear pictures, but I can come up with a lot of material, quite flowingly, if I just start talking or writing. "Ideas condense out of the mental cloud" — that makes sense to me. And, again, doesn't that seem quite visual, thoughts like precipitation from the mental state that seems like a cloud?
Rothman describes research by Russell T. Hurburt, who used a beeping recording device to get people to say what was just going on in their head. Among the categories of thinkers, he found some who engaged in “unsymbolized thinking”:
They often have “an explicit, differentiated thought that does not include the experience of words, images, or any other symbols.” Reading this description a few years ago, I felt at last that I had a term that described my mind: it’s not “empty”; my thoughts are just unsymbolized.
But Hurlburt’s work suggests that it’s a mistake to ascribe to oneself a definitive cast of thought. Most people, he’s found, don’t actually know how they think; asked to describe their minds pre-beeper, they are often wildly off the mark about what they’ll report post-beeper.
They’re prone to make “faux generalizations”—groundless assertions about how they think. It’s easy for me to assume that most of my thinking is unsymbolized. But how closely have I examined it?
And, Rothman recognizes, to examine "it" is to generate new thoughts. You can never really look at it at all... look at it... listen to it... unsymbolically grok it it... whatever it is you're doing.
***
"Grok" is my paraphrase. The word — which I think is perfect — does not appear in the article. I've blogged "grok" before, so I won't expatiate on it this time. I'll just make a tag for it and add it retrospectively: here. This is the 6th post with that tag, which pleases me more than makes any sense.
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