How do you think?
I don't really know how I think. I used to believe that I didn't think in words because it would always take me some effort to explain in words something that I intuitively understood, and I would often do a poor job of it. But at the same time, what is in my head is mostly words. Maybe it's more like a shorthand, where I can explain something to myself in a succinct way that would not adequately explain it to someone else. But using too many words gets in the way of the concept or the intuition. (And I consider intuition to be the sum of one's understanding and knowledge of a subject or concept, not something that arises from nothing.)
"When I work on deep and esoteric things, describing what it's like is hard. It's like asking a centipede which leg comes after which. There is a crazy mixture of partial equations and solutions, and I have some sort of picture of what's happening that the equation is saying is happening. It's a nutty thing, and I don't know that it does any good to describe it. I suspect what goes on in every person's head might be very different.
At high levels, we think we're communicating well, but we're actually having some kind of big scheme going on to translate what the other person says into our images, which are very different.
I found this out because I got interested in our time sense. I would try to count to a minute by counting to 48. I could do many things while I was counting, such as reading. However, I had great difficulty speaking because, of course, I was sort of speaking to myself inside my head when I counted.
Once, I went down to the breakfast, and there was John Tukey, a mathematician at Princeton. I told him about these experiments and what I could do, and he said, "That's absurd, I don't see why you would have any difficulty talking, and I can't possibly believe that you could read."
So, I couldn't believe John, so we calibrated him. It was 52 for him to get to 60 seconds. Then he said, "All right, what do you want me to say? 'Marry had a little lamb?' I can speak about anything. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, 52." It's a minute. He was right. I couldn't possibly do that, and he wanted me to read because he couldn't believe that I couldn't.
So then we compared notes. It turned out that when he thought of counting, what he did inside his head was see a tape with numbers that went clink, clink, clink, and the tape would change with the numbers printed on it, which he could see.
Since he's using a sort of optical system and not voice, he could speak as much as he wanted, but if he had to read, he couldn't look at his clock. Whereas for me, it was the other way. That's where I discovered, at least in this very simple operation of counting, the great difference in what goes on in the head when people think they're doing the same thing.
So, it struck me, therefore, if that's already true at the most elementary level, when we learn the mathematics, functions, exponentials, electric fields, and all these things, that the imagery and method by which we're storing it all and the way we think about it could be, it really, if we could get into each other's heads, entirely different.
In fact, when somebody has a great deal of difficulty understanding a point that you see as obvious, and vice versa, it may be because it's a little hard to translate what you just said into his particular framework and so on. Now, I'm talking like a psychologist, and you know I know nothing about this."
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/richard- ... son-ph-d-/
So fascinating and thought provoking for me. I've never been able to share any of my deepest esoteric thoughts with others because of similar feeling reason. Since I have no idea how much of the particular subject they recognize let alone comprehend I never know where to start.
I find it fascinating to watch and listen to different people with different thought patterns share about different topics. I recently watched Temple Grandin talk about the different types of minds on a couple youtube videos that were pretty interesting.
https://youtu.be/fn_9f5x0f1Q?si=GF617zK78OD1Z263
Lists of things always have a visual look in my head. Numbers turn in a different direction with multiples of 10. When I think of the years, they change direction at the end of each decade. The first decade of the 21st century goes upward, the second decade downward (the current decade's direction is still unclear in my mind). The 1990s are flat.
When I think of the days of the week, they ascend until they reach Saturday, where they taper around. When I think of the hours in the day, they're somewhat diagonal from midnight until 6AM, then they travel upward until they reach noon, then they start ascending from there.
Music is often represented in my head by specific colors. Guitar music is green, flutes or whistling is dark red, organs are white. Electric guitars are variously orange, yellow, brown, or gray, depending on how they're played. Pianos are...yellow, I think? Certain sounds are represented in my head as pink. It's interesting to me that I rarely visualize music as blue, despite the traditional musical uses of the word (which I suspect have a synesthetic origin).
I also occasionally think of music as well as other concepts in terms of taste--certain songs and certain concepts are "salty" or "sweet."
My brain is weird. I have trouble remembering names, dates, exact numbers, spelling. I remember vast numbers of other things. In history/social studies in grade school and high school (age about 10 to 16). I could recount whole stories and event and get all the names and dates wrong. Or just fuzzy grey spots in my memory. Or only remember some of the letters in a name. Needless to say this was not great on tests.
I tend to think in words and pictures. But not always both. Lots of visual thinking.
_________________
ADHD-I(diagnosed) ASD-HF(diagnosed)
RDOS scores - Aspie score 131/200 - neurotypical score 69/200 - very likely Aspie
Doing advanced maths exams in school years ago at I would sometimes spontaneously hear the correct answer in my head, which embarrassed me as I couldn't explain my "working out" process when asked to, after handing in my completed paper very soon after beginning. I took care to sit right up the front near him so that he would know I had not been cheating.
How my brain turned on and used that mode I have never known but assume the subconscious was somehow involved..
It is now 8 days since I wrote the above post. Tonight, seemingly out of nowhere I found myself thinking "My mind is a spiderweb". At first I didn't get what this thought was trying to communicate. Then it dawned on me that it works - in some situations - as maze of hyperlinks connecting at high speed (the "spiderweb"). This belated realisation explained issues - like the maths example in the above post - that have puzzled me for over half a century. I wonder if this makes any sense at all to anyone else..
“Associative Memory” might be like the “hyperlinks” you mentioned.
Here is the URL with the parentheses replaced with percent-encoding:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associa ... chology%29
I write much better on a Wiki than on an Essay. Wiki and hypertext is more like the way I think.
_________________
ADHD-I(diagnosed) ASD-HF(diagnosed)
RDOS scores - Aspie score 131/200 - neurotypical score 69/200 - very likely Aspie
Doing advanced maths exams in school years ago at I would sometimes spontaneously hear the correct answer in my head, which embarrassed me as I couldn't explain my "working out" process when asked to, after handing in my completed paper very soon after beginning. I took care to sit right up the front near him so that he would know I had not been cheating.
How my brain turned on and used that mode I have never known but assume the subconscious was somehow involved..
It is now 8 days since I wrote the above post. Tonight, seemingly out of nowhere I found myself thinking "My mind is a spiderweb". At first I didn't get what this thought was trying to communicate. Then it dawned on me that it works - in some situations - as maze of hyperlinks connecting at high speed (the "spiderweb"). This belated realisation explained issues - like the maths example in the above post - that have puzzled me for over half a century. I wonder if this makes any sense at all to anyone else..
Makes a lot of sense to me. It's just a theory right now, but I think it has something to do with how our autistic brains develop. One of the main things I've found in my own research, which appears to be constant across all autistic brains, is way more neural pathways and synaptic connections in ours compared to NT people. This seems to be because of noticeably less synaptic pruning in our brains in early development. When I look at scans of NT brains the neural pathways appear to eventually prune and develop to be almost tree-like. Scans of autistic brains, however, appear to be very much web-like.
The other difference, to me at least, is the development of each groups neural pathways. Due to synaptic pruning, the NT brains pathways are forced to become bigger and stronger to compensate for becoming one of the 'primary' connections. Our autistic brains, because of the low level of synaptic pruning, have many more neural pathways which means that they aren't forced to develop as strongly. Where the NT brain has to utilize it's primary connections in solving something, our brains naturally seem to utilize multiple pathways to solve same thing. Theirs sees things in one way, ours unconsciously and consciously sees things in many ways.
"When I work on deep and esoteric things, describing what it's like is hard. It's like asking a centipede which leg comes after which. There is a crazy mixture of partial equations and solutions, and I have some sort of picture of what's happening that the equation is saying is happening. It's a nutty thing, and I don't know that it does any good to describe it. I suspect what goes on in every person's head might be very different.
At high levels, we think we're communicating well, but we're actually having some kind of big scheme going on to translate what the other person says into our images, which are very different.
I found this out because I got interested in our time sense. I would try to count to a minute by counting to 48. I could do many things while I was counting, such as reading. However, I had great difficulty speaking because, of course, I was sort of speaking to myself inside my head when I counted.
Once, I went down to the breakfast, and there was John Tukey, a mathematician at Princeton. I told him about these experiments and what I could do, and he said, "That's absurd, I don't see why you would have any difficulty talking, and I can't possibly believe that you could read."
So, I couldn't believe John, so we calibrated him. It was 52 for him to get to 60 seconds. Then he said, "All right, what do you want me to say? 'Marry had a little lamb?' I can speak about anything. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, 52." It's a minute. He was right. I couldn't possibly do that, and he wanted me to read because he couldn't believe that I couldn't.
So then we compared notes. It turned out that when he thought of counting, what he did inside his head was see a tape with numbers that went clink, clink, clink, and the tape would change with the numbers printed on it, which he could see.
Since he's using a sort of optical system and not voice, he could speak as much as he wanted, but if he had to read, he couldn't look at his clock. Whereas for me, it was the other way. That's where I discovered, at least in this very simple operation of counting, the great difference in what goes on in the head when people think they're doing the same thing.
So, it struck me, therefore, if that's already true at the most elementary level, when we learn the mathematics, functions, exponentials, electric fields, and all these things, that the imagery and method by which we're storing it all and the way we think about it could be, it really, if we could get into each other's heads, entirely different.
In fact, when somebody has a great deal of difficulty understanding a point that you see as obvious, and vice versa, it may be because it's a little hard to translate what you just said into his particular framework and so on. Now, I'm talking like a psychologist, and you know I know nothing about this."
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/richard- ... son-ph-d-/
That has to be one of the most interesting snippets I have read. I'm also fascinated by the different ways people think and work through problems. When you think about all the factors and experience that influences our way our thoughts, it makes sense that it would be completely different. Thanks for sharing!
I learned Geometry before I learned Algebra. We did it the old fashioned way with a straight edge and a compass. When I did algebra I always had to picture the curves. I turned every problem into geometry. I learned to program in Basic at the same time. So I had this basic idea about x and y and where they went on my computer screen. I also knew that things like y = x squared meant all values of x, but in reality you could only use some of them: x is 0 through 10, adding 1 each time through the loop. Or adding 0.5. (Etc) but never really “all”. When I took physics I did the same thing, I had an idea of geometry. And wood or Lego or something. The equation related to the graph, and they both related to the experiment. When my kids do algebra or physics (chemistry, etc) they don’t seem to get this back and forth between the three things. It is funny, because I can’t do it any other way. I also have to be able to read equations out loud. If I don’t know the name for the symbols I have to make them up. In boolean logic there are symbols that look like arrows but you read them as “indicates”. It makes sense to me. I cannot always explain it to other people.
_________________
ADHD-I(diagnosed) ASD-HF(diagnosed)
RDOS scores - Aspie score 131/200 - neurotypical score 69/200 - very likely Aspie
Slowly, but constantly.
My conscious mind is generally one-threaded. Mostly, I use constant verbal monologue, in which I'm arguing with myself and with myself and with myself... I don't like to agree with myself - it's boring. New associations come pretty quickly, so I move between subjects, and none of them seems well thought through. But then I come back to old topics. And then again, and again... Often I make shortcuts using some "pure ideas" and relations between them. Then, I think I understand something, but cannot put it in words, and begin to think if there are any ideas in my mind, or it's just a false feeling of understanding.
When it comes to more demanding tasks, like turn-based games, I'm trying make decision trees using the monologue, but my working memory doesn't have enough RAM and previous elements in a tree are removed very quickly. That's why I hate chess and people tell me to click enter already when we play civilization.
I think my visual imagery is quite vivid, but I don't use it in reasoning. It accompanies reading books and trying to understand mechanisms, e.g. in physics. I can also imagine taste of food quite precisely. For other senses it's much weaker.
That sounds fun! Unless you can't turn off the soundtrack or music is bad, than it doesn't sound fun (in both meanings). For me it's mostly just "mental humming". Do you, guys with good auditory imagination, can vividly imagine actual instruments playing. How large can mental orchestra be?
_________________
Recently diagnosed with ASD, still skeptical.
Feel free to PM me if you want to or are really bored.
Either overthink or don't think at all - there's no middle way.
I think so, logically it would make sense. Multiple neural pathways bringing information that potentially comes from many different sources; an opportunity for great mental chaos and breakthrough. Definitely great for understanding some things but does often cause me to be indecisive at times until I can process everything to my satisfaction.
This is a very interesting question! I am an industrial engineering and I remember very clearly the day when we learned about time studies and task prioritization at NC State University. From that moment on, my mind uses the Critical Path Method and think of tasks as written on a spreadsheet and start calculating times and priorities.