According to Kanazawa’s Hypothesis, the comparative effectiveness of ‘type 1’ thinking should vary with how long the species has had to adapt to the type of problem being presented. So predicting herd behaviour, or how popular someone else is likely to be in a group, are problems human instincts have had a long time to adapt to. Whereas predicting the solutions to complex problems involving quantum mechanics, or just lots of capacitors and resistors in series and in parallel, are not.
What if you don’t have paper and pencil, though? A messy resistor network has to be solved as a system of linear equations, which involves a lot of pencil on paper action, especially if you want results to be accurate to n decimal figures. With a pretty huge failure rate too. And the failures here can give you results that are orders of magnitude off; very bad thing as far as survival is concerned.
At the same time, if you had a little bit of training via observing computer simulator of resistor networks, and you have the resistances presented in some graphical form (e.g. as lines of different thickness corresponding to conductivity; think painted conductive ink resistors), you may be able to learn to just imagine the current flows and see the approximate answer with not such a bad accuracy. Brain is good at training itself to match some rules. I can do mechanics pretty well by mental imagery (and electronics not too badly).
When you are trying to design a circuit, or to invent something, you need very quick and dirty evaluation method, that you can run backwards when you need a circuit for a task. (Then you need to find the values accurately using paper and pencil).
According to Kanazawa’s Hypothesis, the comparative effectiveness of ‘type 1’ thinking should vary with how long the species has had to adapt to the type of problem being presented. So predicting herd behaviour, or how popular someone else is likely to be in a group, are problems human instincts have had a long time to adapt to. Whereas predicting the solutions to complex problems involving quantum mechanics, or just lots of capacitors and resistors in series and in parallel, are not.
What if you don’t have paper and pencil, though? A messy resistor network has to be solved as a system of linear equations, which involves a lot of pencil on paper action, especially if you want results to be accurate to n decimal figures. With a pretty huge failure rate too. And the failures here can give you results that are orders of magnitude off; very bad thing as far as survival is concerned.
At the same time, if you had a little bit of training via observing computer simulator of resistor networks, and you have the resistances presented in some graphical form (e.g. as lines of different thickness corresponding to conductivity; think painted conductive ink resistors), you may be able to learn to just imagine the current flows and see the approximate answer with not such a bad accuracy. Brain is good at training itself to match some rules. I can do mechanics pretty well by mental imagery (and electronics not too badly).
When you are trying to design a circuit, or to invent something, you need very quick and dirty evaluation method, that you can run backwards when you need a circuit for a task. (Then you need to find the values accurately using paper and pencil).