[This is in shortform because I haven’t looked into any of the existing literature on the subject]
I’ve been thinking for a while about how people’s mental machinery works. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about spelling and reading. It’s reasonable to assume that everyone has roughly the same mental machinery for spoken language, as this is something that has been a part of human experience for tens of thousands of years. Similarly, you’d expect everyone to have the same mental machinery for loving others, feeling hungry, and other things that were present in the ancestral environment.
Reading, on the other hand, is an ‘intellectual technology’ that’s only been around for a couple thousand years. And of course, along with reading comes writing and spelling.
My housemates and I had a conversation once a couple years ago where we each tried to describe our internal experience of spelling words, and they were so vastly different as to be incomprehensible. For example, for me, words are basically indistinguishable from their spellings—each English word is a chunk, and when I think of a word I just also think of a picture of that word. If asked to spell it, I can read it off from the picture, or I can just say the correct sequence of letters in a way that’s introspectively opaque to me.
On the other hand, some of my housemates described having to sound out the word each time (it was stored verbally rather than visually), or other things that were even more foreign to me and that I can’t remember because the conversation was two years ago. (But you can imagine another person who has to imagine looking the word up in a dictionary, or typing it on a keyboard, in order to spell it.)
I see this also with the task of memorizing text. For me this is basically trivial—I can memorize hundreds of lines of text in a day or two if I just read through it enough times. One of my housemates, on the other hand, has basically nothing memorized at all, and it’s very hard for him to memorize anything. We once went caroling, and even though we sang the same song like 20 times in a row, he just had to hum along in the background because he couldn’t learn the words.
The takeaway is that we all have basic mental scaffolding that allows us to develop skills like spelling and memorizing text, but there are many different edifices that we can construct on top of that scaffolding. Some will be more effective than others (e.g. my native memorization machinery is much more effective than my housemate’s). This isn’t often noted because most people are not as into introspection as the people I know.
Something to note is that, since many of these edifices are constructed from a very young age, one would expect them to be very hard to retrain. For a real example of people building new mental edifices, look at memory palaces—they replace an introspectively opaque, sort of random process with a structured and effective process, but they take time to learn.
Follow-up thoughts: Could this be leveraged to teach people to spell, or be better at more important things like math or research? Like, instead of saying, “spell this word”, you could say, “picture this word in your mind and read off the letters.” Except that not everyone has mental imagery? Typical mind fallacy feels related but in a more complex way than just “these are the same topic.”
Hmm, “what mental machinery should we try to teach children” is a pretty interesting question (with potentially different answers depending on how much of this is ‘children randomly pick a scaffolding to build’ vs ‘people are hardwired differently for mysterious reasons’)
I think about the mystery of spelling a lot. Part of it is that English is difficult, of course. But still why does my friend who reads several long books a year fail so badly at spelling, as he has always struggled since 2nd and 3rd grade when his mom would take extra time out just to ensure that he learned his spelling words enough to pass.
I have never really had a problem with spelling and seem to use many methods when I am thinking about spelling explicitly, sound it out, picture it, remember it as a chunk, recall the language of origin to figure out dipthongs. I notice that students who are bad at spelling frequently have trouble learning foreign languages, maybe the correlation points to a common cause?
[This is in shortform because I haven’t looked into any of the existing literature on the subject]
I’ve been thinking for a while about how people’s mental machinery works. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about spelling and reading. It’s reasonable to assume that everyone has roughly the same mental machinery for spoken language, as this is something that has been a part of human experience for tens of thousands of years. Similarly, you’d expect everyone to have the same mental machinery for loving others, feeling hungry, and other things that were present in the ancestral environment.
Reading, on the other hand, is an ‘intellectual technology’ that’s only been around for a couple thousand years. And of course, along with reading comes writing and spelling.
My housemates and I had a conversation once a couple years ago where we each tried to describe our internal experience of spelling words, and they were so vastly different as to be incomprehensible. For example, for me, words are basically indistinguishable from their spellings—each English word is a chunk, and when I think of a word I just also think of a picture of that word. If asked to spell it, I can read it off from the picture, or I can just say the correct sequence of letters in a way that’s introspectively opaque to me.
On the other hand, some of my housemates described having to sound out the word each time (it was stored verbally rather than visually), or other things that were even more foreign to me and that I can’t remember because the conversation was two years ago. (But you can imagine another person who has to imagine looking the word up in a dictionary, or typing it on a keyboard, in order to spell it.)
I see this also with the task of memorizing text. For me this is basically trivial—I can memorize hundreds of lines of text in a day or two if I just read through it enough times. One of my housemates, on the other hand, has basically nothing memorized at all, and it’s very hard for him to memorize anything. We once went caroling, and even though we sang the same song like 20 times in a row, he just had to hum along in the background because he couldn’t learn the words.
The takeaway is that we all have basic mental scaffolding that allows us to develop skills like spelling and memorizing text, but there are many different edifices that we can construct on top of that scaffolding. Some will be more effective than others (e.g. my native memorization machinery is much more effective than my housemate’s). This isn’t often noted because most people are not as into introspection as the people I know.
Something to note is that, since many of these edifices are constructed from a very young age, one would expect them to be very hard to retrain. For a real example of people building new mental edifices, look at memory palaces—they replace an introspectively opaque, sort of random process with a structured and effective process, but they take time to learn.
Follow-up thoughts: Could this be leveraged to teach people to spell, or be better at more important things like math or research? Like, instead of saying, “spell this word”, you could say, “picture this word in your mind and read off the letters.” Except that not everyone has mental imagery? Typical mind fallacy feels related but in a more complex way than just “these are the same topic.”
My lunch break is now over.
Hmm, “what mental machinery should we try to teach children” is a pretty interesting question (with potentially different answers depending on how much of this is ‘children randomly pick a scaffolding to build’ vs ‘people are hardwired differently for mysterious reasons’)
I think about the mystery of spelling a lot. Part of it is that English is difficult, of course. But still why does my friend who reads several long books a year fail so badly at spelling, as he has always struggled since 2nd and 3rd grade when his mom would take extra time out just to ensure that he learned his spelling words enough to pass.
I have never really had a problem with spelling and seem to use many methods when I am thinking about spelling explicitly, sound it out, picture it, remember it as a chunk, recall the language of origin to figure out dipthongs. I notice that students who are bad at spelling frequently have trouble learning foreign languages, maybe the correlation points to a common cause?
Also probably related: habit formation