(I don’t know how to better organize my thoughts and discoveries, and also suspect that it’s better to wait until I master speedreading, but I think it may worth to just share/ask about this one my big confusion right now as quick take)
When I was younger I considered obvious how human mind works, there were such components of it like imagination, memory etc. And of course, thoughts were words. How can it be at all possible to think not in words?
Discovery by mere observation
But some time ago I read “You are surely joking mister Feynman” for the third time, and it finally succeeded to make me go and just look into reality. What I found… Is that all my life was a lie. The Facts aren’t things which are being produced in labs via some elaborated tools and then going down through hierarchy of authority and being whispered to you by Teachers in school or by Experts on youtube.
Facts are just things which emerge when someone observes reality or deduces from information. I mean, of course I knew that you can just see things in everyday life. But these were mere mundane things, things which are from another category which can’t be compared with True Scientific Knowledge.
In the end, you can’t just introspect a little and go publish scientific papers about how human vision or thinking works, aren’t you? You can’t discover true knowledge by doing some such easy, unserious, accessible to everyone thing like… observation. Or thinking.
No, really, truths are things which said you by authority, not things which you can just… see. In the school you are said some arcane truths which came from experts, not just said to… observe a little.
And I have seen people who dared to trust their eyes more than words of scientists, they believed in dreams prophesying future and all other sorts of crazy things. It would be a terrible fate to become one of those.
But now I was just looking at reality and discovering information which could be on wikipedia page about how eye or mind work. Just by observation. Without any eye motion detectors or other tools. And it was really clear that these knowledges aren’t any qualitative way worse than those from tools in labs or authoritative sources of knowledge.
Eventually, my brain just got non standard input of direct observation and I found out that I am a type of mind who believes his own eyes more than authoritative people. Though well, it was actually new information, before I genuinely didn’t know that just by my own eyes and brain I can discover such things that usually said to you by authoritative people.
Speed of thinking
And main thing I started to observe was my mind. And I found out that I was wrong all this time about how it works, which are it’s constraints. It was like be a 12 dimensional creature but always move only in 3, and then find all these degrees of freedom and start to unfold.
And there were much much more things than I am able to say in one post even in short. But there is one thing which confuses me the most. I found out that I can think not only in words. That was strange feeling, more like in dreams where you have some incredible mental experience and then wake up and find that it was complete nonsense.
Thing which I was, as it looked, observing, was that I can think not in words, but some strange indescribable way without them. And even more, it felt multiple times faster than thinking in words. And I had that wild idea of “speedthinking”, analogous to speedreading possibility that if you are able to process others ideas in 5x speed just by using visual modality instead of audial, then maybe it is also possible to process your own ideas that fast?
And the problem was that it was too wild. If it would be possible, then… People who think 5 times faster will be like some 1000 years old vampires, they will shine, they be super fast and noticeable, at 20 they will have more cumulative knowledge than usual people at 100, and so, ever in the life.
It will be super noticeable. And then everyone will go and also learn to think visually. That wasn’t our world. Was it possible that I discovered a thing that was never or almost never discovered by anybody at all?
But then when I was practicing foreign language, I found that when I am trying to find a word, I can think without words. It wasn’t just a daydream. Conceptual thinking was real. And so I decided to just test was it possible to learn it as a skill and think 5 times faster.
Unfortunately it took much much longer to test than I thought. But now I am sure that conceptual thinking is possible, I just can do that. And I found that there were much more properties of thinking mode than just that one.
But I am still very confused by the question of which thinking is usual. People are usually by some strange reason can’t report a detailed introspection about how they think. I also tried to ask Grok about that but answers also failed to form a picture.
On the one hand, it looks like people are used to think much faster than I was thinking in words. But on the other hand, average speed of reading is 200 wpm and people usually do that by subvocalization. Which is really strange if they think not in words, or in words, but by hearing them, not pronouncing, and so much faster.
But what about unusual people? Here into my mind immediately comes up Eliezer Yudkowsky who in his glowfics gave probably the most detailed (or maybe, object level instead of metaphorical) descriptions of work of the mind I saw.
And he definitely talks like thoughts work by sequential mental audial words with their length being a cap. And also he talks about speedreading in the way of that actual restriction is speed of your mind, not speed of your body.
And I have now some understanding about how mind can work after some training, conceptual and visual thinking dozens times faster than audial by pronouncing is certainly possible. But I am still really confused how thinking works usually.
And well, also about its significance. Is it actually such a big advantage if you can think 30 times faster than somebody else, as I thought initially?
Is it actually such a big advantage if you can think 30 times faster than somebody else, as I thought initially?
Depends. I would expect that the difference is not only in speed, but also in precision, or maybe suitability for different kinds of problems.
It seems to me that for me “inner dialogue” works better for figuring out complicated stuff or coming to unusual conclusions, “visualization” works for geometrical and mechanical problems, “feeling” for choosing between clearly given options, and there is also something in between that I use for medium-difficulty situations.
I’ve already read “Universal experiences” (though thanks for 2), people are different, yeah, but there should be something central. Most people don’t have synethesia, don’t like math, but respect existing status hierarchies, noticebly want to be not alone etc. And subvocalization while reading is the most usual, so I suspect it to be the most usual while thinking too.
Depends. I would expect that the difference is not only in speed, but also in precision, or maybe suitability for different kinds of problems.
That was what I thought initially when I subvocalized all initial flashes of idea. But now my direct observations are showing me that was I was just wrong. Actually, I had evidence that I was wrong, I just didn’t properly process it: when you are opening your eyes in the room, you are immediately seeing it all, the visual cortex recognizes dozens of objects with hundreds of details at one moment, parallelly as the brain is. It’s not brain limit to use words sequentially, it’s mouth limit (or hands for sign language).
When you are imagining a scene like “blond haired woman in a red dress was going to the shop by a street with trees” you don’t need to think about each element sequentially, you can just see it as a whole, including action. Which is really different from how you will read a sentence describing it.
Audial thinking is faster than visual, but not that much, you can say something like 24 phonemes in one second and recognize in speech 2-3 times more than that − 48-72 per second. And you need ~100ms to recognize an object visually (~250 to react), so it’s 4-10 per second. But it’s only a little difference, 6 or 7.2 times between limits.
While sentences contain 10-30 words and words are ~4-8 letters each, 40-240 for sequential audial processing, 0.5-10s vs 0.1s for visual recognition.
“feeling” for choosing between clearly given options
And I suspect that we put different meanings into “conceptual thinking”. I am not talking emotions feelings, and not about intuitive leaning to some option, and not even about semantic thinking. It’s exactly conceptual thinking. I don’t know, maybe… When you already said a sentence, can you at least sometimes feel it’s meaning as a one concept same way as you can feel as one concept meaning of a word even if it’s something not perceptual like “cat”, but complicated abstract definition like “freezing into a solid form without creating a crystal structure”? I just found out that with some introspection you can turn initial flash directly into that, without a need to subvocalize distinct words. and very fast in comparison with a sentence, approximately a time of saying a word.
Though sometimes I can’t convert it into a conceptual feeling of sentence that fast, because it’s somewhat difficult to organize it semantically. But I am not sure it’s even worse for thinking, not for speech. Because then I still can unfold conceptual sense of it, it just becomes not projected into specific words. which maybe good, because I can say either “probabilistic correlation” or “logically binding” or “timeless agreement”, but as non word projected concept I can just think about a central object between all of them, without picking only one side.
Though after time passed I indeed see some unobvious flaws. Like that subvocalizing words with intonation enhances your emotions. Though… Can’t you just subvocalize a song while thinking conceptually?
Also when you stuck in a dialogue you can just start babbling, but conceptually it’s much harder. Though it’s also maybe easily done non sequentially (non audibly) by imagining words printed shapes visually.
And also I see some vague beginning of understanding how different forces shape your thinking depending on modality. Like there are limits how slow you can talk and after which sentence should go next sentence, while visual (or conceptual) thinker can just not generate new thought after ending previous, and therefore be even worse in general, while being better in fast bursts.
Or that you can start feel that you have more time and therefore use it with more slack.
Or that audial thinkers can actually have whole lot of background faster non auditory processing, so it will not be 1 vs 10-30, but more like 1+5 vs 10-30. So it will be still good, but not that good.
Though I think that maybe one of biggest advances may be not even speed, but the fact that after thinking thought you can save it in your imagination space, and then put following thought next to it etc. And so see whole thought chains, which I don’t see how you can do audibly at all.
And subvocalization while reading is the most usual, so I suspect it to be the most usual while thinking too.
LOL, I wanted to write a comment disagreeing with you… and then I noticed that I am subvocalizing as I am writing the comment.
subvocalizing words with intonation enhances your emotions.
Great observation!
It seems that as subvocalization is “imagined speech”, subvocalization with intonation is “imagined role-playing”. And there is a visual thing that is “imagined object manipulation”.
Maybe there is more to this analogy, and some problems with speech could have analogical problems with thinking? Something like “imagined word salad” or “imagined unintelligible babbling”...
(I don’t know how to better organize my thoughts and discoveries, and also suspect that it’s better to wait until I master speedreading, but I think it may worth to just share/ask about this one my big confusion right now as quick take)
When I was younger I considered obvious how human mind works, there were such components of it like imagination, memory etc. And of course, thoughts were words. How can it be at all possible to think not in words?
Discovery by mere observation
But some time ago I read “You are surely joking mister Feynman” for the third time, and it finally succeeded to make me go and just look into reality. What I found… Is that all my life was a lie. The Facts aren’t things which are being produced in labs via some elaborated tools and then going down through hierarchy of authority and being whispered to you by Teachers in school or by Experts on youtube.
Facts are just things which emerge when someone observes reality or deduces from information. I mean, of course I knew that you can just see things in everyday life. But these were mere mundane things, things which are from another category which can’t be compared with True Scientific Knowledge.
In the end, you can’t just introspect a little and go publish scientific papers about how human vision or thinking works, aren’t you? You can’t discover true knowledge by doing some such easy, unserious, accessible to everyone thing like… observation. Or thinking.
No, really, truths are things which said you by authority, not things which you can just… see. In the school you are said some arcane truths which came from experts, not just said to… observe a little.
And I have seen people who dared to trust their eyes more than words of scientists, they believed in dreams prophesying future and all other sorts of crazy things. It would be a terrible fate to become one of those.
But now I was just looking at reality and discovering information which could be on wikipedia page about how eye or mind work. Just by observation. Without any eye motion detectors or other tools. And it was really clear that these knowledges aren’t any qualitative way worse than those from tools in labs or authoritative sources of knowledge.
Eventually, my brain just got non standard input of direct observation and I found out that I am a type of mind who believes his own eyes more than authoritative people. Though well, it was actually new information, before I genuinely didn’t know that just by my own eyes and brain I can discover such things that usually said to you by authoritative people.
Speed of thinking
And main thing I started to observe was my mind. And I found out that I was wrong all this time about how it works, which are it’s constraints. It was like be a 12 dimensional creature but always move only in 3, and then find all these degrees of freedom and start to unfold.
And there were much much more things than I am able to say in one post even in short. But there is one thing which confuses me the most. I found out that I can think not only in words. That was strange feeling, more like in dreams where you have some incredible mental experience and then wake up and find that it was complete nonsense.
Thing which I was, as it looked, observing, was that I can think not in words, but some strange indescribable way without them. And even more, it felt multiple times faster than thinking in words. And I had that wild idea of “speedthinking”, analogous to speedreading possibility that if you are able to process others ideas in 5x speed just by using visual modality instead of audial, then maybe it is also possible to process your own ideas that fast?
And the problem was that it was too wild. If it would be possible, then… People who think 5 times faster will be like some 1000 years old vampires, they will shine, they be super fast and noticeable, at 20 they will have more cumulative knowledge than usual people at 100, and so, ever in the life.
It will be super noticeable. And then everyone will go and also learn to think visually. That wasn’t our world. Was it possible that I discovered a thing that was never or almost never discovered by anybody at all?
But then when I was practicing foreign language, I found that when I am trying to find a word, I can think without words. It wasn’t just a daydream. Conceptual thinking was real. And so I decided to just test was it possible to learn it as a skill and think 5 times faster.
Unfortunately it took much much longer to test than I thought. But now I am sure that conceptual thinking is possible, I just can do that. And I found that there were much more properties of thinking mode than just that one.
But I am still very confused by the question of which thinking is usual. People are usually by some strange reason can’t report a detailed introspection about how they think. I also tried to ask Grok about that but answers also failed to form a picture.
On the one hand, it looks like people are used to think much faster than I was thinking in words. But on the other hand, average speed of reading is 200 wpm and people usually do that by subvocalization. Which is really strange if they think not in words, or in words, but by hearing them, not pronouncing, and so much faster.
But what about unusual people? Here into my mind immediately comes up Eliezer Yudkowsky who in his glowfics gave probably the most detailed (or maybe, object level instead of metaphorical) descriptions of work of the mind I saw.
And he definitely talks like thoughts work by sequential mental audial words with their length being a cap. And also he talks about speedreading in the way of that actual restriction is speed of your mind, not speed of your body.
And I have now some understanding about how mind can work after some training, conceptual and visual thinking dozens times faster than audial by pronouncing is certainly possible. But I am still really confused how thinking works usually.
And well, also about its significance. Is it actually such a big advantage if you can think 30 times faster than somebody else, as I thought initially?
People are different. Source: 1, 2, 3.
Depends. I would expect that the difference is not only in speed, but also in precision, or maybe suitability for different kinds of problems.
It seems to me that for me “inner dialogue” works better for figuring out complicated stuff or coming to unusual conclusions, “visualization” works for geometrical and mechanical problems, “feeling” for choosing between clearly given options, and there is also something in between that I use for medium-difficulty situations.
I’ve already read “Universal experiences” (though thanks for 2), people are different, yeah, but there should be something central. Most people don’t have synethesia, don’t like math, but respect existing status hierarchies, noticebly want to be not alone etc. And subvocalization while reading is the most usual, so I suspect it to be the most usual while thinking too.
That was what I thought initially when I subvocalized all initial flashes of idea. But now my direct observations are showing me that was I was just wrong. Actually, I had evidence that I was wrong, I just didn’t properly process it: when you are opening your eyes in the room, you are immediately seeing it all, the visual cortex recognizes dozens of objects with hundreds of details at one moment, parallelly as the brain is. It’s not brain limit to use words sequentially, it’s mouth limit (or hands for sign language).
When you are imagining a scene like “blond haired woman in a red dress was going to the shop by a street with trees” you don’t need to think about each element sequentially, you can just see it as a whole, including action. Which is really different from how you will read a sentence describing it.
Audial thinking is faster than visual, but not that much, you can say something like 24 phonemes in one second and recognize in speech 2-3 times more than that − 48-72 per second. And you need ~100ms to recognize an object visually (~250 to react), so it’s 4-10 per second. But it’s only a little difference, 6 or 7.2 times between limits.
While sentences contain 10-30 words and words are ~4-8 letters each, 40-240 for sequential audial processing, 0.5-10s vs 0.1s for visual recognition.
And I suspect that we put different meanings into “conceptual thinking”. I am not talking emotions feelings, and not about intuitive leaning to some option, and not even about semantic thinking. It’s exactly conceptual thinking. I don’t know, maybe… When you already said a sentence, can you at least sometimes feel it’s meaning as a one concept same way as you can feel as one concept meaning of a word even if it’s something not perceptual like “cat”, but complicated abstract definition like “freezing into a solid form without creating a crystal structure”? I just found out that with some introspection you can turn initial flash directly into that, without a need to subvocalize distinct words. and very fast in comparison with a sentence, approximately a time of saying a word.
Though sometimes I can’t convert it into a conceptual feeling of sentence that fast, because it’s somewhat difficult to organize it semantically. But I am not sure it’s even worse for thinking, not for speech. Because then I still can unfold conceptual sense of it, it just becomes not projected into specific words. which maybe good, because I can say either “probabilistic correlation” or “logically binding” or “timeless agreement”, but as non word projected concept I can just think about a central object between all of them, without picking only one side.
Though after time passed I indeed see some unobvious flaws. Like that subvocalizing words with intonation enhances your emotions. Though… Can’t you just subvocalize a song while thinking conceptually?
Also when you stuck in a dialogue you can just start babbling, but conceptually it’s much harder. Though it’s also maybe easily done non sequentially (non audibly) by imagining words printed shapes visually.
And also I see some vague beginning of understanding how different forces shape your thinking depending on modality. Like there are limits how slow you can talk and after which sentence should go next sentence, while visual (or conceptual) thinker can just not generate new thought after ending previous, and therefore be even worse in general, while being better in fast bursts.
Or that you can start feel that you have more time and therefore use it with more slack.
Or that audial thinkers can actually have whole lot of background faster non auditory processing, so it will not be 1 vs 10-30, but more like 1+5 vs 10-30. So it will be still good, but not that good.
Though I think that maybe one of biggest advances may be not even speed, but the fact that after thinking thought you can save it in your imagination space, and then put following thought next to it etc. And so see whole thought chains, which I don’t see how you can do audibly at all.
LOL, I wanted to write a comment disagreeing with you… and then I noticed that I am subvocalizing as I am writing the comment.
Great observation!
It seems that as subvocalization is “imagined speech”, subvocalization with intonation is “imagined role-playing”. And there is a visual thing that is “imagined object manipulation”.
Maybe there is more to this analogy, and some problems with speech could have analogical problems with thinking? Something like “imagined word salad” or “imagined unintelligible babbling”...