← Back to context

Comment by andai

2 days ago

I'm not sure. I think I had a reasonable amount of metacognition as a child. I remember being eight years old, and having a really cool idea but forgetting it.

So I devised a plan to retrieve it. I'm just going to rewind time. I'm going to go back to doing what I was doing when I had that idea, and then it'll come back to me.

And so I remembered that I had been fiddling with my seat belt when I had the idea. And so I resumed fiddling, and my cool idea promptly came back.

Metaphors and abstractions came to me much later though. (I struggled with OOP for about 10 years until one day it all just clicked.) Symbolism took me another ten years.

11 comments

andai

Reply
the_gipsy  2 days ago

> So I devised a plan to retrieve it. I'm just going to rewind time. I'm going to go back to doing what I was doing when I had that idea, and then it'll come back to me.

You narrated the ideas back. It's words and language. There is no hidden, unknown, layer of "thought".

  • andai  2 days ago

    >You narrated the ideas back

    No, I rewound my visual memory, to see what I was doing, and then I did it again, to provide the same stimulus, to retrieve the lost memory.

    I've met a few people who have nonverbal cognition, which is also not visual.

    It's a bit like this, a "direct manipulation of ideas".

    > The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined… The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

    https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics

    Though as I mentioned, I had this more as a child, and I've become overreliant on language, and this "direct" facility has starkly deteriorated. But as the author explains in the rest of this article, this fluency can be regained by sheer force of will, by simply working on a very narrow problem space obsessively for weeks at a time.

    (We don't know if that works for everyone, or if it's something weird like perfect pitch. I suspect everyone could gain a great deal of fluency -- that the chunking would reach such a high order level as to make the mnaipulation feel transparent. But possibly, the types of chunks would be different depending on the person.

    More data needed!)