I’m wondering how Gendlin Focusing interacts with working memory.
I think the first phase of focusing is pre-chunk, as well as pre-verbal. You’re noticing a bunch of stuff going on in your body. It’s more of a sensation than a thought.
The process of focusing is trying to get those sensations into a form your brain can actually work with and think about.
I… notice that focusing takes basically all my concentration. I think at some part of the process it’s using working memory (and basically all of my working memory). But I’m not sure when that is.
One of the things you do in focusing is try to give your felt-sense a bunch of names and see if they fit, and notice the dissonance. I think when this process starts, the felt-sense is not stored in chunk form. I think as I try to give it different names
Gendlin Focusing might be a process where
a) first I’m trying to feel out a bunch of felt-data that isn’t even in chunk form yet
b) I sort of feel it out, while trying different word-combos on it. Meanwhile it’s getting more solid in my head. I think it’s… slowly transitioning from wordless non-chunks into wordless chunks, and then when I finally find the right name that describes it I’m like “ah, that’s it”, and then it simultaneiously solidifies into one-or-more chunks I can store properly in working memory, and also gets a name. (The name might be multiple words, and depending on context those words could correspond to one chunk or multiple)
Not about Gendlin, but following the trail of relating chunks to other things: I wonder if propaganda or cult indoctrination can be described as a malicious chunking process.
I’ve weighed in against taking the numbers literally elsewhere, but following this thread I suddenly wondered if the work that using few words was doing isn’t delivering the chunk, but rather screening out any alternative chunk. If what we are interested in is common knowledge, it isn’t getting people to develop a chunk per se that is the challenge; rather everyone has to agree on exactly which chunk everyone else is using. This sounds much more like the work of a filter than a generator.
When I thought about it in those terms, it occurred to me that it is perfectly possible to drive this in any direction at all; we aren’t even meaningfully constrained by reality. This feels obvious in retrospect—there’ve been lots of times when common knowledge was utterly wrong—but doing that on purpose never occurred to me.
So now it feels like what cults do, and why they sound so weird to everyone outside of them, is deliberately create a different sequence of chunks for normal things for the purpose of having different chunks. Once that is done, the availability heuristic will sustain communication on that basis, and the artificially-induced inferential distance will tend to isolate them from anyone outside the group.
Continuing to babble down this thought-trail:
I’m wondering how Gendlin Focusing interacts with working memory.
I think the first phase of focusing is pre-chunk, as well as pre-verbal. You’re noticing a bunch of stuff going on in your body. It’s more of a sensation than a thought.
The process of focusing is trying to get those sensations into a form your brain can actually work with and think about.
I… notice that focusing takes basically all my concentration. I think at some part of the process it’s using working memory (and basically all of my working memory). But I’m not sure when that is.
One of the things you do in focusing is try to give your felt-sense a bunch of names and see if they fit, and notice the dissonance. I think when this process starts, the felt-sense is not stored in chunk form. I think as I try to give it different names
Gendlin Focusing might be a process where
a) first I’m trying to feel out a bunch of felt-data that isn’t even in chunk form yet
b) I sort of feel it out, while trying different word-combos on it. Meanwhile it’s getting more solid in my head. I think it’s… slowly transitioning from wordless non-chunks into wordless chunks, and then when I finally find the right name that describes it I’m like “ah, that’s it”, and then it simultaneiously solidifies into one-or-more chunks I can store properly in working memory, and also gets a name. (The name might be multiple words, and depending on context those words could correspond to one chunk or multiple)
Not about Gendlin, but following the trail of relating chunks to other things: I wonder if propaganda or cult indoctrination can be described as a malicious chunking process.
I’ve weighed in against taking the numbers literally elsewhere, but following this thread I suddenly wondered if the work that using few words was doing isn’t delivering the chunk, but rather screening out any alternative chunk. If what we are interested in is common knowledge, it isn’t getting people to develop a chunk per se that is the challenge; rather everyone has to agree on exactly which chunk everyone else is using. This sounds much more like the work of a filter than a generator.
When I thought about it in those terms, it occurred to me that it is perfectly possible to drive this in any direction at all; we aren’t even meaningfully constrained by reality. This feels obvious in retrospect—there’ve been lots of times when common knowledge was utterly wrong—but doing that on purpose never occurred to me.
So now it feels like what cults do, and why they sound so weird to everyone outside of them, is deliberately create a different sequence of chunks for normal things for the purpose of having different chunks. Once that is done, the availability heuristic will sustain communication on that basis, and the artificially-induced inferential distance will tend to isolate them from anyone outside the group.