I tried this. Overall interesting. I had some good, novel thoughts. I’m not sure I had more or different good, novel thoughts about my abstract object than I would have had I just said “I’m gonna think about this for an hour”. I do get the sense that if I were practiced at this, I would have had novel thoughts in 10-15 minutes rather than in an hour, and that if I regularly practiced this I’d naturally have some of those novel thoughts without really reaching for them. The whole thing felt brain stretchy in a nice way—not like “oh this is a hard math problem”, more like “oh I haven’t been to this city before apart from driving through”.
Oddities:
Usually 5 minutes is a great amount of time for me; here, I kept finding myself thinking “am I done?” at about 4 minutes.
Phase 2 Exercise 4 I skipped because I must have skimmed or something? and thought I was supposed to do the abstract object rather than concrete. So I did E5 instead, then read the instructions for E5 and was like “wait didn’t I just do that”.
P3E1 I don’t know why, but it took me a while to believe/confirm that “the previous exercise” referred to P2E6.
When looking at my felt sense for my abstract object, I noticed that it was slippery—I was feeling a specific hypothetical instance of the object, and I was feeling the generalization of a subset of the object, but rarely The Intended Object
I tried this. Overall interesting. I had some good, novel thoughts. I’m not sure I had more or different good, novel thoughts about my abstract object than I would have had I just said “I’m gonna think about this for an hour”. I do get the sense that if I were practiced at this, I would have had novel thoughts in 10-15 minutes rather than in an hour, and that if I regularly practiced this I’d naturally have some of those novel thoughts without really reaching for them. The whole thing felt brain stretchy in a nice way—not like “oh this is a hard math problem”, more like “oh I haven’t been to this city before apart from driving through”.
Oddities:
Usually 5 minutes is a great amount of time for me; here, I kept finding myself thinking “am I done?” at about 4 minutes.
Phase 2 Exercise 4 I skipped because I must have skimmed or something? and thought I was supposed to do the abstract object rather than concrete. So I did E5 instead, then read the instructions for E5 and was like “wait didn’t I just do that”.
P3E1 I don’t know why, but it took me a while to believe/confirm that “the previous exercise” referred to P2E6.
When looking at my felt sense for my abstract object, I noticed that it was slippery—I was feeling a specific hypothetical instance of the object, and I was feeling the generalization of a subset of the object, but rarely The Intended Object
My log