Sometimes people are explaining a mental move, and give some advice on where/how it should feel in a spatial metaphor. For example, they say “if you’re doing this right, it should feel like the concept is above your head and you’re reaching toward it.”
I have historically had trouble working well with advice like this, and I don’t often see it working well for other people. But I think the solution is that for most people, the spatial or feeling advice is best used as an intermediate/terminal checksum, not as something that is constructive.
For example, if you try to imagine feeling their feeling, and then seeing what you could do differently to get there, this will usually not work (if it does work fine, carry on, this isn’t meant for you). The best way for most people to use advice like this is to just notice your spatial feeling is much different than theirs, be reminded that you definitely aren’t doing the same thing as them, and be motivated to go back and try to understand all the pieces better. You’re missing some part of the move or context that is generating their spatial intuition, and you want to investigate the upstream generators, not their downstream spatial feeling itself. (Again, this isn’t to say you can’t learn tricks for making the spatial intuition constructive, just don’t think this is expected of you in the moment.)
For explainers of mental moves, this model is also useful to remember. Mental moves that accomplish similar goals in different people will by default involve significantly different moving parts in their minds and microstrategies to get there. If you are going to explain spatial intuitions (that most people can’t work easily with), you probably want to do one of the following:
1) make sure they are great at working with spatial intuitions
2) make sure they know it’s primarily a checksum, not an instruction
3) break down which parts generate that spatial intuition in yourself, so if they don’t have it then you can help guide them toward the proper generators
4) figure out your own better method of helping them work with it that I haven’t discovered
5) remember the goal is not to describe your experience as you experience it, but to teach them the skill, and just don’t bring up the spatial intuition as if they should be guided by that right now
I like NLP’s explanation of this. Submodalities like position and distance aren’t common between people, but people DO tend to have similar representations with similar submodalities. I tend to be very kinesthetic with proprioceptive intuitions, but if instead I can say “do this task, wait for some sense, then tell me how you represent that”, I can have them work with THEIR representation instead of mine.
This seemed to work decently well for teaching people strategies for overcoming Akrasia/procrastination, and I suspect with some tweaking it can be even more consistent.
Sometimes people are explaining a mental move, and give some advice on where/how it should feel in a spatial metaphor. For example, they say “if you’re doing this right, it should feel like the concept is above your head and you’re reaching toward it.”
I have historically had trouble working well with advice like this, and I don’t often see it working well for other people. But I think the solution is that for most people, the spatial or feeling advice is best used as an intermediate/terminal checksum, not as something that is constructive.
For example, if you try to imagine feeling their feeling, and then seeing what you could do differently to get there, this will usually not work (if it does work fine, carry on, this isn’t meant for you). The best way for most people to use advice like this is to just notice your spatial feeling is much different than theirs, be reminded that you definitely aren’t doing the same thing as them, and be motivated to go back and try to understand all the pieces better. You’re missing some part of the move or context that is generating their spatial intuition, and you want to investigate the upstream generators, not their downstream spatial feeling itself. (Again, this isn’t to say you can’t learn tricks for making the spatial intuition constructive, just don’t think this is expected of you in the moment.)
For explainers of mental moves, this model is also useful to remember. Mental moves that accomplish similar goals in different people will by default involve significantly different moving parts in their minds and microstrategies to get there. If you are going to explain spatial intuitions (that most people can’t work easily with), you probably want to do one of the following:
1) make sure they are great at working with spatial intuitions
2) make sure they know it’s primarily a checksum, not an instruction
3) break down which parts generate that spatial intuition in yourself, so if they don’t have it then you can help guide them toward the proper generators
4) figure out your own better method of helping them work with it that I haven’t discovered
5) remember the goal is not to describe your experience as you experience it, but to teach them the skill, and just don’t bring up the spatial intuition as if they should be guided by that right now
I like NLP’s explanation of this. Submodalities like position and distance aren’t common between people, but people DO tend to have similar representations with similar submodalities. I tend to be very kinesthetic with proprioceptive intuitions, but if instead I can say “do this task, wait for some sense, then tell me how you represent that”, I can have them work with THEIR representation instead of mine.
This seemed to work decently well for teaching people strategies for overcoming Akrasia/procrastination, and I suspect with some tweaking it can be even more consistent.