Psychology has a complex relationship with introspection. To advance the science of psychology via the study of introspection, you need a way to trigger, measure, and control it. You always face the problem that paying attention to your own mental processes tends to alter them.
Building mechanistic tools for learning and knowledge production faces a similar difficulty. Even the latest brain/computer interfaces mostly reinterpret a brain signal as a form of computer input. The user’s interaction with the computer modifies their brain state.
However, the computer does not have the ability to directly manipulate the structure of the user’s thoughts. It is not analogous to how a surgeon directly manipulates a patient’s body. Instead, it’s like how a theatrical performance manipulates an audience into sitting quietly and laughing or gasping occasionally for three hours or so.
People do have the ability to directly monitor and manipulate their own conscious cognitive processes. Their goals also diverge from those of scientists. A psychologist might seek to understand how people’s brains and minds work in a naturalistic context, and the influence of the lab setting, evaluations, measurement devices, the subjects’ self-consciousness, and so on are tolerated as necessary evils.
By contrast, individual people seeking mental self-improvement and practical function in the world might deliberately try to avoid their brain’s “natural” way of functioning. To be extremely crude, the web comic SMBC gives a parodic portrait of the “natural” brain as an echo chamber of embarrassing intrusive thoughts and grandiose fantasies. A person who wants to discipline their mind in order to be able to perform at serious work wants an artificial mind, not a natural one.
Since the goals of a person seeking mental self-improvement diverge from those of scientists, and because they have higher-fidelity, direct, unconstrained, long-term access to their own mind, it makes sense to view this task as distinct from the work of the scientific study of the mind. For the same reasons, it is also distinct from the challenge of building software and physical tools for knowledge work.
Since scientists and tool-builders have different goals, methods, and constraints from those interested in mental self-improvement, we can expect that there is much for those interested in mental self-improvement to discover that isn’t already contained in the scientific literature or engineered into a learning tool. Those interested in mental self-improvement can probably learn at least as much via introspection and “mindhacking” themselves (analogous to biohacking) as they can by reading the psychological and educational literature, or by incorporating more engineered learning tools into their workflow.
That’s not to say that the psychological literature and learning tools are irrelevant to their projects—far from it! Becoming a “mentat” is not the only way to practice mental self-improvement, and I’m not at all sure that the portrayals of genius in science fiction are useful guides or exemplars for real-world mental self-improvement efforts.
Likewise, I think we should be skeptical of our impressions of how the genius mental calculators of history, like von Neumann, seemed to operate. There’s a story about von Neumann. He was told a math riddle:
Two bicyclists, 20 miles apart, are pedaling toward each other. Each bicycle is going 10 miles per hour. In front of the wheel of one bicycle is a fly. It travels back and forth between the two bicycles at 15 miles per hour. How far will the fly have traveled before it is squashed between the wheels of the two bicycles?
The slow way to solve this riddle involves calculating the distance the fly travels each time it changes direction, and adding all these up. The fast way to solve it is to realize that it will take the bicyclists one hour to cover the 20 mile gap between them, and that the fly will therefore travel 15 miles during that time.
Von Neumann, on hearing this riddle, is said to have given the correct answer instantly. When the riddle-poser disappointedly said “oh, you must have heard it before,” von Neumann said “I merely summed the geometric series.”
This gives the impression that von Neumann was such a fast mental calculator (which was undoubtedly true) that he was able to solve this problem the slow way faster than mathematicians are able to solve it the fast way.
An alternative explanation, though, is that von Neumann also solved it the second, fast way, but also recognized that the slow way existed. In claiming to have instantly solved it the slow way, he was either making a joke, or bolstering the legend of his own calculating speed.
That’s mere speculation on my part, but the point is that we should be skeptical of the impressions we have of the capabilities and mental methods historical geniuses used to develop their ideas and perform calculations. Even if we correctly discern how they operated, the techniques that work best for our own minds and purposes might be very different. Von Neumann, in particular, was reported to be poor at geometry and topology, and to have had very poor physical intuitions and to have been a bit of a clutz. If your work depends on having strong visual and physical intuitions or on manual dexterity, von Neumann is not your exemplar.
I am advocating that those interested in mental practice and mental self-improvement focus on observing and tinkering with their own cognitive faculties. Use external tools and draw upon the scientific literature, but use them as inspiration. Don’t rely on them. You have access to different forms of information, control mechanisms, goals, and incentives than are available to scientists and engineers who do this sort of research and build these sorts of tools. Your projects, insights, and conclusions are therefore likely to diverge.
Likewise, if you are trying to do practical learning for real-world challenges, you might want to be skeptical of the methods of people who compete in memorization challenges and similar competitions. The techniques that allow somebody to memorize 10,000 digits of π are optimized for that task, and may not be the mental techniques most helpful for becoming an excellent mathematician, chemical engineer, or ornithologist.
Psychology has a complex relationship with introspection. To advance the science of psychology via the study of introspection, you need a way to trigger, measure, and control it. You always face the problem that paying attention to your own mental processes tends to alter them.
Building mechanistic tools for learning and knowledge production faces a similar difficulty. Even the latest brain/computer interfaces mostly reinterpret a brain signal as a form of computer input. The user’s interaction with the computer modifies their brain state.
However, the computer does not have the ability to directly manipulate the structure of the user’s thoughts. It is not analogous to how a surgeon directly manipulates a patient’s body. Instead, it’s like how a theatrical performance manipulates an audience into sitting quietly and laughing or gasping occasionally for three hours or so.
People do have the ability to directly monitor and manipulate their own conscious cognitive processes. Their goals also diverge from those of scientists. A psychologist might seek to understand how people’s brains and minds work in a naturalistic context, and the influence of the lab setting, evaluations, measurement devices, the subjects’ self-consciousness, and so on are tolerated as necessary evils.
By contrast, individual people seeking mental self-improvement and practical function in the world might deliberately try to avoid their brain’s “natural” way of functioning. To be extremely crude, the web comic SMBC gives a parodic portrait of the “natural” brain as an echo chamber of embarrassing intrusive thoughts and grandiose fantasies. A person who wants to discipline their mind in order to be able to perform at serious work wants an artificial mind, not a natural one.
Since the goals of a person seeking mental self-improvement diverge from those of scientists, and because they have higher-fidelity, direct, unconstrained, long-term access to their own mind, it makes sense to view this task as distinct from the work of the scientific study of the mind. For the same reasons, it is also distinct from the challenge of building software and physical tools for knowledge work.
Since scientists and tool-builders have different goals, methods, and constraints from those interested in mental self-improvement, we can expect that there is much for those interested in mental self-improvement to discover that isn’t already contained in the scientific literature or engineered into a learning tool. Those interested in mental self-improvement can probably learn at least as much via introspection and “mindhacking” themselves (analogous to biohacking) as they can by reading the psychological and educational literature, or by incorporating more engineered learning tools into their workflow.
That’s not to say that the psychological literature and learning tools are irrelevant to their projects—far from it! Becoming a “mentat” is not the only way to practice mental self-improvement, and I’m not at all sure that the portrayals of genius in science fiction are useful guides or exemplars for real-world mental self-improvement efforts.
Likewise, I think we should be skeptical of our impressions of how the genius mental calculators of history, like von Neumann, seemed to operate. There’s a story about von Neumann. He was told a math riddle:
Two bicyclists, 20 miles apart, are pedaling toward each other. Each bicycle is going 10 miles per hour. In front of the wheel of one bicycle is a fly. It travels back and forth between the two bicycles at 15 miles per hour. How far will the fly have traveled before it is squashed between the wheels of the two bicycles?
The slow way to solve this riddle involves calculating the distance the fly travels each time it changes direction, and adding all these up. The fast way to solve it is to realize that it will take the bicyclists one hour to cover the 20 mile gap between them, and that the fly will therefore travel 15 miles during that time.
Von Neumann, on hearing this riddle, is said to have given the correct answer instantly. When the riddle-poser disappointedly said “oh, you must have heard it before,” von Neumann said “I merely summed the geometric series.”
This gives the impression that von Neumann was such a fast mental calculator (which was undoubtedly true) that he was able to solve this problem the slow way faster than mathematicians are able to solve it the fast way.
An alternative explanation, though, is that von Neumann also solved it the second, fast way, but also recognized that the slow way existed. In claiming to have instantly solved it the slow way, he was either making a joke, or bolstering the legend of his own calculating speed.
That’s mere speculation on my part, but the point is that we should be skeptical of the impressions we have of the capabilities and mental methods historical geniuses used to develop their ideas and perform calculations. Even if we correctly discern how they operated, the techniques that work best for our own minds and purposes might be very different. Von Neumann, in particular, was reported to be poor at geometry and topology, and to have had very poor physical intuitions and to have been a bit of a clutz. If your work depends on having strong visual and physical intuitions or on manual dexterity, von Neumann is not your exemplar.
I am advocating that those interested in mental practice and mental self-improvement focus on observing and tinkering with their own cognitive faculties. Use external tools and draw upon the scientific literature, but use them as inspiration. Don’t rely on them. You have access to different forms of information, control mechanisms, goals, and incentives than are available to scientists and engineers who do this sort of research and build these sorts of tools. Your projects, insights, and conclusions are therefore likely to diverge.
Likewise, if you are trying to do practical learning for real-world challenges, you might want to be skeptical of the methods of people who compete in memorization challenges and similar competitions. The techniques that allow somebody to memorize 10,000 digits of π are optimized for that task, and may not be the mental techniques most helpful for becoming an excellent mathematician, chemical engineer, or ornithologist.