I’m often walking to somewhere and I notice that I have a good amount of thinking time, but that I find my head empty. Has anyone any good ideas on useful things to occupy my mind during such time? Visualisation exercises, mental arithmetic, thinking about philosophy?
It depresses me a little, how much easier it is to make use of nothing but a pen and paper, than it is to make use of when that is removed and one has only one’s own mind.
How often do you think in words, and how often in visuals, sounds, and so on? Do you normally think by picturing things, or engaging in an internal monologue, or what? Or is the distribution sort of even?
I’d say something like internal monologue, for thinking anyway (this may be internally sounded, I know that I think word-thoughts in my own voice, but I regularly think much faster than I could possibly speak, until I realise that fact, when the voice becomes slow and I start repeating myself, and then get annoyed at my brain for being so distracting).
For calculating or anything vaguely mathematical I use abstractly spatial/visual sorts of thoughts—abstract meaning I don’t have sufficient awareness of the architecture of my brain to tell you accurately what I even mean. Generally I’m not very visual, but I would say I use a spatial sort of visual awareness quite often in thought. If this makes sense.
Does this imply something about the sorts of tasks I could do that were most useful? I’m intrigued by the reasons you have for requesting the data you did. :)
I requested that data because for some reason, in my own experience, I’ve noticed the tendency you mentioned in your previous post as being strongest when I’m trying to avoid the internal monologue way of thinking.
If I try to avoid using words in my thought process, I often find myself walking around empty-headed for some reason. It’s as if it’s a lot harder to start a non-verbal thought, or something. I don’t know.
When walking around with a lot of thinking time on my hands, I’ve found a lot of success keeping myself occupied by simply saying words to myself and then seeing where it takes me. For example, I may vocalize in my head “epistemology”, or “dark arts”, or something like that, and then see where it takes me (making sure to start verbalizing my thought process if I stall at any point).
Maybe I’m on a different topic though. Are you simply asking what you should spend your time thinking about, and I’m going into the topic of how to start a thought process (whatever it is)? This seems like an unlikely interpretation though because you said the problem is not having a pen and paper, which suggests to me that you know what to think about, but end up not doing anything if all you can’t write or draw.
Sorry if this is pretty messy. I wanted to respond to this, but didn’t have much time.
I see, that’s interesting. That feels recognisable: I think when I hear my own voice/internal monologue, it brings to memory things I’ve already said or talked about, so I dwell on those things rather than think of fresh topics. So I think of the monologue itself as being the source of the stagnant thinking, and shut it down hoping insight will come to me wordlessly. Having said all that about having an internal monologue, I now think I do have a fair number of non-verbal thoughts, but these still use some form of mental labelling to organise concepts as I think about them.
That sounds an interesting experiment to do, next time I need to travel bipedally I’ll get on to checking out those default conceptual autocompletes* that I get from different words. Thanks!
*Hoping I haven’t been presumptious in my use of technical metaphors—in the course of writing this I’ve had to consciously reign in my desire to use programming metaphors for how my brain seems to work.
I suppose among the questions I was interested in, was indeed what I should spend my time thinking about. I had the idea that there must be high-computational-requiring and low-requisite-knowledge-requiring mental tasks, akin to how one learning electronics might spend time extrapolating the design of a one-bit adder with a pen and paper and requisite knowledge of logic gates. But crucially, without a pen and paper. So in what area can I use my pre-existing knowledge to productively generate new ideas or thoughts without a pen and paper. Possibly advancing in some sense my ‘knowledge’ of those areas at the same time.
Sidenote: I like reading detailed descriptions of people’s thought-processes like this, because of the interleaved data on what they pay attention to when thinking; and especially when there isn’t necessarily a point to it in the sequences-/narrative-/this post has a lesson related to this anecdote-style, and when it’s just describing the mechanics of their thought stream for the sake of understanding another brain. For some reason it feels like a rich source of data for me, and I would like to see more of it. Particularly because it feels to give insight on a slightly lower level than cognitive biases themselves. I sometimes think I use my micro-thought processes to evade or disrupt the act of changing my mind simply because they have the advantage of being on a lower level. A level that interacts with feelings, of which I seem to have many. Alternately, my desire for detailed descriptions of people’s thought-processes might be down to my personality and not be something generally useful.
I’m often walking to somewhere and I notice that I have a good amount of thinking time, but that I find my head empty. Has anyone any good ideas on useful things to occupy my mind during such time? Visualisation exercises, mental arithmetic, thinking about philosophy?
It depresses me a little, how much easier it is to make use of nothing but a pen and paper, than it is to make use of when that is removed and one has only one’s own mind.
How often do you think in words, and how often in visuals, sounds, and so on? Do you normally think by picturing things, or engaging in an internal monologue, or what? Or is the distribution sort of even?
I’d say something like internal monologue, for thinking anyway (this may be internally sounded, I know that I think word-thoughts in my own voice, but I regularly think much faster than I could possibly speak, until I realise that fact, when the voice becomes slow and I start repeating myself, and then get annoyed at my brain for being so distracting).
For calculating or anything vaguely mathematical I use abstractly spatial/visual sorts of thoughts—abstract meaning I don’t have sufficient awareness of the architecture of my brain to tell you accurately what I even mean. Generally I’m not very visual, but I would say I use a spatial sort of visual awareness quite often in thought. If this makes sense.
Does this imply something about the sorts of tasks I could do that were most useful? I’m intrigued by the reasons you have for requesting the data you did. :)
I requested that data because for some reason, in my own experience, I’ve noticed the tendency you mentioned in your previous post as being strongest when I’m trying to avoid the internal monologue way of thinking.
If I try to avoid using words in my thought process, I often find myself walking around empty-headed for some reason. It’s as if it’s a lot harder to start a non-verbal thought, or something. I don’t know.
When walking around with a lot of thinking time on my hands, I’ve found a lot of success keeping myself occupied by simply saying words to myself and then seeing where it takes me. For example, I may vocalize in my head “epistemology”, or “dark arts”, or something like that, and then see where it takes me (making sure to start verbalizing my thought process if I stall at any point).
Maybe I’m on a different topic though. Are you simply asking what you should spend your time thinking about, and I’m going into the topic of how to start a thought process (whatever it is)? This seems like an unlikely interpretation though because you said the problem is not having a pen and paper, which suggests to me that you know what to think about, but end up not doing anything if all you can’t write or draw.
Sorry if this is pretty messy. I wanted to respond to this, but didn’t have much time.
I see, that’s interesting. That feels recognisable: I think when I hear my own voice/internal monologue, it brings to memory things I’ve already said or talked about, so I dwell on those things rather than think of fresh topics. So I think of the monologue itself as being the source of the stagnant thinking, and shut it down hoping insight will come to me wordlessly. Having said all that about having an internal monologue, I now think I do have a fair number of non-verbal thoughts, but these still use some form of mental labelling to organise concepts as I think about them.
That sounds an interesting experiment to do, next time I need to travel bipedally I’ll get on to checking out those default conceptual autocompletes* that I get from different words. Thanks!
*Hoping I haven’t been presumptious in my use of technical metaphors—in the course of writing this I’ve had to consciously reign in my desire to use programming metaphors for how my brain seems to work.
I suppose among the questions I was interested in, was indeed what I should spend my time thinking about. I had the idea that there must be high-computational-requiring and low-requisite-knowledge-requiring mental tasks, akin to how one learning electronics might spend time extrapolating the design of a one-bit adder with a pen and paper and requisite knowledge of logic gates. But crucially, without a pen and paper. So in what area can I use my pre-existing knowledge to productively generate new ideas or thoughts without a pen and paper. Possibly advancing in some sense my ‘knowledge’ of those areas at the same time.
Sidenote: I like reading detailed descriptions of people’s thought-processes like this, because of the interleaved data on what they pay attention to when thinking; and especially when there isn’t necessarily a point to it in the sequences-/narrative-/this post has a lesson related to this anecdote-style, and when it’s just describing the mechanics of their thought stream for the sake of understanding another brain. For some reason it feels like a rich source of data for me, and I would like to see more of it. Particularly because it feels to give insight on a slightly lower level than cognitive biases themselves. I sometimes think I use my micro-thought processes to evade or disrupt the act of changing my mind simply because they have the advantage of being on a lower level. A level that interacts with feelings, of which I seem to have many. Alternately, my desire for detailed descriptions of people’s thought-processes might be down to my personality and not be something generally useful.