Comment by sillysaurus2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillysaurus2 | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting premise. I've noticed most people use conversation (which is storytelling) as a substitute for writing essays. The main benefit in writing your thoughts is the ideas you generate by doing so. This happens in conversation too, but more randomly and usually less effectively.

And that is exactly how we think. We think in narratives all day long, no matter if it is about buying groceries, whether we think about work or our spouse at home. We make up (short) stories in our heads for every action and conversation.

Actually, I think in images. The only dialogue in my head is my own voice. Whether I'm doing mathematics or programming, it's images combined with me speaking internally about it (trying to reason my way through it). Perhaps that's a "story", but it'd be a boring one. Maybe there's a more precise term?

When you're reasoning through a problem, what does it look and sound like to you, mentally? Does anyone else think in pictures?

I think in images and then try to verbalize it when I need to express it.Mostly when I am doing coding or math,the solution most of the time strikes me as an image then I go about implementing it. I think most of us think more in images than words.

I think most of us think more in images than words.

I thought so too, but interestingly the imagery is completely different for different people. Einstein often spoke of "thinking with music," and Ramanujan claimed to think of solutions by picturing a goddess delivering them to him as drops of blood.

Here's a concrete example of the difference: When I see "13/12", I think of a pie shape with a small sliver filled in, like if you filled in the area between the hands of a clock pointing at 12 and 1. That's the "one-twelfth" part, so the whole thought becomes "one plus [that image]". People seem to think of fractions differently; sometimes purely as an abstraction rather than visualizing what the numbers mean.

Someone should write a webapp to poll the community / explore the different ways people think about various tasks. I bet $5 that Bret Victor's mental imagery is more powerful than ours. Naturally, we'd want to change our thinking to match his process, if we had the option to. The only reason we can't is because we don't know what his mind looks like when he's problem solving. Making a webapp that enables us, as a community, to explore these differences is perhaps a step in that direction.

I doubt most people know they have particular thinking pattern and when they think in images v/s words or in any other form. A web poll would be nice though.

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