Edward W. Porter wrote:
In response to Charles Hixson’s 10/12/2007 7:56 PM post:
Different people’s minds probably work differently. For me dredging up of
memories, including verbal memories, is an important part of my mental
processes. Maybe that is because I have been trained as a lawyer.
I am not arguing against the fact that visual memories play an important
role in human thinking. They do. I often do a lot of my best thinking in
terms of images.
What I am arguing is that other types of grounding play an important part
as well. I am arguing that visual grounding is not necessarily the
largest force in each and every mathematical thought. Yes, the human
brain dedicates a lot of real estate to visual processing, but if you take
all of the language, behavioral, emotional and higher level association
areas, you have a lot of brain real estate dedicated to concepts that are
either non-visual or only partially visual. We should not assume that all
that brain real estate plays little or no role in most thinking.
Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if visual memories and patterns are
taking at least some part in the massively parallel spreading activation
and inferencing in the sub-conscious that helps pop most thoughts up to
consciousness -- without me even knowing it. But by similar reasoning I
would also assume a lot of non-visual memories and patterns would also be
taking part in such massive parallel inferencing.
In many types of thinking I am consciously aware of words in my head much
more than I am of images. Perhaps this is because I am a patent lawyer,
and I have spent thousands of hours reading text in which many of the
words have only loose association to concrete visual memories. And as a
lawyer when I read such abstract texts, to the extent that I can sense
what is in my consciousness and near consciousness, many of the words I
read seem to derive their meaning largely from other concepts and memories
that also seem to be largely defined in terms of words, although
occasionally visual memories pop out.
When I read “The plaintiff is an Illinois corporation selling services for
the maintenance of photocopiers” it is probably not until I get to
“photocopiers” than anything approaching a concrete image pops into my
mind.
Thus, at least from my personal experience, it seems that many concepts
learned largely through words can be grounded to a significant degree in
other concepts defined largely through words. Yes, at some level in the
gen/comp pattern hierarchy and in episodic memory all of these concepts
derive at least some of their meaning from visual memories. But for
seconds at a time that does not seem to be the level of representation my
consciousness is aware of.
Does any body else on this list have similar episodes of what appears to
be largely verbal conscious thought, or am I (a) out of touch with my own
conscious processes, and/or (b) weird?
I also do not visualize your plaintiff example except for the
photocopier at first, but eventually I have to visualize to remember as
a mnemonic technique.
I do not think that your plaintiff example is a "verbal conscious
thought," but a verbal memory. I first just memorized the words and
sounds of the sentence without visualizing it. I can easily memorize the
example by selectively memorizing the important words by rehearsal. Then
I visualized the shape of the state Illinois from a map. For a
corporation, I visualized a big building. For "selling services" I
visualized a grocery store. I visualized the phrase "for the
maintenance" to a picture of someone fixing a computer. I memorized a
picture of a photocopier.
For reconstruction of the sentence, I converted the images back to
words. I will eventually forget the "selling services" part because I
can still reconstruct the sentence without it.
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