I see; thanks Nick, I am happy the expected categories fell apart. But there have been occasions when I went looking for categories something like these on my own too.
In college (which I hit about like a bird flying into a window), as sophomores we were taught algebra by Mike Aschbacher, one of the great algebraists of the just-past generation. A man who never brought notes, wrote every proof spontaneously, and could write on a chalkboard at the same speed as he talked. A friend and I — both of us just getting pounded into the ground — decided that there were geometric thinkers, who exapted visual thinking, and algebraic thinkers, who exapted syntactic thinking. Aschbacher being the most syntactically superhuman being we had ever encountered. And we decided we were both “algebraically impaired”. In contrast, analysis was straightforward, and always seemed to me to have a somewhat visual angle to it, and algebraic topology and differential geometry were even better. Although I never tried anything hard in those fields, like proving things about more than 3 dimensions. So not sure how much visual/geometric skill I have beyond the baseline for primates. I have continued to wonder where one should go to characterize “elementary” or “primitive” modalities of cognition, and how to take them to assemble into the kinds of synthetic things we call “skills”. Marc Hauser once gave some very compelling talks along these lines for mathematical reasoning. But since he was found fabricating data some years later, I don’t know how much of the earlier stuff I should continue to find compelling. It might not have been tainted at all; but I am not in the field. It’s a nice topic. Eric > On Nov 6, 2025, at 15:59, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]> wrote: > > I’m sorry for the misprint. The correct term is aphantasia. > > It took 15 minutes with a handful of people at thuam for the categories to > break down horribly. My prediction was based on no great insite. I had > divided the world up into picture people and word people assume that our > word. I claimed no wisdom here, only prejudices I seem to be a.-side myself > Sent from my Dumb Phone > > On Nov 6, 2025, at 1:02 PM, Prof David West <[email protected]> wrote: > > Yes, please, what Eric asked. > > I would expect most people on this list to tend towards the "hyper," not the > "apha." > > davew > > > On Thu, Nov 6, 2025, at 10:38 AM, Santafe wrote: >> That’s interesting, Nick (on limited time here, but just for a while) >> >>> On Nov 6, 2025, at 11:19, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> Given the work that many of you do, many of you are candidates for >>> "aphatasia" >> >> Can you say more about why you expect a correlation? 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