> Personally, most of my "thinking in J" uses my visual/spatial > reasoning rather than my verbal/grammatical reasoning.
An old colleague of mine, Dr Nick Hammond, of York University, once designed a psychological "test" or "index" to determine a person's cognitive style (at least, in one important respect), and showed it to be remarkably constant across all aspects of life. It seems to have nothing to do with (general) intelligence, left/right hemisphere orientation, nor other (popular) mental quality ...but that's a research question. Essentially... == Type A picks up a hammer and then looks for something to hit. == Type B first selects a nail and then looks for something to hit it with. Mac/Windows (WIMP) interfaces cater for B's. Unix suits A's. If both are forced to use a command-line language, A's perform measurably better with a syntax resembling: <verb>...<object>, B's with <object>...<verb>. (I can give you a cartload of references... all work paid for by IBM.) It also turns out that in normal speech A's have difficulty remembering nouns in a hurry (and will resort to placeholders like "whatsit", "gizmo"...) but verbs give no trouble. B's on the other hand are good at quickly coming up with just the right noun. (In fact, this is what the Test is based on.) B's might well agree with [St] Augustine of Hippo's assertion that the purpose of a university education was to "learn to call everything by its Right Name". A's on the other hand might be impatient with that, and prefer to stress achievement and the scope for it. This is not to say A's have no interest in names of things: they may collect them meticulously and keep lists of them. Possibly as compensating behaviour. I've always felt Nick's work needed to be more widely known. A schoolteacher would benefit from knowing each pupil's rating on the Test -- as would the pupil, because I don't think it's amenable to training or lifestyle choice, rather the other way round. But ever since Cyril Burt and the IQ scandal, there's been a reluctance among teachers (in England at least) to let a shrink slap a label on their pupils. But I've benefitted from learning I'm strongly-A (and so I recall was my mother, whose favourite word was "thingmajig", as in: "put it on the thingmajig") -- and I wish my teachers at school had known it too, and guided me accordingly. I'd love to know the test scores of others on the J lists. (If only I could remember its dratted name...!) IanClark On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 11:37 AM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 11:17 PM, Bill Harris > <[email protected]> wrote: >> I think in words in English or German. I don't have to puzzle through that; >> it's become natural enough so that I just do it. When I read something by >> an author such as Faulkner or Kant, I may indeed have to think more >> carefully, but that's not the way I normally write. >> >> Would I be better off if I thought analytically in J, too? Would increased >> skill in that regard give me more analytical strength? >> >> If so, would I get to the point that writing a program is to thinking as >> writing an email is to talking: just setting down "on paper" what was going >> through my head? Would that make me a better programmer? Is that what Ken >> was talking about when writing about a notation of thought? > > I cannot answer that. > > Personally, most of my "thinking in J" uses my visual/spatial > reasoning rather than my verbal/grammatical reasoning. > > Put differently, I am mostly thinking in terms of J's nouns (or > abstractions of those nouns), rather than J's verbs. > > I do have a sense of the sort of operations I can perform, on the > nouns, but that's not where I start my thoughts. I start my thoughts > by thinking in terms of what data I want (to start with, and to end > with). Once I have that connecting them with verbs is something I can > often do. That said, there are some J verbs (and adverbs and > conjunctions) that I use frequently and the associated transformation > are easier for me to visualize than others. > > Atop? easy > > Plus? easy > > Rank? not too hard (Implicit rank? easy) > > Magnitude? not too hard > > Hypergeometric? difficult > > -- > Raul > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
