Communicating an idea (to yourself)

[Tunco]

I've recently realized that I can communicate an idea to myself without consciously thinking about it, as in; I can lose my 'train of thought' ('stream of consciousness', whatever you name it) while solving a problem or thinking about a conclusion of some sort and when I arrive at the result, I may have no idea about 'steps' I've went through or what I've thought inbetween the problem-result. This 'anomaly' obviously doesn't work with pure analytical subjects like mathematics, but I often experience it when writing an essay or thinking about rather an abstract subject.

I don't know if this is related to my MBTI type which I always take with suspicion out of concern that it's pseudo-science, maybe it effects a great percentage of INxx types.

[chocollama]

Godammit. This happens to me too. Math class. I'll get a question right, but have no idea how, then the teacher will start asking how everyone got their answers and I'll have no idea.

[Scrivener]

i have a theory that's probably not new but might explain this. i'll try to think of a way to express it...

[Tanner]

While I suspect that the phenomenon that chocollama is describing is "laziness", I'm not sure I completely understand what Tunco's talking about. Are you describing the moment of inspiration that comes sometimes when you stop directly thinking about a problem? It's a pretty well-documented occurrence: it's often the reason that you're recommended to "sleep on it" or have an epiphany in the shower.

[otters~1]

I see where Tunco is coming from. If I get what he's saying, I've experienced this too. If a train of thought in a lengthy, involved debate gets too long, I sometimes mentally have to drop the first five steps I took out of ten and just trust my conclusion in order to continue thinking about it in an orderly fashion. Sometimes if asked to retrace my argument afterward I literally can't recreate it for this reason.

Rereading his post, it sounds more like what Tanner was describing, but I get that too. We all do. Except Edison, who is celebrated for short-circuiting his creative gene and throwing solutions at a wall until one stuck. Perseverance > genius, that day.

[yahoozy]

I think it's a phenomenon that occurs as a contrariety to motor function memory. Being able to hammer through a few steps of critical thought so quickly as to have seemingly skipped them completely after you've done so, like being able to do a maneuver in a video game or using a fork correctly without thinking about it. Think of how many times you've walked into a room and forgotten why you're there or what you wanted to get. This is probably you experiencing thought on such a subconscious level as to forget about it moments later. Thinking without thinking, you dig?

[乳头的早餐谷物]

Think of how many times you've walked into a room and forgotten why you're there or what you wanted to get.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1 ... 011.571267

[yahoozy]

Think of how many times you've walked into a room and forgotten why you're there or what you wanted to get.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1 ... 011.571267

Oh man, that is really cool.

[Amadeus]

What I think Tunco is referring to is when your brain thinks up a solution - the neurons and synapses firing up and communicating the process and answer - but you're not actively thinking about the steps in the cognitive process one by one. The solution process just happens like normal, you're just not consciously aware of the steps your brain has taken. It is almost like an epiphany in that your brain has thought up the answer without you fully realizing how.

[chocollama]

Think of how many times you've walked into a room and forgotten why you're there or what you wanted to get.

[Scrivener]

What is the need for consciousness if the mind can reach conclusions without it? Is "thought" the product of the conscious mind, or the subconscious, or is there not a clear distinction between the two?

I propose that the "consciousness" is like a screen onto which is projected only the results of the actual thought process, which takes place in the "subconsciousness." I'm sure this has been proposed, it might even be part of the actual definition of these two words. But the important takeaway is that the "conscious" mind doesn't do any work besides displaying (and thusly being able to communicate, eg. to other people) the information, conclusions, predictions etc. that your "subconscious" mind has produced.

My reasoning, and the approach I took towards that theory, is that it can be understood in a simple manner as a program with multiple namespaces (or locales, or whatever they're called). The subconscious is a subroutine that is called in response to stimuli, and it performs operations on variables which are local to the subconscious. Some greater, organizational part of the mind (perhaps simply part of the subconscious) delegates which of these variables are returned or made global, and seen by the conscious mind - outputs of the program. These values can include transitional steps (such as steps in a logical process), and from experience, such variables being returned is probably some sort of an attempt at error-checking or debugging. If no intermediate values are returned, we would seem to reach an answer instantly, regardless of how long our subconscious has been working on the problem.

Disclaimer: Words like namespace and subroutine are at the limit of my gibberish (er, jargon), so please let me know if I've botched any terminology. Thanks!

[Donfuy]

I think it's a phenomenon that occurs as a contrariety to motor function memory. Being able to hammer through a few steps of critical thought so quickly as to have seemingly skipped them completely after you've done so, like being able to do a maneuver in a video game or using a fork correctly without thinking about it. Think of how many times you've walked into a room and forgotten why you're there or what you wanted to get. This is probably you experiencing thought on such a subconscious level as to forget about it moments later. Thinking without thinking, you dig?

This happens so many times to me, specially on driving games. Extremely focused on beating a record or winning something, and then I start thinking about other, totally unrelated shit. Most of the times I realize I'm pseudo-dreaming, it's when I finish the race, but there are times when I regain conscience middle corner and screw things up.

[otters~1]

I think it's a phenomenon that occurs as a contrariety to motor function memory. Being able to hammer through a few steps of critical thought so quickly as to have seemingly skipped them completely after you've done so, like being able to do a maneuver in a video game or using a fork correctly without thinking about it. Think of how many times you've walked into a room and forgotten why you're there or what you wanted to get. This is probably you experiencing thought on such a subconscious level as to forget about it moments later. Thinking without thinking, you dig?

This happens so many times to me, specially on driving games. Extremely focused on beating a record or winning something, and then I start thinking about other, totally unrelated shit. Most of the times I realize I'm pseudo-dreaming, it's when I finish the race, but there are times when I regain conscience middle corner and screw things up.

That's funny, this happens to me when actually driving.

[Tunco]

What Yahoozy described seem more like basic thinking skills that doesn't require much critical thought; as Yahoozy put it; using a fork, entering a room to get something, etc. I'm pretty sure there're tons of 'intermediate' thoughts between the first strike of idea and getting the action done, we just don't bother consciously labeling ('thinking') them using words since, a) the tools we use to describe our actions (language) is probably not evolved enough to describe such miniscule yet-to-be thoughts (we're talking about intermediate-thoughts in our everyday actions) and, b) they don't require any particular thinking skills outside the usual thinking fabric. It may be necessary to draw the line between what is 'critical thought' and what isn't; in my former post I was referring to non-repetetive thinking; I don't think maneuvering a car (real or not), an action you've done several thousand times before would be much of critical thinking compared to preparing a refuting proposition in a debate about a specific subject. I was talking about such epiphany that one experiences during such an occurrence, a point centerfire (and Amadeus, to a degree) pinned down. In fact, I do have that exact moment in a lengthy debate too, which is why I prefer written formats when it comes to arguments.

Also, a question I thought up when reading Scrivener's post; do the process of remembering the 'intermediate' thoughts for the sake of 'debugging' or 'controlling' an idea fit into the scheme of evolution? I mean, I feel urged to say that there's no way evolution could've forseen it since forgetting about something out of the blue seems to be very common.

On a second thought that belongs to another discussion; I feel like it's related to evolution of language. or something

[Donfuy]

That "critical thought" line may be rather hard to define. I mean, you can apply patterns to any action, and say that the reason why you can't remember doing them is cause it's something repetitive, like driving a car.
But hey, each time you drive a car is different. Different roads, different weather conditions, different transit (and I'm talking about real driving now). These are all factors that I already know how to deal with. But maybe you can apply this reasoning to finding a solution of a problem - you're most likely using the same basic problem-solving or argument refuting techniques that you've always used.

[ENT474]

This happens to me /all/ /the/ /time/. Especially when doing things like multiplication in my head.

Theory:
Things that happen and you think about can only be truly remembered with constant reminders - say, every five seconds. This constant recall can create a kind of "backup" in your subconscious. Without it, things get stored in a kind of RAM with a limited amount of memories allowed - say, as a ridiculous example, 3 items. So, if I wanted to go into a room to get something, and I think about other things, the thing I wanted to get would become thrown out, while the only one left is the knowledge that I was walking towards that room. So by the time I've reached that room, I have no idea what to do. So yeah.

By the way, I'm assuming that a "thought" consists of many subthoughts, like tiny units. However, these subthoughts are sorted by importance, so the things required for survival and things that require action (for example, walking) are sorted as higher importance than others.

Not much of a theory, more of an idea that has no grounding in the real world. So ignore me.