Quote:
Originally Posted by Michaelangelica
...However I fell that i must disagree with you... the reason for this was that I thought in pictures. Thinking in pictures is much faster than words. My arguments often jumped to conclusions that no-one else could see because I had not put them down in a logical sequence of words. I was angry & frustrated because I could literally SEE the answer... So, does this exception disprove the rule?
Do Japanese/Chinese think in pictures?
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Excellent, excellent!
You have painted me into a corner!
Now let's see how nimbly I can think my way out of this (using linguistic structures!).
You are correct that "visual thinking" occurs in some people, myself included. For me, math, even Calculus and its use in Physics was easy because I didn't have to memorize very much; I could "see" the relationships and the path to solution. I have many vivid visual memories of my childhood, detailed as a video, usually associated with an intense emotional experience. Let's start with that.
The mammalian brain is at work here. A strong emotion/feeling such as panic, rejection, pain, can release neuro-chemicals that cause a visual transcription to occur. Later re-experience of that same emotion/feeling can trigger replay of that "
vizscription". This is (I assert) how mammals learn from experience. (For Pavlov's dogs, it was "
audioscription". We can generalize with the word "
eventscription".) This learning is actually a bonding of the eventscription with an emotion/feeling engram and with an outcome/action engram.
When we "think" with images (events), we are actually manipulating not the images per se, but the image inputs (emotion/feeling engram) and the image outputs (outcome/action engram). Using these inputs and outputs, we can string together eventscriptions in a "logical" fashion, accomplishing something like "visual thinking".
Why can't bison do this? They have mammalian brains. They have something very like the eventscription and its bonding to an outcome/action engram. Otherwise, it would not learn that the tail of a lion was just as dangerous as the entire lion, leading to the same reaction.
That's the key word here. Reaction. The bison reacts when a visual cue triggers the associated eventscription and its output reaction. ("Run away!")
You and I have done something far more subtle. We
attach linguistic labels to the input emotion/feeling engram and to the output/action engram. And since linguistic labels can trigger subsequent emotion/feelings, we can now string together a sequence of eventscriptions like Lego bricks. But rather than merely reacting ("Run away!"), we are building a linguistic structure.
What we "see" in our minds, however, is the sequence of eventscriptions, not the labels -- even though it is the labels that enable us to construct the jigsaw puzzle that "pictures" for us the solution that we are seeking. The jigsaw pieces are the eventscriptions. The wiggly borders on each side of each piece -- the borders that interlock together -- are the linguistic labels associated with the eventscription.
The teacher asks, "how far does George travel if he starts at speed zero at time zero, and subsequently, his velocity along the X-axis is defined by the function Vx = Fx(t), and his velocity along the Y-axis is defined by the function Vy = Fy(t)?".
The linguistic trigger (velocity-to-distance) triggers an eventscription that looks like a picket fence, with the top border being velocity and the area of the fence being total distance. I "see" an animation of area being swept over and accumulated by the dot of current velocity traveling along the function of time, F(t).
I "see" that whatever I do in X and in Y are at right-angles.
This triggers an emotion/feeling of delight in splitting a hard problem into two easy problems.
I "see" the Integral Sign accumulating distance from velocity.
I "see" a distance traveled in X and a distance traveled in Y.
I "see" a Pythagorean triangle with hypotenuse.
This triggers an emotion/feeling of delight at knowing how to calculate the hypotenuse.
The jigsaw puzzle is complete, triggering an emotion/feeling of success which triggers a confidence that the solution works and that I am assured of the right place to start.
Maybe not ONE word may ever have been subvocalized in this process. And yet, at what we might call "the subconscious level" these eventscriptions, these visual, possibly animated memories of real (or constructed) "events" could not have been tied together into a "logical" sequence without each eventscription having been labeled; thereby causing these eventscriptions to be "wrapped" much as an Internet packet, producing a linguistic element that can be combined with other (jigsaw piecing) linguistic elements to form a linguistic structure.
I'll stop there. Not a proof, exactly. But perhaps a suggestion of a proof.
