How do you think? (Or: "what do you think *in*?")

Discussion in 'Braaaaiiiinnnns...' started by Alexand, Nov 1, 2017.

  1. Aondeug

    Aondeug Cringe Annoying Ass Female Lobster

    Oh right that is a thing. That I can do. When reading like academic shit for the first time at least I'm able to just kind of shut that voice off and proceed to blitz through it. At least according to that online test I read at around 743 wpm with a comprehension of 82%. Which apparently dropped me in the range of excellent reader. And at the very least I tend to score very, very high on reading comprehension based tests in schooling while getting done with it quickly. I also seem able to discuss this shit right afterwards too so it doesn't seem to just be my remembering key words and selecting a multiple choice answer entirely. At least some of it is, in fact, just that though. There were at least two questions on there that I don't recall what they were actually about in the passage, but I remembered exact phrasing just enough to select the right one. Though I will say that after that, if I feel it's important, I will go back and reread the text at a slower pace, occasionally even reading it aloud. For whatever reason vocalizing something I'm read can occasionally make it click better with my head. If not then I toss the thing aside and look for better research materials. Sometimes I won't even make it all the way through before I abandon shit.
     
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  2. unknownanonymous

    unknownanonymous i am inimitable, i am an original|18+

    i have really solid visual headcanons about what the red vs. blue characters look like under their armour, and it doesn't feel like pseudo-perception to me most of the time. instead it feels more like the aesthetic just matches perfectly.
    [​IMG]
    (the art style goes through changes but the general thing of "no faces, body types all look basically the same, basically suits of armour" remains constant.)

    though yeah, there are times when i'm watching the show and picturing my facecanons, even though what i'm actually seeing is suits of armour headbobbing.

    and i have really visceral feelings about what some of the characters look like. temple, for example, is not as bulky as his armour sometimes makes him look. he's just not.
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    i headcanon temple as being thin, like...
    [​IMG]
    Screen Shot 2017-08-12 at 1.57.20 AM.png
    so yeah, some of other people's red vs. blue facecanons just feel viscerally wrong to me - though the temple ones feel mostly correct. and i don't even think i've managed to draw my facecanons entirely correctly 'cause i'm not that great at art.
    i read really fast and i have an inner reading-voice.
     
  3. Erica

    Erica occasionally vaguely like a person

    I've tried, but there's a tricky thing going on here where consciously trying to read faster (or in any way being aware that I'm being tested/am testing myself/am reading at all) pretty much without fail turns the reading voice back on, and then going faster blurs it. So... reading tests do not work, trying to time myself for pages doesn't either. I know I used to be a pretty fast reader for my age when I was younger but I don't know how much faster, and the ~evidence~I have for it is from when I was 11-12 + 17 (1st point being I tried to challenge myself to finish the 5th harry potter book in one day and succeeded despite having classes & other stuff to do that day, 2nd point being teachers accusing me of not having read the short story he asked us to because I was done too soon)
    Doing the test now & trying to rush I get 700ish, but that's with the reading voice all blurred and the comprehension less than ideal :(


    Same hat!! (Except I think even for fight scenes I don't concretely visualise things - there'll be vague impressions of "this is what this move looks like", but it's more... seeing/feeling the movement? than actually seeing it played out? presumably because of the exact illogical type of descriptions you're describing, lol )
     
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  4. ZeroEsper

    ZeroEsper Well-Known Member

    @Alexand

    I'm sorry, I meant to respond before now, but I forgot.

    I can guess tastes better than smells, but the older I get the better I am at inferring smells. I'm a little more aware of them than a lot of people because A) I'm allergic to cigarette smoke so if I'm in an environment where I'm worried I'll smell it, I pay extra attention and B) certain smells can trigger my migraines, so I also try and be vigilant about them. Interestingly enough, Lavender is the worst culprit even though everyone says it should help you relax.

    I've learned that 'ocean' or anything like it does NOT smell like the ocean, which is super depressing. It's closer to the smell that your cooler gets after you went to the beach and then put it in your hot car for a few hours. So it's false advertising.

    I know what 'warm' smells like in terms of scents (the only way I can think of to describe it is the smell of a fire without the smoke? I know that doesn't make sense, but that's as close as I can get. You can also think of it as 'undertones of warm vanilla', because that's pretty close). 'Spicy' just smells like my nose and throat are burning (because they are). I never recognize citrus notes. And floral tends to lean toward triggering a migraine, so I try and avoid it.

    So basically I pick my fragrances in person, lol.

    If you still need a fragrance my friend tried black opium by Yves Saint Laurent. It's stupid expensive BUT if you buy the sample size it's less so, and a little goes a long way. It smells fantastic - warm, sweet without being overpowering, and not too strong.

    With food - I can actually infer what weird food combinations would taste like!

    Poutine isn't common at all here, but I can tell it'd taste really good and savory - that's a good balance of flavors. I'm not sure about beetroot with chocolate - I'd give it a shot, but I've actually never tried beetroot on its own! If it's anything like regular beet, I think it'd taste fine with chocolate, but it would have to be a dark chocolate - white chocolate I think would make this really caustic taste that you'd want to spit out.

    Ice cream with olive oil would be okay I think - but what I'm kind of picturing is ice cream with olive oil on top of it. I'm imagining the texture more for 'ice cream made with olive oil mixed in'. It'd be a very pleasant texture though, so I would try tasting it.

    Scrambled eggs with grape jelly is good! I've accidentally gotten jelly on my eggs before and it was okay. It's best to put some salt on the eggs though, because the saltiness and the sweetness go well together. Eggs have a very smooth flavor, and grapes have a more vivid taste, but it's overall very balanced, which gives them a more smooth taste a well. Together they taste fine. The eggs need to be cooked till they're firm, though, or else the texture can be slimy, and while I don't necessarily mind that, I know that's a HUGE no for a lot of people. Also, I recommend Welch's grape jelly if you're going to try it, because a bold flavor is going to work better than a weaker one.
     
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  5. versi2

    versi2 ???????

    I think in words and pictures. I've pretty much always got a running dialogue in the back of my head, but I'm not sure it's all that coherent. I do a lot of jumping from thought to thought with only partial respect to grammar cause I know what I mean, but I know it doesn't make a lot of sense, objectively speaking.
    I can just talk and talk and write and talk forever pretty much but it gets kind of long winded and doesnt always make sense because im not there to double check that im not repeating myself or making sense or actually saying what i was trying to say and sometimes I lose my own point while im talking just as an example this is what this has been

    I'm also pretty much always imagining a 3d image of an.. activity? Like, I have visual memories of scenes from books I've read because as I read those scenes I acted them out in my head. I also have visual memories of actually physically reading those books, but I don't really remember reading words on a page. I just remember the events in the book as they happened.

    I'm very tired right now, and as a result I'm having a hard time turning my thoughts into coherent sentences.
     
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  6. Morgan Jae

    Morgan Jae pecure. sontain. crotect.

    maybe a side effect of communicating in a text medium but, aside from my thoughts sometimes coming in the form of songs or quotes from whatever vine i've seen recently, sometimes my brain renders words in a certain format
    like........ the word "garbage", but instead of plain text it's
    garbage
    in that format
    it's kinda hard to explain
     
  7. Alexand

    Alexand Rhymes with &

    Here's a thread-relevant question I'm thinking about today...or, set of questions. Namely: How does your thought-style interact with foreign languages? and What's your aptitude with learning new languages?

    I think I remember someone claiming that the secret to their exceptional polyglottism was that they didn't "think in language", they thought in pre-lingual concepts. So, instead of approaching the task of speaking a foreign language as "having some sort of pre-lingual concept in their head, then automatically thinking it in their native language, and then translating that native-language thought into the target language"...they just went straight from "pre-lingual concept" to target language. So I think language-learning is a really interesting topic to talk about in this context!

    Personally I'm horrid at languages and I hate it. My first language is technically Russian, but I can't really speak or write it anymore...part of that might be anxiety/rejection-sensitive dysphoria/"the consequences of Making A Grammar Mistake are too dire for me to allow myself to try at all", but I also feel like Russian just hasn't...stuck well in my head. I think in English almost exclusively. I can make myself think in Russian if I try, but I end up stalling for words a lot. And I never really got any other language to "stick" either...I took several years of Italian, Latin, and Japanese, and I couldn't write an essay in any of those now if my life depended on it. It's very disappointing for me, because I think languages are fascinating, but somehow it's like they just...don't..like me.

    (...I'm pretty bad at programming languages, too. Everything I've ever coded has been 95% thanks to me finding other examples of people coding the same type of problem online, it's like...I'm bad at "generating sentences" in Human Language, and I'm bad at "generating sentences" in Computer Language too...I can only "read sentences" or "modify sentences" in either with any proficiency...it's like my Grammar Production Module is underdeveloped or something, so I have to rely on the Grammar of other people? I don't know if that's really related like I'm making it out to be, though.)

    Also I have AT LEAST two replies I want to write here to talk about topics brought up earlier but I'm currently about to Crash if I don't go eat Immediately so I'd just like to...get this...post out first. AND THEN I'LL COME BACK.
     
  8. Aondeug

    Aondeug Cringe Annoying Ass Female Lobster

    With foreign languages I'll often end up thinking of specific words in certain languages primarily. The most striking example for me is grammar terms and Arabic. If and when I have trouble remembering the name of a concept in English chances are I remember it in Arabic. And if you're the masdr chances are I almost exclusively remember you in Arabic first, English second. So sometimes I'll get mixed up and stuck on "Ok but it's you know, the thing, Like THE THING," but to a lesser extent than it happens with bilingual sorts. Occasionally I will straight up just think in those other languages too. Especially if I'm spending time practicing it. Why? Who knows! God damn can it happen though.

    As for my aptitude with language...I pick it up very fast. Grammar concepts get absorbed very quickly and once I have a grasp of how the morphology works and some basic roots I often pick up new words quick. The issue is I basically have no follow through and grow bored and move on to other languages unless you are of a very special and select class of languages. However this habit has, in the end, just kind of improved my ability to just pick up bits of new languages and move on better. Partly because I'm not picking up just bits of that language. I'm picking up linguistic concepts themselves and I suppose the underlying logic behind it? A lot of people have trouble with Irish to have statements, but really the concept just kind of works for me because I mean...it logically checks out? If you have something it is at you. And why wouldn't Arabic have two separate words for that? It just makes sense that I have to specify if it is on my person or something that I have ownership over, whether it's on me or not. I just really love languages and how they work so I'm just building this ever expanding library of "This is how we language".

    What I do have trouble with with language is speaking them, but a good chunk of that is just that I'm shy and afraid of failure. On top of my lacking follow through. Bits of it are my limited vocabulary, but if I'm honest with myself it's not exclusively that. I know I can bullshit up new words or even just throw in English words and I know it works with my being understood.

    but i'm just so afraid of failure
     
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  9. artistformerlyknownasdave

    artistformerlyknownasdave revenge of ricky schrödinger

    i think like i’m narrating to myself, and will often refer to myself in the third person like “come on harvey you can do it” or for some reason, as “we”, i think with we being my brain and my body.

    i think in sentences, and i often formulate them like i’m going to say them to someone else. i also think in pictures and colors. narration over top, pictures and colors going on simultaneously

    learning french was really hard for me and i’ve forgotten most of what little i learned, but starting to learn asl has been much easier
     
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  10. unknownanonymous

    unknownanonymous i am inimitable, i am an original|18+

    i am terrible at learning other languages. i failed french when i was a kid, and got taken out of it. (i'm canadian and most canadians have to take french.) before i failed out of the class, i cheated a lot on it with google translate.
     
  11. Morgan Jae

    Morgan Jae pecure. sontain. crotect.

    i'm okay at language? i got terrible grades because i never did my hw in high school, but i took three years of spanish and improved noticeably for it. i picked up japanese in fifth grade at an average rate, i think. i should.. go back and re-learn spanish, and try to hold on to it this time.
    ASL is the other one i want to learn. it wasn't too hard except some of the word signs were hard to remember bc they were Ultra Similar to each other
     
  12. Saro

    Saro Where is wizard hut

    I think I'm best at learning to hear different languages as they're "meant" to be heard - by that I mean, if I'm listening to a Japanese sentence spoken out loud, I can generally parse it in terms of "here is a coherent string of word sounds" rather than "[unintelligible noise]". I also think I'm pretty good at imitating tone and inflection and picking up on things like the difference between long and short vowels (again in Japanese, e.g. "obasan" vs. "obaasan"). I think it might have to do with the fact I "hear" a lot when I'm thinking? Most of my thoughts are "verbalized", it's almost like I'm listening to an external noise. I'm good at alphabets but NOT at pictograms. Kanji are hell. I was good at grammar in Latin, but I don't know how that translates to anything else, Latin is kind of a special case, especially since you're not really learning it to speak and converse, but just to read or to translate in and out of. (In general, I would assume anyway; I'm sure there's a conversational Latin class out there somewhere.)
     
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  13. Aondeug

    Aondeug Cringe Annoying Ass Female Lobster

    Grammar in Latin translates to other highly inflectional languages, as one example. It is far from the only language that uses grammatical cases to that degree, and in fact several use it even more than Latin does. But either way you now have a familiarity with the concept of inflection for expressing things English needs prepositions for. There's other things in Latin that can translate to an easier time with other languages or perhaps to one's conlanging habits. Roots are a big thing, especially if you're working in that family of languages and there's similarities between grammars too. These can also hamper you, but like Irish and Scottish conjugations are similar and while they're not the same they are derived from the same ultimate system. This all is something that can be said of languages in general, though. There's other uses too! Latin can be especially lovely if you're looking into, say, how our languages have changed over time. Though that moves away from learning language to converse and learning language to study and analyze other language. Then there is, I suppose, the translatibility of how Latin is taught to how other dead languages are taught. You're over that hump of not having any idea of how these things are taught and tricks to learn it, at least to some degree. So taking another dead language is a bit simpler as you're more aware of how this process is structured and how you best study this sort of thing. At least that is how it has worked for me? Others are different.
     
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  14. Verily

    Verily surprised Xue Yang peddler

    I’m okay at languages. I’m a very good student, which makes me seem better than I probably am. I’m also a pretty decent mimic of human mouth noises, which helps me fake a lot of things.

    I don’t think my thoughts are totally verbal, but my surface thoughts are, and that’s where I interact from. Those are historically mostly in English.

    I’m not good at having conversations in other languages. I’m pretty good at understanding intent and nuance or knowing when I probably don’t understand. I’m good at translating. (Translating, phone! Not Transformers, autobots autocomplete I swear it’s like it knows me a little too well.)

    Like I said earlier in what is going to be a wandering post, I don’t really think in other languages. I do think in a mishmash of grammar and vocabulary. My English syntax becomes... corrupted is not the right word. But like that without the negative connotations. I’ll use words and grammar that are overly literal adaptations of other languages. Sometimes it’s subtle, like I’m thinking of Japanese right now so I’m much more likely to use the word “becomes”. I’m more likely to use it in general than I used to be.

    I feel like my thoughts in general rely on interplay between verbal surface thoughts and emotional things/pattern recognition under that. They check and support each other. If they’re in agreement then the thought is reasonably concluded. I can’t really do that in realtime in a different language because I don’t have the back catalogue of patterns and emotional associations. I have to run it by my English language stuff or else I like, use the Japanese short form when talking to a nice old lady who is doing me a favor in her own place of business, and feel embarrassed and relieved that she seems to find it endearing.

    I’m pretty good at telling people whether subtitles are accurate and explaining lost nuance. Not so good at chatting.
     
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  15. ZeroEsper

    ZeroEsper Well-Known Member

    I can pick up languages pretty quickly. I can think in another language if I tell myself to, but I don't do that on the regular. My ability to think in pictures and pre-verbal concepts helps, because when I'm practicing a language, instead of translating in my head, I try and focus on either a relevant image (a person waving hello/goodbye, etc) or a nonverbal concept. I don't think I translate the nonverbal concepts directly, it's more like the nonverval concept forms in my brain and nudges the rest of my brain to form words. Brain was already operating under 'form words in x language' commands, so I don't consciously translate, my brain just spits it out. I think that's what makes it easy-ish for me to pick up languages.
     
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  16. Verily

    Verily surprised Xue Yang peddler

    I have the much less useful strong visual association of the environment in which I learned/solidified the memory of various words. I wonder if I could hijack that for a more useful end if I made an effort.
     
  17. ZeroEsper

    ZeroEsper Well-Known Member

    Ah, I meant to mention, I pick up on grammar structures toi easily. I often mimic the person I'm talking to. I don't mean to, and it's not to mock the person, it's totally unconscious. I feel nad though because when I'm speaking to someone for whom English isn't a primary language, I'll adapt their speech mannerisms, and I'm worried it comes across as mocking. But like, one of my current managers doesn't really speak English. I don't speak Tibetan. But I know in Tibetan, negatives go at the end of the sentence because that's how he speaks. So sometimes I have to catch myself before I say 'bread no?' I also drop unnecessary words - 'man call on phone.'

    Edit: ah, one last post I forgot to mention. Sometimes if I'm speaking to a non-native English speaker, my brain will start 'translating' too - and will keep doing it for a while after the conversation. That is, I start 'talking aroundl' the English words.

    Ex: I had to go to the uh, mmm, supermarket for the -what's it - milk to make dinner? Yes, almond milk, thank you.
     
    Last edited: Nov 7, 2017
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  18. ZeroEsper

    ZeroEsper Well-Known Member

    It's a useful trick, but sometimes I have to continuously reinforce an image. If there's a shortcut for remembering it (for example, in Farsi the word for blue is derived from the word for water, so if you remember one you can kind of remember the other) it's easier.
     
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  19. shmeed

    shmeed plant me

    the language question is very interesting and i'm enjoying reading responses, although i haven't practiced another language in so long that i really don't remember what my answer would be -o-;

    i usually think in moods and feelings and really vague images of concrete things
    like, calm/anxious/scared/angry/sleepy/approval/disagreement/etc
    and sometimes then go back and mentally attach words to the emotional impressions, which usually feels extremely slow and time-consuming but something i'm compelled to do
    it feels like the moods are much faster and more efficient and i get distracted by putting words to it

    i have a really hard time thinking about what i'm going to say before i say it, i get distracted by the words if i think too hard about them
    writing is easier than talking because stream-of-consciousness is really easy to edit into coherency and intended meaning, whereas you can't do that irl

    i think in first person narration for if i'm studying or trying to work something out
    again, helps to type or write
     
    Last edited: Nov 8, 2017
  20. strictly quadrilateral

    strictly quadrilateral alive, alive, alive!

    i think in words but they come with built in narration. the words used to be consistently sort of right in front of/above my eyes, and the voice in my head, but:

    i recently read a set of stories where everyone has a distinction between public and private thoughts. i decided to try to set up a distinction in my head like the ones described in the stories, just to see if i could. canonical examples include "public thoughts in front of me, private thoughts behind me," "public thoughts plaintext, private thoughts encrypted," "private thoughts inside, public thoughts outside"... so i thought, okay, i think in words, let's try a journal, i can keep private thoughts in there, and if ever i need public thoughts i can write a letter beginning with "ATTN TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN".

    so i set it up except that i did it with, like, the visual of an actual open journal. in front of my face. and it stayed there sort of overlaid on the world until i went "yeah no this is distracting let's fix it." i shut the journal and locked it and stuck it in my chest.

    my thoughts moved to my chest. the words i see started appearing there, and it was less seeing them and more knowing they were there and what they were. the audio part moved too. which is weird.

    but my thoughts are theoretically safe from mind readers now, which is pretty great.
     
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