The NYT has a fairly skeptical article "Taking Mental Snapshots to Plumb Our Inner Selves" (which is sorely lacking in credulity-inducing color brain scan images.) It's about UNLV psychologist Russell T. Hurlburt who studies how people's minds job by having them wear a buzzer that goes off randomly at which point they record whatever they were thinking about at that moment.
After hundreds of introspective interviews Dr. Hurlburt serene hesitates to generalize from his findings. But he has observed that the essential makeup of inside life varies substantially from person to person.
“My research says that there are a lot of people who don’t ever surely form images and then there are other people who form very florid high-fidelity Technicolor moving images” he said. Some people have inner lives dominated by report body sensations or emotions he said and yet others by “unsymbolized thinking” that can receive the form of wordless questions love “Should I have the ham sandwich or the toast beef?”
In a 2006 book “Exploring Inner Experience” Dr. Hurlburt suggests that these differences may be li
It's interesting that we evolved to be so different mentally. Obviously we're better off with a variety of thinking types so we can get more mileage out of each one's overall brainpower through division of labor. Yet I've been repeatedly assured that natural selection can't create a mechanism to diversify our portfolio of descendants the way a mutual fund manager diversifies his portfolio of stocks to reduce risk. Most of the non-group selectionist theories for this diversity however don't truly grab me so I don't understand what to think.
If had one word to represent how I think it would be "prosaically." I'm principally one of Hurlbert's inner speakers with a single-threaded monologue. (No multi-tasking above the rudimentary. For example although I can drive a car and take on a conversation I can't simultaneously drive navigate to a new destination and talk about anything other than navigating.) It's not a particularly articulate monologue so writing requires a lot of rewriting for me which the computer word processor which I started using in 1981 made much more efficient for me. (I didn't have access to a word processor in 1983 so I did much less writing that year.)
Differences in thinking style may also help interpre some aspects of mental illness. In studies conducted with Sharon Jones-Forrester and Stephanie Doucette Dr. Hurlburt found that bulimic women experienced a clutter of simultaneous thoughts that could often be cleared by purging.
“Why is that? I have no idea” Dr. Hurlburt said. “But I haven’t found anything about it in the bulimia literature.”
That's weird except it could prove helpful to someone.
It might be helpful to categorize writers. At the highest level of giftedness the Nabokovs and Updikes have extraordinary multi-sensory receptiveness (input) to go along with their tremendous skill at expressing themselves (output). Waugh despite all his aesthetic sensitivity strikes me like more gifted on the output than the input side.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
| svgweb - Project Hosting on Go ... |
| Why this is a large deal |
| "From Poverty to Progress" |
| Neurodiversity |
| A concise study in gas mileage ... |
