Category Archives: Thoughts on Thoughts

Expecting Words vs. Hearing Them

Thoughts on Thoughts

So, I was talking with S earlier today, and she quoted a line from the asdfmovie[1]. It took me a second to understand what she said. It went something like this:

S: [quote]
Me: “What?” “…” “Oh!”

And I suddenly noticed myself going through the process of hearing the words, processing them, then thinking about what to say. I realized how often I actually do the auto-sentence-completion used in predictive punning. The fact that it was so jarring to react to a conversation in order was a clear sign that I had fallen into a pattern.

As Leia said in ‘Heir to the Empire'[2], once you have been in a place for too long, you no longer observe everything that is happening, as your mind only pays attention to larger things and fills in the rest with memories and expectations.

There can be benefits to finishing peoples’ sentences with expectations (more time to think, quicker conversations, less mental energy expended at peak), but there’s a question[3] as to how much you’re actually thinking and listening when you’re filling half of peoples’ sentences from your brain instead of through your ears.

The funny thing is that I really enjoy the feeling of a ‘cache miss‘, which is basically what I described above, where someone says something you didn’t fully anticipate, and you need to go back and re-listen to it. It means that I’m actively learning something, perhaps updating my neural net.

So, how do you balance this tradeoff (between listening and anticipation)? Right now, I tend to lean towards anticipation, but I might start leaning back in the other direction.

[1]The asdfmovie is a work of genius, but not for the easily offended or triggered. NSFW is putting it mildly. It’s violent, and many trigger warnings apply. If you still want to watch it, you can find it (them) here. Also, I’m not sure what the proper plural is here, or if it should even be a plural.

[2]”The Place had become too comfortable, too familiar – her mind no longer really saw everything that went on around her, but merely saw some of it and filled in the rest from memory. It was the kind of psychological weakness that a clever enemy could easily exploit, simply by finding a way to fit himself into her normal routine.” – Heir to the Empire, pp310 Also, even though the ‘Expanded Universe’ is now considered ‘non-canon’, the ‘Thrawn trilogy’ is still by far the best of the Star Wars books (with a close second perhaps the Han Solo trilogy

[3]Also from S, who called it ‘looking for confirmation instead of listening’.

Anger vs. Flow: How do you feel?

Thoughts on Thoughts

“How do you feel?”

“How do you feel?”

The one question that Spock could not answer after his resurrection at the beginning of ‘The Voyage Home’.

Yesterday, I asked the question ‘how do you feel as you’re just starting to accomplish something?’ I touched on analogies from the ‘Wheel of Time’ series, where characters would use ‘anger’ to break through to, or would ’embrace’ to find the flow.

Early in life, I was taught to suppress emotions, the whole ‘don’t let it affect you’, ‘don’t let the bastards grind you down[1]’, and most importantly, ‘pick your battles[2]’.

Whether it was how I was taught, something from our culture, or raging adolescent hormones, I always saw myself as being in conflict. Writer’s block was something to force myself through, and flow was something I only ever reached when under a deadline or in large unstructured blocks of time.

When you stubbed your toe, the ‘correct’ response was to get angry, focus your anger, and use that to move or put away whatever was in the wrong place.

Only when I was really tired, and my emotional overcontrol lessened would I have I have a cathartic cry, and some of the other things would get expressed.

Music (especially singing with The Northern Lights) helped me a lot with this, teaching me to be much more in touch with many of these things.

To me, there’s a fine (but very important) line between ‘don’t let it affect you’ and ‘be like a cat, feel it completely, then let it wash over you, let it go’. One is much harder and brittle, one is much more flexible. But to an 8 year old who is being mercilessly teased at school, it’s difficult to give advice that advocates one over the other.

I feel like I began to understand this when I was teaching safety to undergrads. I would talk about anger and frustration are often proximate causes of incidents and accidents, and how what I do is to draw the emotion in, experience it fully, then let it go. Like relaxing and breathing into a slightly painful stretch or bodywork.

My current tactic is to laugh at myself, anytime I see myself getting frustrated and pissed at something. I mean, we’re just barely evolved monkeys. We’re allowed to feel all of these things, and all of those feelings are valid. What matters is how we act.

But back to ‘anger vs. flow’. The Wheel of Time describes the process of ‘harnessing Saidar’ as ‘submission’ or ’embracing’. But these terms are still very much bound up in hierarchical and gendered power structures (as is the ‘wrestling’ of harnessing Saidin[3]).

For me, I find the analogy of ‘relaxing into it’ to be more helpful, combined with ‘getting out of your own way[4]’. Of course this is easier said than done. Meditation seems to help some, mindfulness seems to help me with specific things.

Sometimes just thinking about something differently can make all the difference. When I was growing up, we talked about ‘hormones’, as if adolescents were just not in control of themselves, that this was normal, and it would pass.

But what I remember feeling was a lot of *anxiety*, and I feel that if that had been addressed directly, that would have helped a lot.

A simple recasting, a changing of words can make an unsolvable problem seem much more tractable, and maybe help people understand themselves a little better and heal our wounds.

[1]’Illegitimi non carborundum.’ I love Latin ‘translations’.

[2]It’s always ‘battles’. What does it say about our culture and species that one of our most famous coping strategies has violent imagery?

[3]Lan also uses the analogy of ‘the flame and the void’, where you take all of your fears and anxieties and burn them to achieve a Zen-like state. This doesn’t work for me (as an analogy, or as a technique), but I can see how it could be a technique that could work for some people. It still feels like a crutch, though, rather than a fuller possible self-knowledge leading to relaxing and opening up.

[4]I got this from an excellent vocal teacher Peter Barnes, and it feels like it has commonalities with ‘The Inner Game’.

Anger vs. Flow: Nynaeve, Blocks, and the Fluidity of Mars and Venus

Thoughts on Thoughts

Disclaimer: Years old WoT spoilers below.

How do you feel when you are accomplishing something? More specifically, how do you feel as you’re just starting to accomplish something? People seem to experience this in different ways. Some people call it ‘getting through writer’s block’, some call it ‘breaking through’, some call it ‘relaxing into flow’, for some it can feel like a ‘Zen’ acceptance.

In Robert Jordan’s[1] ‘Wheel of Time’ series, the magic system or ‘channeling’ is ostensibly divided into two halves: ‘Saidar’ and ‘Saidin’. ‘Saidar‘, wielded by women[2] in the books, is described as ‘a river of power which must be surrendered to or embraced in order to be controlled’. ‘Saidin‘, wielded by men, is described as a ‘raging torrent which must be subdued and dominated by a strong-willed channeler in order to be controlled’

Putting aside the obvious connotations, to me this feels like a description of how a writer (or anyone) might experience starting to work on different days. Some days, you ‘surrender’ to the flow of words coming forth from your brain, some days you have to wrestle your brain in order to get anything out, but once you’ve wrestled the flow can feel similar[3].

One of the main characters in the book, Nynaeve, generally considered to be ‘one of the most powerful female channelers alive’, had a block that prevented her from channeling unless she was angry. To me, this feels very similar to how one would channel Saidin, wrestling with one’s self, using strong negative[4] emotions such as anger.

As the women who wrestle with blocks to channel are considered ‘not formally trained’, or ‘wilders’, perhaps this means that all of the male channelers who have to wrestle every time just need a different sort of training, perhaps it’s the patriarchy[5].

Anyways, back to how *you* feel when you’re just starting to accomplish something. Are you fighting with your brain? Are you delicately moving things out of the way, removing distractions, and letting the flow happen?

Title Note: I originally wanted to entitle this ‘Saidin is from Mars, Saidar is from Venus’, but most of my readers don’t know my opinions of the fluidity of ‘Martians’ and ‘Venusians’, and so would react to the sexism inherent in the title.

[1]Including 3 books by Brandon Sanderson!

[2]There are exceptions to this absolute gendering in the novels, but I haven’t read that part, and it’s a little too spoilery for me (and while I always enjoy poking at binaries, it’s a little off-topic right now). As a taste, the two halves can be woven together, and indeed it is a major plot point when they do. (i.e. Linking, the bore, Nynaeve’s ter’angreal, etc…)

[3]I wonder if this is where the idea of the ‘taint’ in Saidin came from. That feeling that when you’re using anger or other types of force on your own brain, that the results are tainted somehow.

[4]Some say that anger is dual-use as an emotion. That is a longer discussion.

[5]It’s always the patriarchy.

Punning like a Broken Record (Player)

Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts

Puns.

The most advanced form of humour in the world.

You may or may not believe me, but they do take a considerable amount of work and preparation to perform.

I have a few mental models/analogies that seem to help with pun construction and execution.

The simplest of the three has to do with how people construct sentences from concepts. My experience is that most people only pay attention to the concepts that their brains create, and don’t watch for the words that are emitted. You can test this by asking someone to repeat what they said, and watching how often they use the exact same words.


*-----------*     *------------*
| Concept   |     |  Concept   |
|           |---->|  to word   |---->Speech
| generator |  ^  | translator |  ^
*-----------*  |  *------------*  |
               |                  |
Where people   |                  |
pay attention--/                  |
                                  |
Where punsters                    | 
pay attention---------------------/

The second model is that of ‘hash functions’. Even though the brain is a neural net, many of its attributes can be modeled as hash functions. In this context, a ‘hash function’ is a very quick retrieval of something (an idea, concept, memory), based on a trigger. But this often only works in one direction. If you ask someone what they were ate yesterday for breakfast, they may not be able to tell you. But if you ask them the last time they ate toast, they would be far more likely to say ‘yesterday, at breakfast’. This can cause issues of the ‘why don’t you remember that?’ and ‘I already told you that’ sort when people have different hash functions, and associate things differently.

The third model (and my favourite!) is a poor description of part of how I listen for puns. I’ve talked about word and sentence rotation recently, but much of that is the slower, ‘software’ way of manipulating sentences to extract verbal humour. This next analogy seems to be much more hardwired.

The analogy is of a record player playing a record. The record player is my ear and word processing apparatus, the record is the incoming vocal stream. So far, so good. What it feels like I do is to lift the needle slightly off the record. I then engage my sound->word prediction, and come up with as many words as I can that sound similar to those that are being and will be[1] used. So, I’m turning my exact word matching into fuzzy or inexact matching, then using the results to construct puns.

Other models of how to pun? Let me know in the comments below!

[1]Remember how you need to be able to predict the exact words someone will use.

Puns and Other Forms of Verbal Warfare

Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts

Recently, a person I respect very much, and who I consider to be quite good at the rough-and-tumble of verbal sparring, told me something that was either one of the best compliments I’d ever received, or…something else.

What he said was even though he engaged in gentle mockery of others, he would never do it to me, because of the fact that or the way that I would fight back.

I had mentioned ‘mental push hands‘ before, and I mentioned the idea of pushing (or throwing) the listener off-balance. There are a number of ways of doing this[1], of varying levels of pleasantness and effectiveness. Here are a few:

– Insults

In my opinion, it’s generally better to keep the conversation de-escalated and cerebral, as not only do I function best there, if you have any negotiation goals, and are interested in actually getting to yes[2], insults are generally not the way to go.

– Puns

A well constructed pun will make the listener think just enough, by making them return to what they just said, and cross-reference it with what you have just said. For someone who is not prepared for a pun duel, you can make an impression[3], especially if you can have a counter-riposte ready, with appropriate timing, to counter whatever riposte they may perform. You are helped in this that most people pun in areas close to the subject at hand[4].

– Be Boring

Sometimes this exactly what you need. Sometimes you need to take your presentation (usually a presentation), and for every single word in it, find a more ‘professional’ or ‘enterprise’ word. This may be your best option when you’re dealing with a very controversial topic, where no matter which example you use, you’re going to anger someone. Sometimes the only way to slide a concept through is to make it like lukewarm porridge.

So, how do you deal with these?

For insults, my recommendation is de-escalation. There are many other, better writings on the topic, so I will stick to the simple ‘speak calmly and make it about the issue, not the person’.

For Puns, practice! You will be the envy of your friends! Take a random sentence from a book and practice sentence rotation on it! Find a way to refer to a word in a previous sentence without using that word. Read this comic again, and come up with different ripostes.

For boring presentations, I would recommend a deeper knowledge of a topic. In grad. school, I could tell that I progressed between 1st and 2nd year because I started to get something from the Sunday morning talks. (This was at a retreat, where you would arrive Friday night, have talks all day Saturday, then stay up most of the night.) Test yourself on the topic when you are half-asleep. If you can still understand and poke holes in arguments, you’re in good shape.

And that’s it! If you have more types of verbal sparring, I’d love to hear about them in the comments below!

[1]This assumes that you’re familiar with the standard ‘remember something about the person you’re talking to’, the ‘remember their name’, and the ‘be nice’.

[2]I hear it is an excellent book. I have not read it all the way through, but it is considered the fundamental book on ‘principled negotiation’, as in when you want both/all parties to come to an agreement which is truly best for all involved.

[3]I’ll leave it to you to decide what type of impression it is…

[4]I often say that know just enough about many words to be able to pun with them. This involves spelling, pronunciation, and just enough of a definition/genre/associated words.

Rotation and Other Metaphors

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

Today, I noticed that I seem to write a lot about rotation. It seems to come to be ‘naturally’, or at least from something far back in my past[1].

It feels like it might have originally come from discussions of Chirality, somewhere back in high school. Like the concept of Gm1m2/r^2 migrating to Cq1q2/r^2[2], or basing the Bohr model of the atom on the model of the solar system.

A lot of what I write has to do with how I ‘rotate in’ possible solutions to try to fit them with the problem I’m working on. As far as I know, the brain doesn’t actually work like this. I could see a generalized model of computing developing two sections of nerves, one which displayed a problem, one which displayed possible solutions, each in their firing patterns. I wonder if this happens.

While we’re trying to fit possible solutions to this problem, let’s consider other possible metaphors from the ‘ball and stick’ molecular model[3].

– Hinge rotations, like a pendulum, or the dangling COOH on a long-chain carboxylic acid
– Spring action, like atoms in an N2(g) molecule moving towards and away from each other.
– Triangle and higher order into and out of plane rotations/vibrations/translations

Note that all of these can change based on the conditions:
– Temperature
– Water or non-water nearby
– Salts or other charged ions near or far away
– How hydrophilic or hydrophobic parts of the adjoining environment are
– Van der Waals forces

The blog posts which inspired this one:

BOF VI: The Chemist in me:
Multidimensional Word and Sentence Rotation
Solution Rotation

[1] Perhaps this explains why I was so excited about Dinosaur Rotation!

[2]I was lucky enough to see Douglas Hofstadter speak about ‘Analogies in Physics‘. His best work is probably ‘Godel, Escher, Bach‘, which talks about natural and artificial intelligence, the incompleteness theorem, music, and art.

[3]I owe much or all of my intuition here to my time spent rotating[4] through the Ponder Lab at WashU. They work on one of the few world class molecular modeling software programs, Tinker. When I was there, Tinker worked by modeling molecules as balls & sticks, with various rotational and vibrational modes.

[4]Ha!

Brain Normalization, Bicycles, and Privilege

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts

The brain is good at many things. Previously I’ve talked about how the brain is good at being lazy.

One corollary of this is that the brain is very good at normalizing your experiences of whatever difficulties you are experiencing.

This can be a very good thing, if for example you are trying to accomplish a task while subject to indescribable pain. But it can be a bad thing when you assume that everyone else’s problems are just as difficult as yours.

For illustration, I’m going to use my favourite analogy, which while imperfect, I think showcases the relevant concepts.

Bicycles, headwinds, and tailwinds:

Most of you reading this have ridden a bicycle at some point. If you have ever commuted by bicycle, you will know that headwinds are the bane of your existence[1].

But you might never notice a tailwind, if you have one. Headwinds are very noticeable, because you have to actively fight through them. Tailwinds are much more subtle, you might notice that you’re less tired after a trip, or that it was faster. It’s very easy to ascribe that to you feeling more energetic that day, or just feeling more fit.

Now imagine that on your route each morning, you have a tailwind. You don’t notice it, you just end up at work each day slightly happier than you would otherwise. Now imagine another person who travels in a different direction each morning, which gives them a headwind. Having never experienced a headwind, you might say “oh, you just need to increase your pedal cadence until you become more fit”.

This is your privilege speaking. This person is just as fit or perhaps more fit than you. Your brain has normalized your experience. You just think you understand because you also have problems which feel just as difficult to you.

[1]This is especially fun if ‘downtown’ is by a large body of water, and dwellings are ‘uptown’. You will get an onshore breeze in the morning (blowing inland) as you’re commuting downtown, and then an offshore breeze (blowing towards the body of water) in the evening, as you’re commuting home. Headwinds for everyone!

How do you Want to Remap Your Brain Today?

Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts

Every time you do something, you are making a choice about how you want to map your brain. A few times might not make much of a difference, but eventually you will start seeing the world differently. During the 1890s, psychologist George M. Stratton found that after about 5 days of wearing reversing glasses, his brain started to see the world upside down.

Every time you make a choice about what you do today, you bring your brain a little closer to remapping itself, or reinforcing the remapping that it is still there. This is a lot of why habits can be so difficult to break.

Confounding many of your efforts is the fact that your brain tries to be as lazy as possible, all the time.

You may experience this as the article above, as changing your walking gait under different conditions, or as many do, as your brain sliding away from a difficult problem and distracting you with something else.

If you want to get better at these things, you have to train yourself to marshal and to guard what I call ‘proactive energy[1]’. My personal theory is that this is why hobbies and doing something you love are so powerful. When I was singing with TNL, we would talk about ‘The Inner Game‘, and tactics for interacting with yourself, to getting out of your own way and letting yourself succeed.

But we never would have gotten there if we hadn’t so desperately wanted so sing well. Because we loved the singing so much, and wanted to succeed so badly, we overcame a number of internal obstacles. We could then use these tactics we learned to help us do so many other, more mundane things.

Somewhat similar to how engineering school is often great training for pushing yourself to your limits, and learning how to deal with sleep deprivation[2].

But back to our original question: “How do you want to remap your brain today?” Every choice you make is a brain remapping choice, where you will get better at the things you do.

The corollary is that if you do things you love to do, you will get better at them, and then want to get better at them, perhaps enough to learn more about yourself and remap your brain even a little bit more consciously.

[1] Christine Miserandino has an excellent essay: ‘The Spoon Theory‘, which talks about the difficulties of living with a chronic illness or disability, and how difficult it can be to have limited resources of this type. She uses ‘spoons’ as a proxy for the amount of mental energy someone has at the beginning of the day. Wikipedia link.

How do you math?

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Nostalgia, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

In an earlier post, I was talking about ‘friendly triangles’ as an example of unconscious things that inform my interactions with problems and math. Today, I wanted to talk about some other aspects of solving math problems that I didn’t notice I did until I had to teach mental math*, a number of years a.

I was trying to describe mental math, when I noticed all of the little assumptions I made, all the little tricks that I used to make math and mental math easier and more likely to end up correct**.

Some of these tricks were:
– The curve on the bottom of the lower case ‘t’, so it didn’t look like a ‘+’ sign
– Curved ‘x’, I’m guessing so it doesn’t look like a multiplication symbol (this one is lost to the mists of history for me
– Lining up equals signs
– Being very conscious of only having one equality per line
– Friendly triangles (1,1,sqrt(2), 1,2,sqrt(3), 3,4,5)
– Looking for radii of circles in geometry problems
– Various methods for making sure that I always itemized all of the permutations or combinations***

Once I noticed that I was doing these tricks, it was a matter of figuring out which were useful enough to spend my students’ time on. Many of them would probably be most usefully conveyed by demonstration in passing, like the way a painting instructor would demonstrate brush stroke by example.

Knowing then what I know now, I might have tried to help them come up with rules for each type of situation, but in hindsight, it’s probably best I didn’t****. What I do remember is teaching geometry problems with the advice ‘draw a big picture*****’, and ‘label everything you know or can figure out’, which feels like sound advice for solving all sorts of problems.

To this day, it’s probably why all my notebooks are slightly-larger-than-larger blank sketch pads.

*To adults, as part of standardized testing preparation.

**I remember being one of those school math students who did really well overall, but was constantly doing ‘stupid mistakes’, where I would drop a sign, or reverse something/etc… I think I compensated for this be extra checking and all the little tricks I’ll be talking about above. Or have already talked about above, it you’re reading the footnotes after all of the post.

***I actually learned this

****I don’t actually remember what I told them. I seem to recall it was just a bunch of working through problems.

*****Thanks prof. Collins!

Friendly Triangles and Spectator Ions

Nostalgia, Science!, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

There are many different ways that you learn things. You can learn things from school, from books, from videos, from sticking a fork in a light socket.

But we’re talking about the things you learn in passing, or by osmosis, as you’re growing up. Sometimes these are things learned so early on in your education, so basic, and built upon by thousands of other concepts. Sometimes they are the ways of speaking of your parents, their ways of thinking.

For me, this was Spectator Ions. Growing up, my dad would always talk about (aqueous) chemical reactions, for example, from Wikipedia:

2Na+(aq) + CO3 2−(aq) + Cu 2+(aq) + SO4 2−(aq) → 2Na+(aq) + SO4 2−(aq) + CuCO3 (s)

In this reaction, the carbonate anion is reacting/bonding with the copper cation. The two sodium cations and the sulfate anion have no part in this reaction. They are merely ‘spectators’.

So this is all reasonable, this makes sense. But I was trying to explain this to someone recently, and I realized that I didn’t know the phrase ‘spectator ions’, I just knew intuitively that sodium cations are basically never involved in reactions. The best way I can describe is knowing them as ‘small and bouncy’. (Perhaps ‘small, bouncy, and indivisible’, unlike N2(g), which is ‘small to medium-sized, bouncy, and divisible with significant effort.)

So, how do you explain something like this, when you approach it in such an intuitive way? I feel like it approaches or becomes an issue of privilege, like being the only person who can access the underpinnings of the system.

Sometimes, I feel the same way about ‘friendly triangles’. Probably the most famous of these is the ‘3,4,5’ triangle, which has been known (and presumably used in construction) since antiquity.

The other triangles commonly called ‘friendly’ are:
– 1,1,sqrt(2), or the ‘45,45,90’ triangle, used with unit vectors everywhere, also interestingly the right-angle triangle which has the largest percentage of its perimeter in its hypotenseuse.
– 1,2,sqrt(3), or the ‘30,60,90’ triangle, used most often probably with equilateral triangles and subsections thereof

Once these concepts are automatic, you start to see them everywhere. If you want a better explanation of ‘friendly triangles’, try here:

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/trig.htm

But back to our original question, which was all about how you deal with having a very intuitive sense of something, which underpins your world view in a subtle but fundamental way that is difficult to describe. I don’t know. All I can do is to try to notice when it happens, and try to learn how to best describe it, which is really all you can do to try to communicate something unconscious to you and which may be outside the other person’s experience. I think a later post will talk about some of my other interactions with math of this type, and how I learned to describe while showing and sharing.