Learning How to Read

[Vort]

15 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

Remember: There are two types of people in this world.

1. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.

(Political)
2. Democrats

(Self-referential self-deprecating)
2. Mormons
(or)
2. Thirdhour forum members

(Holy Warrior!)
2. Utes

(Feminist)
2. The Patriarchy

(MGTOW)
2. Women

(Harvard grad)
2. Yalies

(BYU grad)
2. Those who can't extrapolate from incomplete data. Duh.

(Berkeley grad)
2. The clouds are so fluffy today

(Ute grad)
2. ...
...um...
Can you repeat the question?

Edited November 19, 2018 by Vort

[zil]

36 minutes ago, anatess2 said:

The brain is not a computer, like @Vort said but we can apply multi-tasking verbiage to the way the brain works using Focus as the shared resource.  For example, a person taking a class may exercise the ability to listen at the lecture and take notes at the same time - two tasks required to accomplish a goal, both requiring focus.  Whether it's actually akin to multi-tasking instead of multi-threading, dunno.  A person rubbing his stomach while patting his head and then talking about what he ate that morning would be another one of those examples.  Some people can do it, some people can't.  One thing I learned from the hypnotist's "how to have better sleep" is if you focus your thoughts on counting (regarded as left brain) while, at the same time, putting into focus the details of a sheep jumping over a fence - color of the wool, color of the nose, height of the fence, the movement of jumping (regarded as right brain)... doing the thing over and over and over, your entire brain starts to reduce focus due to the repetition so that you sleep with your brain "empty" which is a very restful sleep.  I actually found this very dangerous for me because I end up going into "sleep paralysis" where my brain shuts my body down but I'm still awake.

I suspect that the apparent multitasking is either:

1) One focus for the brain - e.g. listening and taking notes, counting sheep while imagining details about the sheep

2) Mechanical and thinking - that is, once you've got the body going, it doesn't require thought - rubbing stomach and patting head, driving while singing along to the radio; autopilot vs actual conscious thought.

3) There's thinking and there's thinking.

4) Part of the bit from the quote I removed was all about how we think our eyes are seeing lots of stuff all at once, but it turns out our brains are processing each thing separately and piecing them together in such a way that we believe we're aware of it all at once when we aren't - we're just flicking through all the data really, really quickly. 

[Guest]

19 minutes ago, zil said:

I suspect that the apparent multitasking is either:

1) One focus for the brain - e.g. listening and taking notes, counting sheep while imagining details about the sheep

2) Mechanical and thinking - that is, once you've got the body going, it doesn't require thought - rubbing stomach and patting head, driving while singing along to the radio; autopilot vs actual conscious thought.

3) There's thinking and there's thinking.

4) Part of the bit from the quote I removed was all about how we think our eyes are seeing lots of stuff all at once, but it turns out our brains are processing each thing separately and piecing them together in such a way that we believe we're aware of it all at once when we aren't - we're just flicking through all the data really, really quickly. 

I don't know if it is really about focus.  Think about what Nibley said.  It is about choices / decisions.

I can drive pretty much on autopilot.  But I can't make a decision about driving while on autopilot.  So, as long as I've got a long road with clear lines and hardly any traffic, I can multi-task no problem.  But once I have to actually make a decision about driving (like should I pass this guy or not and how fast?) then I cannot multi-task. I'd have to shift thinking very quickly and make a decision right away.

When driving, the average perception-reaction time is 2.5 seconds.  But decision-reaction time (truly perception-decision-reaction time) is longer dependent on the nature of the decision to be made.  So, if there is some kind of a slow-down, we only need a 2-second barrier (hence the following distance by most states) to avoid an accident. 

If however, there is a barrier, you need to make a decision about which lane to swerve into because there isn't enough space in the current lane.  That means you need to switch thought processes (I call it switching gears) then observe available data of which lane has more space, etc.  Analyze that data.  Make calculations based on speed and geometry.  Then decide based on that calculation.  Then act.

Yeah, you can't do all that while texting.

Edited November 19, 2018 by Guest

[anatess2]

21 minutes ago, zil said:

4) Part of the bit from the quote I removed was all about how we think our eyes are seeing lots of stuff all at once, but it turns out our brains are processing each thing separately and piecing them together in such a way that we believe we're aware of it all at once when we aren't - we're just flicking through all the data really, really quickly. 

I haven't gone through the Nibley link.  One thing Jordan Peterson talked about in one of his lectures is our ability for abstraction.  We take in detail but then we abstract it according to purpose - similar to replacing a full picture of a house with a kid's drawing of a house - such that we don't really take in details like, the number of windows, the shape of the roof, the material of the walls, etc.  It's our brain's way of filtering out data that we don't need at that time.  We just take an abstraction of it enough to say, it's a house.  So then we look at another house with completely different details - different number of windows, different shape of the roof, different material, etc. - we abstract it and say, that's a house too and they get processed the same as the other house.  This is one problem with autistic people.  They don't instinctively abstract out details.  So they look at a brick house with a gabled roof, 2 front windows, a red door and he stores it in his brain as a house.  So then he sees another house - stucco, one window, black door... not what he recognizes as a house.  So he has to go through the process again to identify that thing as a house.  Now a typical person would pass by a subdivision and see just a bunch of abstracted out houses, one unidentifiable from the other.  An autistic person would pass by a subdivision and see and process each individual house.  So, an autistic person walking through, say the grocery store with all the sights, colors, sounds, stuff, people, etc. etc. can go on complete brain overload processing every detail.