Related, but this reminds me of the story by Richard Feynman [1] when he practices counting up to 60 seconds in his head, and after many experiments around what he can do simultaneously conclude that he can simultaneously count and read but not speak. Later sharing this to John Tukey, he's told that Tukey can't read while counting but could speak while counting.
Turns out Tukey is visualizing looking at a tape, while he counts, while Feynman imagined himself talking to himself, so he couldn't speak while counting but Tukey couldn't read while counting
>By that experience Tukey and I discovered that what goes on in different people's heads. when they think they're doing the same thing - something as simple as counting - is different for different people. And we discovered that you can externally and objectively test how the brain works: you don't have to ask a person how he counts and rely on his ownobservations of him-self; instead, you observe what he can and can't do while he counts. The test is absolute. There's no way to beat it; no way to fake it.
>It's natural to explain an idea in terms of what you already have in your head. Concepts are piled on top of each other; this idea is taught in terms of that idea, and that idea is taught in terms of another idea, which comes from count- ing, which can be so different for different people!
>I often think about that, especially when I'm teaching some esoteric technique such as integrat- ing Bessel functions. When I see equations, I see the letters in colors-I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel func- tions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light- tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.
[1] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/1/Feynman.pdf
Interesting, I experimented a bit with this when my daughter was younger. I used to walk around the room with her in my arms singing to get her to sleep. To ensure she would be settled I would then count 300 steps before putting her in the cot. I discovered I could count and sing at the same time by visualising the number in my head, instead of using my inner monologue. But it requires more focus to maintain.
Thankfully these days she can get herself to sleep. But I miss it sometimes
It reminds a bit of musicians tracking rhythm. You can somehow feel a beat after a bit practice even when not directly paying attention to it and it's not too hard to associate it with an increasing counter (somehow). It sounds hard, but it is quite doable.
yeah, doesn't the multitasking in this thread feel a little bit like what i imagine playing the drums is like? i've done some low-key drum-playing sorts of musical things in my life, and it was the disconnection point when you genuinely had 2-3 different things to focus on at once that i found my brain to be lacking. i observed the same with piano, but i had much more of a knack for piano, so it was only the rare song that genuinely required tracking three things at once... and those kinds of songs are hard enough for most mortals that people just pin them all as "dw those songs are super hard", when in reality it always felt like that specific skill was the thing that was lacking, and besides rote memorization i never found some way to lick it all the time. when i was really in flow, though, it would be completely effortless. it's bizarre.
> You can somehow feel a beat
If you play in an orchestra, you might have the visual memory of the conductor and their time signature motions helping you along.
The somewhat jarring tick tock of a digital metronome can also be encoded into a sort of background track that plays more or less automatically in your head.
> If you play in an orchestra, you might have the visual memory of the conductor and their time signature motions helping you along.
Or on the other side of the spectrum, most DJs learn to "feel" beat counting and phrases, more or less by feeling. After a while, your head kind of goes "1,2,3,4" by itself, and the phrases of the songs "feels" like they're about to come, then they come.
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If you miss it, maybe she does too. You can still do it even though she doesn’t need it
Maybe. But as a parent, sometimes you have to make sacrifices (or force them to make sacrifices) as otherwise they won't have space grow.
Ugh, yeah. It’s the worst. It’s the best.
I've noticed something similar. I can listen to audiobooks and follow/absorb what is going on without really paying attention, as long as I am not trying to read something. I can't follow an audiobook and read at the same time. This is probably because I subvocalize when I read. I have taken speed reading courses but I don't enjoy reading that way. I like feeling every word as I read.
i can't talk and listen at the same time to save my life, but as an intern at the Idaho State Historical Society a million years ago i did learn how to transcribe in roughly real time typing and listening. funny how those boundaries work-- feels like a "choose two of these three things" sort of... thing. i also don't find that i have the sort of internal narrative/voice in my head in the way that others do, so i would have to imagine that plays a role on some level. not that basically anyone with sufficient time can't learn to transcribe in near real-time-- it's not at all some sort of profound skill-- i was just struck by how quickly i could pick that up compared to other things.
I read by imagining a voice saying the words. Is that not how everyone reads?
No, I can do both but absorb much better when I internal monologue it but can read much faster when I don't. Some people don't internal monologue it at all.
If you're in the market for another "wait I thought everyone did it X way?!" surprise look up aphantasia where some percentage of people can't mentally "picture" items and there's a whole spectrum of vividness. I've yet to find someone not surprised by this no matter where they are on the spectrum.
I have two modes of reading - when I read a story to enjoy, I read it to myself with inner voice saying the words (like internal audiobook). When I read to gather information quickly, I try to just absorb as much keywords as possible by quickly glancing at text and trying to directly absorb the text, rereading where needed.
No, and this is one of the first things that tends to come up in any guides on how to read more quickly: reading without internally vocalizing, in order to not limit reading to the speed of vocalizing.
Some people can switch back and forth between both readily, and use them for different purposes. Some people read only in one or the other mode.
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Personally it's the same way you look at a thing and get a mental sense of "this is that thing" without having to scan every detail right away, you look at a chunk of a sentence or words and get the sense of its meaning, and you can vocalize that in your head if you want to
I have two reading modes: A narrative reading mode where a voice reads the text, and a speed reading mode where my eyes scan down the page and recognize the characters, words and phrases without any voice.
Not at all. I can do it, but I have to actively produce it. Don't see much use for it except when reading quality fiction. It's dog slow IME. You are a fast reader?
You might wonder how I read and it's a bit like how you can watch an intersection and know what to do without verbalizing "there is a bike", "there is a car". You just get the situation and understand it. Sentences are like that as well.
It is not.
> I like feeling every word as I read.
I know what you mean. I don't typically sub-vocalize, but when I run across a particularly beautiful bit of prose I slow down in order to hear it in my head. If I'm on my own I might read it aloud.
This has everything to do with the fact we have two brains. The left and right brain (more specifically the left and right hemispheres of the Cerebral Cortex) hold different functions cognitively, control the motor movements of the opposite sides of the body, and communicate thru the Corpus Callosum. Your full consciousness, or thought, is almost like a 'stream' created at this meeting point of the two brains where the neural traffic is so dense (more like my own theory...). However, if you were to find a patient where this connection is severed, like an epileptic patient whos Corpus Callosum was surgically bisected to cure them of chronic seizures, you would then have someone with 2 separate brains that cant talk to one another. This is split brain theory. I wrote a paper on this in undergraduate and id have to pull up a ton of other details, but essentially go watch videos on Michael Gazzaniga and Dr. Roger Sperry's experiments with these people. They would experience the right brain reaching for one outfit to get dressed in the morning while the left brain "thought" the idea of another outfit, so they would be very confused. Its very revealing to the mapping of our brain and all the different human functions, and how we learn! Then you lead down the rabbit hole of Bicameral Mind... but anyways, i believe thats why everyone can count in their left brain, and then from there its up to each brain system to figure out how to map the second task to the right brain so they can enter the consciousness stream simultaneously. There is an internal mechanism everyone develops themselves and Feynman is showing you can test that. Its probably right around most humans cognitive limit to use the right brain to help either reading OR speaking as the left brain is the primary handler of all of these (math, reading, speech). I also think thats why Feynman saw colors with his math; his right brain was assigning a unique identifier (color) to his logical problem being worked out in his left brain (all the different symbols and letters). Fascinating.
Fun fact, the Zizian AI murder cult is similarly obsessed with the idea of two hemispheres being separate brains. They also believe gender dysphoria is a trait present or absent within each hemisphere.
Their long term goal was to abolish sleep by making one hemisphere of their brains sleep at a time, leaving the other to be awake. Supposedly this would allow them to work more and have more sex. In reality, they all simply went insane, committed pointless murders, and ended up in prison.
As it happens, dolphins and whales do this so as to not drown, and they consequently have an underdeveloped hippocampus and take 3x as long as primates to learn the same things.
Long story short: don't mess with your sleep or you might start a murder cult.
> don't mess with your sleep or you might start a murder cult
Or: don't select members that are really into bicameral mind ideas
In my extremely limited experience, some crazies are into split brain thinking, and some crazies have symptoms of split brains
it does feel like quite the coincidence that 2 seems like the magic number and we do, in fact, have two hemispheres. i doubt that the processing for any of these tasks falls strictly down the left vs right hemisphere, but i do kind of feel like our consciousness is kinda built on having a sort of internal tick-tock cycle, and we do certain kinds of thinking on tick and others on tock. but that is just armchair introspective dilettante neuroscience-- not to be confused with the actual thing.
The article's EEG images don't seem to suggest this is due to two brain hemispheres.
The original comment is talking about a related phenomena from Richard Feynman's own thought experiment. The article itself is talking about how the brain pays attention to 2 other people speaking at them; its not the same thing. Article focused on monitoring and listening, the comment is talking about one's own brain trying to complete 2 simultaneous tasks consciously.
I can't remember the book now, I think one of Antonio Damasio's? He recounted an experiment with a patient that had a severed corpus callosum where they put a wall between the eyes and showed him two different pictures, asking him what he saw, and he wrote one answer and spoke another, without any indication either half of him was aware the other half was inconsistent.
It was terrifying 20 odd years ago to read this kind of thing, but it's amusing in light of all the obsession with productivity hacking in Silicon Valley that I could almost see someone with a YouTube channel doing this on purpose to try and be able to accomplish simultaneous tasks a normal person would be tripped up on by the need for a normal brain to produce a single consistent narrative.
Interesting, I often sing a good night lullaby to my kid and have discovered it’s trivial to read while doing so. But I just tried talking while counting in my head and it felt like a brick wall was blocking me.
Singing and playing guitar was super painful for me. Got easier after the first song, so now it's just painful to the people hearing me.
I remember a story about people who stutter not stuttering while singing.
How do we know, or would Feynman know, that they can count while reading and not just that counting and reading are simple enough tasks broken down into discrete steps that our brains can context swap in an unnoticeably short unit of time?
Just trying to read your post while counting at a consistent pace I associate with roughly 1 second per number, it didn't feel like I was reading words but instead scanning them and understanding them after the fact from memory. Usually when i read I hear the words 'in my head' but not while counting at the same time.
i wish i could do syntax highlighting in my head
I can also count while reading, I just tried it. But I can't write while counting.
I can have one interpretation and one generative task running at the same time.
I can count while reading and it's fairly easy
The sentence below will be written when I'm counting to 60
Let me try counting while writing, it's hard with tons of mistakes and typo (like switching count with write), it's also demonstrably slower with this whole sentence taking more that 60 count. Verbalizing the count is way harder and I need frequent stops to gather my thoughts
It really does feel like reading and counting can occupy separate lanes, while writing and counting are both trying to use the same internal narrator
Well, FWIW, I can easily write and count. It's actually way easier than I thought and takes no effort. Perhaps due to automatic touch typing while talking and thinking about something else etc? I can actually type and think about something else, never really noticed that before.
Reading and counting is harder for me. I can do it, but it's tiring. Those feel like they share lanes to me.
With touch type it would work if I buffer the work ahead of time and then I can type out the buffer while I count.
Sort of like: I think what I will type then when I start typing I start counting.
I do not generate what I type while I count, but think of it before I do it.
A CPU designer might call them execution ports.
Honestly my takeaway from this is that simple experiments like this are very important in identifying how brains work. I am admittedly a fanboy of Feynman, but I believe these kinds of questions are worth a dozen EEGs or fMRIs asserting how the brain works.
I wonder how musical counts interact with this.
This is a nice example of using interference as a window into representation
> while Feynman imagined himself talking to himself
ironic )
Try counting by imagining fingers in your head and talking at the same time. (-;