2008/7/10 nescivi <nescivi_at_gmail.com>:
>
> This would suggest that thinking always involves some kind of
> visualisation...
> This is not the case for everyone; some people can't think visually.
>
Yes, I agree. For relationships like "this process runs parallel with that"
then yes, probably. But for "is similar to" or "is followed by" it becomes
more vague and for things like "depends on" I don't experience any internal
visualisation at all.
This;
public class Bang extends Event
{
//marvellously interesting functionality goes here
}
clearly defines a relationship between two sorts of things; the existing
"Event" and my new "Bang". The link is quite strong but I don't visualise it
at all.
It might be interesting to see if or how this differs between the sexes.
According to some research (most) men navigate by internalising a model of
the terrain while (most) women supposedly use a series of linked
relationships between places.
I feel this difference is quite relevant. In coding the programmer may have
a larger "map" in his head of how it should all work but the audience is
left to try to imagine it based on smaller elements and their relationships,
for example a function call expressing a relationship between one object and
another.
While spatial and visual analogies are powerful and useful they do have
limits There are plenty of things that are fairly straightforward in
text-based programming but that I wouldn't like to do in -say- PureData. I
also find that mental spatial analogies speed up my thinking for 1, 2 and 3
dimensional arrays but for higher order arrays or when using asociative
indexing is breaks down and instead starts slowing me down. 4d space it hard
to imagine visually yet I'm (mostly) fine with dealing with 4d arrays on a
more abstract level.
It's not at all surprising that "public thought" runs into questions about
cognitive processes... but it's a bit of a shame we (humanity) knew very
little about those when it comes down to it.
Yours,
Kas.
Received on Fri Jul 11 2008 - 13:43:27 BST