On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 10:47:29AM -0700, Steven Brust wrote: > What you are talking about is exactly the same thing happens to me under > those circumstances, but I don't call it thinking spatially, I am just > aware that my thinking, under those conditions, is not happening in > English, but in terms appropriate to the skills being used. You call it > thinking spatially, I call it thinking in the language of those > skills. That it is, at some level in my mind, I am still manipulating a > set of symbols. Facility, or it's lack, with the language of those skills At some level everything a computer does is manipulating a set of symbols. Not very many symbols, at that. Yet it can be productive and predictive to describe a program in terms of it rotating objects (okay, representation of objects)... spatial thinking. (Response not just to Steve but to much of the thread here) Also, people don't think alike. Wolfram mentions four different methods used by mathematicians. I think more in terms of language and symbol manipulation, and suck at rotating objects in my head, a friend is better at that and isn't as good at abstract symbols. We're both good programmers, although he's more enthusiastic about object oriented, and I'd probably be better at assembly. And Feynman found that he counted 'verbally' and thus couldn't talk out loud while counting, while someone else watched a mental ticker tape of numbers go by and thus couldn't read. Reading out loud while counting was suspected to be impossible for humans. How much of this can be changed with practice, I don't know. I'd _like_ to be able to have a solar system model in my head (that's what I suck at and my friend is better at.) Whether assembly modeling and figuring out a TV/VCR really is symbolic or constraint satisfying or is some form of visualization I'm not actually sure. -xx- Damien X-)