Lights, Camera, Action!

Me too, to all of that. I'm somewhat surprised more people don't say this.

I'd be interested in your unpacking that claim of a trial and failure. I lack the background to know with precision what events you are referring to.

What was tried, what was it aiming to do, in what ways did it fail?

Gestalt therapy treated introspection as the best possible way to learn about anything, without considering that conclusions might be flawed. Alicorn's recommending that it be just one data-mining technique among many.

Thinking, to me, feels like a conversation. For hard problems, the conversation is between two entities, neither of whom is myself, but where one is generally close to myself and the other holds unknown truths. The objective is for the one who is similar to me to ask all the right questions to get the more knowledgeable entity to explain those truths. For easier problems, I talk to myself.

When I do visual thinking, including dreams, it's in the style of a movie, often with drama or action, and sometimes more obvious movie effects. The saddest dream I ever had ended with scrolling credits.

Thinking feels like shaping clockworks out of clay and air, a couple of meters behind my head.

Watching very short films, arranging items in space, sometimes snatches of conversation intrude.

Most of the time it's like talking to myself. When I'm actively analyzing something it's like having a discussion with people who all are me but all taking different stances (and one of them is a joker who can't stop looking at it from a comedian viewpoint).

Hmmm.... thinking feels to me like poking leaves floating down a river.

Depends what I'm thinking about.

Sometimes, thinking is talking to myself or to somementalbody else. Sometimes, thinking is floating about somewhere experiencing it mostly visually. Sometimes, thinking is just living the moment. Sometimes, thinking is having mental fun, like rotating cubes in my head. Sometimes, thinking is just self-awareness, 'about' nothing.

When reflecting on it just now, thinking feels like listening to myself speak, with the words but no sound. The more concrete thoughts are at a conversational pace, and some others are in a pace too fast to comfortably speak. This often seems "laid over" a background of an unrelated scene, with dreamlike images flitting about which mildly represent concepts.

Interesting. I thought that my thinking would be mostly words, like inner monologue or talking to myself. Now that I pay attention it is more like images, emotions, concepts constantly flashing through my head, most gone before I even notice them.

Introspectively it seems that my thinking has changed and I just haven't noticed until now. Or that my conscious mind has finally learned to shut up and pay attention.

I can't pin down what thinking feels like. There are a bunch of snippets of sensory experience flying around, some being compared to each other (colliding?), and most being present only briefly before they're sucked away. Analyzing this is extra difficult because I even 10 minutes later, I have almost zero recall of all but the most vivid experiences.

Thinking is like using (at least) one of my senses, but without actualizing the associated physical reality. Right now I can access memories that contain information in audio, visual, tactile and olfactory formats with little effort. I often experience multi-person conversations or music as part of a thought process, but have also known myself to mentally fly around a map, generate pseudocode, mix flavors, sketch an image, or even explore a texture as part of thinking.

...With a little reflection, I find that much of my internal process hinges on something like infographics with little sensory labels, primarily audio but often tactile or even olfactory, but hardly ever actual text. For a complex operation, I seem to zoom in and out on these objects to get the detail/context relationships and see how they interact.

My thinking style has changed twice in my lifetime; I'm going to ramble on about this for a while. I will do a better job of describing me now than when I was younger, because I have a bad memory and it's hard to remember how I used to think.

When I was young (up until the age of 10-12) I just thought in thoughts. I was very quick back then; I could do mental arithmetic and problem solving much faster than I can now, for instance.

Then for just a few years, I started thinking visually. I read all the time during this period; I probably read a ten times as many books in junior high and high school than I have since (I'm 4th year in college). When I remembered something I'd picture the page on the book where I had seen it.

Now I think more verbally. I hear something like a "mental voice". It's very slow compared to either of the others. I think I'm starting to skip my mental dialogue a little lately. I go to lectures and don't read books, which I never would have done in high school. I also am a lot more social; I'm not sure if there's a connection. When I remember something it can be visual or verbal. I also remember things somewhat abstractly sometimes, especially ideas like math. It feels like they're part of me. I'm not sure how long the abstract thing has been going on, it may not be new.

Thinking is like taking a bunch of concepts and jamming them together as one might jam together legos until something fits. I usually do this systematically, as I can feel the first thing that fits is not always the best fit, so I want it organized enough to try everything.

Mostly not like any sensory modality, especially when thinking about relatively simple things. Sometimes talking to myself or to others, or manipulating visuospatialized mathematical structures.

Sometimes talking to myself, sometimes manipulating visualizations (usually heavily mathematical), but mostly not like anything at all, or at least not like any normal sensory modality.

Thinking feels to me like talking to myself.

Thinking feels to me like reading.

Would you allow that "thinking" goes on outside of conscious awareness? Or does the term refer only to deliberative thought?

Please keep posting anything you've already prepared. I'm just skimming the more recent posts in the series but mostly because I have already spent years on luminosity and have discovered what works for me. (Which is somewhat different from what works for you due to different personality types.) I still find skimming your posts useful because it adds some insights that I hadn't considered and serves and a reminder of others.

I certainly wouldn't discourage you from posting more even if I found them useless. They aren't interfering with anyone else, the act of posting things like this is of huge benefit to the author if not anyone else and I know reading this 10 years ago would have changed my life significantly.

I want to see the rest.

I think they were posted too quickly, and other articles are competing for people's limited time. The Recent Posts bar only goes back 4 days right now.

I certainly want to hear everything you have to say on the subject, which is generally a fascinating one. But there's not much to discuss in this particular post - it's a checklist.

I haven't read it yet; the past few days have had more top-level posts than usual, so I've had to put it in my 'read later' queue. Others may have done the same.

So apparently I should not shut up instead of continuing with the sequence. That leaves the score of this post in need of explanation (people haven't read this one yet? this one in particular is inferior to the others? people have a limited number of upvotes they're willing to give to a single sequence and have already used them up?), and if I shouldn't be going by karma in gauging how fast to post, I don't know how I should dole them out. Anybody want to propose a schedule?

Alternate hypothesis: people see the sequence as worth a fixed number of post-upvotes (short of 8 per reader).

(As for me, I'm not gaining too much from this sequence, but all the same I'd prefer that you post the full sequence.)

This post does not immediately seem hugely useful to me. I'm waiting for the rest of the sequence to see how it fits in.

No, I find it very interesting. It's very enlightening to hear somebody else's view on introspection. I tend to introspect a lot (sometimes maybe too much). I always had a bit of a double relationship with it as you are never sure about your conclusions about yourself and I dislike uncertainty rather strongly.

However, I can't see another way how know to yourself better. You can use evolutionary psychology & psychological studies but they only provide very broad strokes. You could go to a psychiatrist but there are a lot of different schools to chose from so you are still not sure (and also expensive off course).

I'm curious, are you also planning to write something about doing something with the conclusions reached through introspection ? I never had much problems analyzing myself but don't have a lot of motivation to act upon it.

I am very interested. My brain and I are ships passing in the night as it stands.

I've been too busy lately to give them the attention (I predict) they deserve. I'll probably upvote them when I read them.