Thought through Imagination?

[alan2here]

Iv'e stumbled over from the Physics side of the forums to air an idea about the nature of thought and Imagination.

 

Im going to use the word "I" a lot as I am not shure who thease would apply to although Its probbebly not just me.

 

When I am asleep dreaming the enviorment around me is contructed from pure imagation. I often have no recolection or constucting it with conscious thought and have little idea what will hapen next.

 

When I imagine things when I am awake I often consciously think about what they should look\sound like and what should happen, this is conscious thought with little actual imagination.

 

If however I imagine standing on a grid of square tiles and I look into the distance and see that the grid of tiles stretches off to the horizon in all directions then I have only had to consciously imagine the first tile, the rest where worked out automaticly (using imagination) and almost instantly, the first took about the same length of time as all the rest.

 

People who are good at spelling visualise the word they are trying to spell and almost imediatly know the answer dispite the seemingly endless number of words they could have chosen. This is partly because they visualise the words and do a visual comarision with other words whereas people who can't spell verry well like myself constuct the words phonetically (with sounds, yes I have tried to lurn the other way and I can't do it). However simply spelling visualy Isn't fast enough for them to do what they do, I think they use fast subconscious thought that they are not aware of happening to do this. In the same way nearly everyone can recorgnise another person and almost almost imediatly know who they are dispite the seemingly endless number of other people they could have chosen, they do this at the same speed I could see all the tiles, not at the speed I consciously imagined the first tile.

 

I find this easyer when I am tired than fully awake. Try to imagine somone talking, the words will probbebly be contously generated. Add another voice on top who is talking to the first one. Once you have this going for a bit add another one and keep going untill you have a small croud. Hopefully you are not contously generating all the voices, most of them should be with Imagination alone.

 

Iv'e know some people apear to be doing maths verry quicky as they are working sums out entirly visualy. They are using the conventional method for working out sums and working them out consciously but holding the whole sum in there heads visualy at once.

 

People with synesthesia can do maths by finding visual paterns between numbers that can allow them to work out the correct shape that would be associated to the answer to a verry hard maths sum much more quickly than the people in the last paragraph. This is mainly done by remembering the associations between the shapes and numbers and working out how to get the correct shape and so the correct number, for example to make a number twice as big the shape may have to have twice the number of sides, also texture and fealings can be important, I should think that sound could also be encorperated. Im not shure how much of this process is conscious thought and memory and how much is subconscious. It is undoubtebly verry clever.

 

Going back to the meany tiles and the croud of voices. What other more usefull things could be achived at the speed that imagination works (as opposed to by using a conscious stratergy) and more importantly how would you teach yourself?