Thinking about thinking

How do we think?

I'm not sure we really know yet. Certainly the amount of cognitive neuroscience that's still being funded suggests there's a lot left to discover. But we can say a few things at least...

Thinking isn't simple. For one thing, there are different kinds of thinking: consider the different sensations of catching something mid-flight, which requires a complex calculation but very little conscious effort, and trying to decide the best course of action in a complicated situation, which feels very labour-intensive. It's the latter kind of thinking or reasoning I'm going to focus on here.

Here's how reasoning feels to me:

• First some subconscious part of my brain seems to inform my consciousness that there's a problem to be solved. 
• Then I feel I somehow consciously generate a will to somehow apply reasoning, which then feels like it either works well or doesn't. 
• When it seems to work well, I get a sensation like the problem is an amorphous blob, which I can probe with different ideas or tools, which themselves might also be half-formed, slippery things.
• Some of these ideas seem to bounce off the problem without making an impression, whereas others seem to penetrate and reshape it, ideally making it feel smaller and simpler and closer to being solved, but sometimes making it seem bigger and more complicated. 
• Eventually either the problem shrinks to the point that it appears to be sufficiently solved, or I decide to stop consciously applying my reasoning to it for the time being.
• If I do decide to stop consciously reasoning, I do so knowing that my brain might make progress on the problem nevertheless, and reveal that progress to me at some unexpected moment, like when I'm in the shower or wiping my arse (another example of how thinking isn't simple).

But is that just me? Are there other ways of interpreting what thinking feels like, and even different ways of thinking? And - perhaps most importantly - can we improve our thinking by learning different processes or increasing the effectiveness of our ideas / tools or some other aspect?

Let's take a look at what some other people have said on the subject.

In How We Think, John Dewey says: "To many persons trees are just trees [...] with perhaps recognition of one or two kinds [....] Such vagueness tends to persist and to become a barrier to the advance of thinking. Terms that are miscellaneous in scope are clumsy tools at best [...]"

This suggests that terms - or words - might be important for thinking. Indeed, in Bright Earth, Philip Ball writes that some people have suggested the ancient Greeks had poor colour awareness because their language lacked basic colour words.

But words were lacking from my own bullet-point walk-through above. And in The Photographer's Playbook, Nathan Lyons quotes Jacques Hadamard's The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, in which Hadamard says: "Words are totally absent from my mind when I really think". Lyons also quotes Hadamard quoting Einstein making a similar point: "The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought."

Does this rule out improving one's vocabulary as a means of improving one's ability to think, contra Dewey? Humans' intelligence and our linguistic abilities are often considered to be some of our most defining characteristics; can it really be that they're so separate?

Well, Ball goes on to say that "There is no reason to suppose that our ability to distinguish colours is limited by the structure of our colour vocabulary. [For example:] We can tell apart hues to which we cannot ascribe names."

Surely what we can discern, we can also bring to bear mentally?

And Hadamard's quotation of Einstein continues:

"The entities [that] seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be voluntarily reproduced and combined. [...] Words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage".

Here we have four terms - "entities", "elements in thought", "certain signs" and "more or less clear images" - that are used interchangeably, and which all, I suggest, refer to one thing: the ideas or tools I myself referred to earlier.

Combining Einstein and Ball, it seems there are elements in thought (ideas), which don't necessarily need to be named in order for us to use them.

However, if it is possible to improve one's thinking by increasing the number, variety or effectiveness of the ideas or concepts at one's disposal, we do need some means of finding new concepts. And while concepts might not have to be named to exist, anything that is named must surely exist, even if only in theory.

So even if words aren't themselves a part of thought, it does seem that increasing one's repertoire of named concepts - that is, one's vocabulary - might be a way of improving one's ability to think.

Where can we find new words? A dictionary would work, but wouldn't be very efficient: many words in it would already be known to us, or be merely (or mostly) synonyms of words we already know.

Whereas the Free Word Centre in London tweets a "word of the day", which the staff appear (justifiably, I think) to hope will be a word most people won't yet know. Some recent examples are:

• Meliorism: the belief that the world can be made better by human effort
• Meraki: to do something with soul; to put something of yourself into your work
• Geborgenheit: the feeling of safety that comes from being with loved ones

So if on some occasion I find myself, say, struggling with my sense of self-worth, knowing these words I might reason that the best course of action is to:

• Remind myself that perhaps the world can be made better by human effort;
• Propose that this effort might be more rewarding if I put something of myself into it;
• And grant myself the feelgood reward of seeing friends or family after my effort is complete.

Might I have been able to reason thus without knowing the three words? Sure. But without knowing the three concepts, or having at least a vague sense of similar alternatives? I think not.

Book Review: Pour Me, AA Gill, 2015

Pour Me is short as memoirs go: just 241 pages. In part that's because, as Gill says early on in it, the alcoholism from which he suffered in his twenties meant that "there was no film in the camera" for those years, and that earlier memories were also dissolved: "childhood, school, holidays, friends ... all seemed to be faded and incomplete".

Incomplete, but not erased entirely: Pour Me does cover some of Gill's childhood, as well as the time between when he managed to stop drinking, aged 30, and when he wrote the book, 30 years later.

Stopping drinking saved Gill's life, and after "thousands of hours of learning the wrong thing" - art, cooking, gardening, bartending - he finally "failed into journalism", becoming one of the best-known food and TV critics in the country.

So I'll borrow a description of journalism that Gill says he liked - "journalism is what will be grasped at once" - and come to the point: Gill was a fantastic and endearing writer, and he had an interesting life. What more can you ask from a memoir?

He could be brilliant, as perhaps best demonstrated by the section on the speech he gave to a room full of dyslexic schoolchildren (he himself was dyslexic), telling them that the English language was theirs to manipulate no matter what their school might tell them about their abilities. This echoed two transformative elements in his own life: the moment when he came upon his English teacher literally tearing apart books to show them who was boss, and a crucifixion painting that particularly moved him with its depiction of human suffering, which was made in the period of the Lutheran reformation.

He was also enviably insightful - something he attributed to his artistic training ("It made me look, as opposed to merely see"). Consider for example this, from page 2: "I wonder what the rest of nature makes of a lawn? Arrogant, snobbish, entitled, needy, effortfully polite, sober." Or this, on famine (he wasn't just a critic), a subject that sadly is timely again: "It isn't staring into the face of starvation that thuds like a blow to your heart, it is having starvation stare back at you".

His turns of phrase were up there with the best of them, and he was funny, and he was empathetic, having experienced loneliness and sickness and desperation by the gallon.

I'm using the past tense, because Gill died in December 2016, a year or two after Pour Me was published. Could that be another reason why the book is so short? I'm not sure: it wasn't clear to me whether he'd received his diagnosis of terminal cancer before the book was finished.

I suspect not, because I suspect he'd have carried on writing it until the end if he'd known it was coming, just as he did with his articles, the last of which was about his experience of dying on the NHS. But then the book is so dense with insight and tales told only in snatches that it could easily have been four times the size, and the final paragraphs are filled with finality: "I misused a life for 30 years and I had 30 more of a second chance that I used better, though not as well as I might."

Perhaps those tales are told only in snatches here because they have already been told elsewhere - in Gill's journalism, a compendium of which is due to be published this year. I'll certainly be buying that too, so maybe I'll let you know.

On experience

"“You want to make something real, you have to experience something, not just something you’ve read or you’ve listened to… something that is you.”"

Musician Pan Daijing as interviewed by Aurora Mitchell for The Quietus.

"It is no longer rare to meet adults who have never swum except in a swimming pool, never slept except in a building, never run a mile or climbed a mountain, never been stung by a bee or a wasp, never broken a bone or needed stitches. Without a visceral knowledge of what it is to be hurt and healed, exhausted and resolute, freezing and ecstatic, we lose our reference points. We are separated from the world by a layer of glass. Climate change, distant wars, the erosion of democracy, resurgent fascism – in our temperature-controlled enclosures, all can be reduced to abstractions."

George Monbiot in the Guardian

What do people do all day? #1

Some insights from the Lunch with the FT collection of interviews:

Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon, interviewed by Andrew Davidson:

His working hours? "I do 60 a week, any less I get bored, any more, tired. I mean, what do people do who do less? How do they fill the time?"

Families, hobbies, television. He frowns, as if he doesn't quite understand.

Oleg Deripaska, billionaire aluminium magnate, interviewed by Gideon Rachman:

Why not cash out? I ask. Deripaska looks faintly indignant - "And do what?" he asks.

Book Review: Generation X, Douglas Coupland, 1991

If you'd asked me a year ago to define Millennials - as in, to provide my best understanding of society's definition of Millennials - I'd have told you that they're the first generation that expects life to be worse for them than it was for their parents.

I'm not sure how I'd have defined Gen Xers - one thing that sticks in my mind from something I read somewhere (maybe even from more recent Coupland? Maybe not) is that they were a generation who were thought to have been soft and good-for-nothing, until digital technology came along and allowed them to express talents and money-making potential that had been hidden unsuspected all along.

But now I reread Generation X for the first time in maybe a decade, and I realise that many (all?) of the things people generally say about Millennials were previously said about Gen Xers.

Take these stats from the back pages of Generation X (publication date, I reiterate, 1991):

"Percentage of US 18-29 year olds who agree that "there is no point in staying at a job unless you are completely satisfied": 58"

"Percentage of US 18-29 year olds who agree that "given the way things are, it will be much harder for people in my generation to live as comfortably as previous generations": 65".

But it's not just rereading Generation X that has taught me that Millennials are not the first doomed generation: the recent US presidential election did the same. At some point in my struggle to understand Brexit and Trump I stumbled across Professor Elizabeth Warren's 2007 testimony before the US Senate Finance Committee, which told me things like:

"the typical man working full-time today, after adjusting for inflation, earns about $800 less than his father earned back in the early 1970s"

and

"By the most obvious financial measures, the middle class American family of the 21st Century is beginning to sink financially"

and

"In 2004, the median homeowner was forking over a mortgage payment that was 76% larger than a generation earlier"

and

"Today’s family spends 74% more on health insurance than their earlier counterparts—if they are lucky enough to get it at all. Costs are so high, that 48 million working-age Americans simply went without coverage last year"

Similarly, from the back pages of Generation X:

"Percentage of income required for a down-payment on a first home ... in 1967: 22; in 1987, 32"

The western middle class has been being hollowed out for decades, but until Brexit and Trump nobody noticed. Or did they think neoliberalism would lift all boats?

All of which is my way of saying how damn relevant Generation X seems right now. In my dim memory it was about people dropping out of consumerist lifestyles and taking refuge in irony / authenticity, which it is, but it's also about people doing so because they have no real choice: they're forced to take up things like:

"Status substitution: Using an object with intellectual or fashionable cache to substitute for an object that is merely pricey: "Brian, you left your copy of Camus in your brother's BMW""

because they're all experiencing:

"Lessness: A philosophy whereby one reconciles oneself with diminishing expectations of material wealth: "I've given up wanting to make a killing or be a bigshot. I just want to find happiness and maybe open up a little roadside cafe in Idaho"."

Which maybe makes Generation X sound a little preachy or too arch, but actually the Gen X-isms are not exclusively economic or self-pitying: they're often funny, heartfelt, and still ring true.

What's more, Coupland also creates interesting, likeable characters, tells engaging stories, and uses language in a fresh and entertaining way.

Generation X is a great book.

I'm not entirely sure what its moral is, or even if there is a clean moral to be plucked from it. We're advised that "purchased experiences don't count", and indeed the characters provide stories about the perfect unpurchased moments that "prove you're really alive", but these are moments that happen seldom, and so the question remains: what do you do in between them?

Do you keep semi-deliberately sliding down the socioeconomic ladder until you find the cheap situation your menial-but-dignifiedly-earned income can support? The book strongly suggests that you do, but can we all? Can any of us? Would we be happy?

Where are those Gen Xers now?

P.S.
I must have first read Generation X when I was 15 or 16 - half my life ago - and I'm again moved to wonder what books like it and Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero did to a mind ill-prepared to receive them. Did they Daria-ify me when I would otherwise have been basically fine? Or was I always destined to be misanthropic and confused?

As Kurt Cobain, who would have been 50 today, said: "Teenage angst has paid off well; now I'm bored and old."

Snap out of it #2

"There had been a time, once, when he had not lived like this, a .32 under his pillow, a lunatic in the back yard firing off a pistol for God knew what purpose [...] There had been a wife much like other wives, two small daughters, a stable household that got swept and cleaned and emptied out daily [...] But then one day, while lifting out an electric corn popper from under the sink, Arctor had hit his head on the corner of a kitchen cabinet directly above him. The pain, the cut in his scalp, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleaned away the cobwebs. It flashed on him instantly that he didn't hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, the whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it. He wanted a divorce; he wanted to split. And so he had, very soon."

A Scanner Darkly, Philip K Dick

Snap out of it #1

"This admission tweaks me out of my own thoughts - the way breaking a shoelace when tying a shoe can somehow instantaneously shift you into a new plane of consciousness."

Generation X, Douglas Coupland