Can you think with ideas/concepts consistently? (See post.)

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Can you think in ideas/concepts consistently?
Yes, all the time. 39%  39%  [ 26 ]
Yes, except during shutdowns etc. 18%  18%  [ 12 ]
Yes (my baseline level of thought is conceptual/idea-based), other. 16%  16%  [ 11 ]
No, my ability to do so is constantly in flux. 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
No, my baseline is definitely outside/below concepts and ideas. But I can climb into the idea realm some of the time. 4%  4%  [ 3 ]
No (my baseline thinking level is not ideas, if I even have a baseline), other. 1%  1%  [ 1 ]
I don't know. 21%  21%  [ 14 ]
Other. 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
Total votes : 67

anbuend
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18 Mar 2011, 4:50 pm

ColdBlooded wrote:
I think I might get it.. Do you mean something like just simply perceiving the things around you without any specific thought attached to that sensory input? Like if you are looking at a chair... You don't attach the idea of what it means to be a chair to it, and it just simply *is*... Like everything in the world is just a flow of sensory input without any meaning attached to it?


Yes pretty much that. That's my "default" state, I have to do a lot of deliberate climbing to get into ideas.


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Apple_in_my_Eye
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18 Mar 2011, 6:17 pm

ColdBlooded wrote:
I think I might get it.. Do you mean something like just simply perceiving the things around you without any specific thought attached to that sensory input? Like if you are looking at a chair... You don't attach the idea of what it means to be a chair to it, and it just simply *is*... Like everything in the world is just a flow of sensory input without any meaning attached to it?

Still not 100% sure I get it, but that explanation makes sense to me.

It also reminds me of something a guy (a famous writer -- A. Huxley?) wrote about taking a hallucinogenic of some kind. There was a table in front of him, and he described an overwhelming sense of "table-ness" from it, and a deep/profound sense of "table-leg-ness" of the table's legs, and so on -- and he went on like that for pages and pages. That seems like the exact opposite of the above. It's like the cognitive/interpretive part of his brain went into overdrive.

As far as what I experience, it's more so the opposite of the "overdrive" way, though I can usually work out where to sit down in an unfamiliar room (albeit a bit more slowly than normal) and so forth, though.



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19 Mar 2011, 6:31 am

Yes, Huxley was describing the opposite thing entirely -- too much meaning, not too little. A surprisingly small amount of people seem to get that it's the opposite, and then tell me that what I'm describing actually sounds like someone like him, or sounds like their utterly overly-meaning-infused acid trip, when it's nothing like that at all. Sometimes hallucinogens unfortunately seem to make people confused about whether they're experiencing something or its opposite, and then people like me get our experiences compared to them. (Even though, for instance, that sort of drugs made my thinking and functioning more normal, not less normal, therefore you'd think people would pick up on that and realize that my experience and the experience of such drugs may just be opposites?)


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19 Mar 2011, 8:17 am

Yes, but mostly related to my special interest-Politics. I can look at anything and make it political.

I once thought I was a highly abstract thinker. Then I read that the difference between concrete and abstract thought is very "domain" specific. So if you are a concrete thinker but your mind is usually floating off somewhere else thinking about politics "politics" becomes more concrete than things in the here and now. I guess you could say I'm good at one-directional abstract thinking i.e. using politics to relate things that aren't in politics. I even tend to relate it to social situations. That's helpful in some ways, but over the years since politics is 100 times more serious than regular social relationships I wound up taking everything too seriously and became overconcerned with everyone's opinions if they disagreed, because everything is insanely easy to relate to politics. Now that I've moved from figuring out how society should be to figuring out how to actually get it there(how to persuade it) things have been going a lot easier and it's sunk in more that this persuasion is going to be at a much wider scale, so if someone holds a belief I disagree with I don't need to feel upset.



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26 Mar 2011, 12:25 am

Resurrecting to add:

I have a lot of conceptual thought that isn't precisely linked to language as well. That is, I think in sensory terms (visual, audio, scent, etc) and without language to attach directly to my thoughts I start going off into thoughts that I have no language for, or that if I have language for it, I have difficulty assembling it into language. This was becoming apparent with my therapist as she was pushing me to discuss things I could visualize but not describe, and it was taking me a lot of energy (as it often does) for me to translate concepts into language, especially in a real time, synchronous exchange. I've had similar problems on multiple occasions and even have issues with writing things out.

These aren't necessarily abstract things, either. Just things I can't describe. I've found when I get the words to describe them, or perhaps prompts to start describing them, I can go on for thousands of words because these are things that have been in my mind for years or decades without having the language to tie them to language until that point.

This isn't the same as the sensory thinking described in the OP, however, as I have thoughts beyond what I am perceiving.

Really, I haven't seriously thought about this in any detail before now because, well, I tended to not analyze a lot of things closely, but it seems like I have levels/layers of thought that are connected to or disconnected from language, concepts, etc, and move between them depending on what I'm doing at the time. I think I am generally more comfortable at the conceptual without language level, but can drop to the no concept/sensing level on occasion, and spend a lot of time with language because I am always on the internet or reading a book. When I'm gaming or doing something else I can hyperfocus on I tend to drop down to the conceptual level even though language may also be at work. I am not actually sure that language is actually ever dominant so much as more prominent.