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Gabriel comments on Thinking without words? - Less Wrong Discussion

10 Post author: PhilGoetz 09 July 2011 06:25PM

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Comment author: Gabriel 11 July 2011 08:14:47PM 1 point [-]

There's this known result that people make decisions intuitively and later come up with verbal rationalizations for them but when all of that gets assembled into a stream of consciousness, it can feel like the rationalizations came first and were the deciding factor. Your experiecne could be something like this, only in the other direction. Or you have a really high-definition number sense. Do you still get correct results if you try to surpress the verbalizations while doing mental arithmetic?

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 11 July 2011 08:37:40PM 0 points [-]

If I don't verbalise the multiplications as I carry them out then I often forget or misremember the running total when I want to add another number to it. I feel like practice would improve this.