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How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking? - The New Yorker

The document discusses different thinking styles and how people perceive they think. It profiles Temple Grandin, who thinks extremely visually in detailed pictures and videos. The author reflects that their thinking is more minimal and they need to speak ideas out loud to fully form them. While the author wishes they could think as visually as Grandin, they both arrive at the same understandings and ideas through different mental processes. The piece explores how different minds can be while still reaching common conclusions, and questions how we should think about variations in thinking styles.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
218 views21 pages

How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking? - The New Yorker

The document discusses different thinking styles and how people perceive they think. It profiles Temple Grandin, who thinks extremely visually in detailed pictures and videos. The author reflects that their thinking is more minimal and they need to speak ideas out loud to fully form them. While the author wishes they could think as visually as Grandin, they both arrive at the same understandings and ideas through different mental processes. The piece explores how different minds can be while still reaching common conclusions, and questions how we should think about variations in thinking styles.

Uploaded by

FF
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?

| The New Yorker 08/02/2023 09:34

Annals of Inquiry January 16, 2023 Issue

How Should We
Think About Our
Different Styles of
Thinking?
Some people say their thought takes place in images, some in
words. But our mental processes are more mysterious than we
realize.

By Joshua Rothman
January 9, 2023

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How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking? | The New Yorker 08/02/2023 09:34

Visual thinkers and verbal thinkers may represent points on a


continuum. Illustration by Miguel Porlan

Listen to this story

0:00 / 27:33

To hear more, download the Audm app.

was nineteen, maybe twenty, when I realized I was empty-headed. I


I was in a college English class, and we were in a sunny seminar room,
discussing “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” or possibly “The Waves.” I
raised my hand to say something and suddenly realized that I had no
idea what I planned to say. For a moment, I panicked. Then the teacher
called on me, I opened my mouth, and words emerged. Where had they
come from? Evidently, I’d had a thought—that was why I’d raised my
hand. But I hadn’t known what the thought would be until I spoke it.
How weird was that?

Later, describing the moment to a friend, I recalled how, when I was a


kid, my mother had often asked my father, “What are you thinking?”
He’d shrug and say, “Nothing”—a response that irritated her to no end.
(“How can he be thinking about nothing?” she’d ask me.) I’ve always

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been on Team Dad; I spend a lot of time thoughtless, just living life. At
the same time, whenever I speak, ideas condense out of the mental
cloud. It was happening even then, as I talked with my friend: I was
articulating thoughts that had been unspeci!ed yet present in my mind.

My head isn’t entirely word-free; like many people, I occasionally talk


to myself in an inner monologue. (Remember the milk! Ten more reps!)
On the whole, though, silence reigns. Blankness, too: I see hardly any
visual images, rarely picturing things, people, or places. Thinking
happens as a kind of pressure behind my eyes, but I need to talk out
loud in order to complete most of my thoughts. My wife, consequently,
is the other half of my brain. If no interlocutor is available, I write.
When that fails, I pace my empty house, muttering. I sometimes go for
a swim just to talk to myself far from shore, where no one can hear me.
My minimalist mental theatre has shaped my life. I’m an inveterate
talker, a professional writer, and a lifelong photographer—a heady
person who’s determined to get things out of my head, to a place where
I can apprehend them.

I’m scarcely alone in having a mental “style,” or believing I do. Ask


someone how she thinks and you might learn that she talks to herself
silently, or cogitates visually, or moves through mental space by
traversing physical space. I have a friend who thinks during yoga, and
another who browses and compares mental photographs. I know a
scientist who plays interior Tetris, rearranging proteins in his dreams.
My wife often wears a familiar faraway look; when I see it, I know that
she’s rehearsing a complex drama in her head, running all the lines. She
sometimes pronounces an entire sentence silently before speaking it out
loud.

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In the recent book “Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People


Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions,” Temple Grandin
explains that her mind is !lled with detailed images, which she can
juxtapose, combine, and revise with verve and precision. Grandin, an
animal behaviorist and an agricultural engineer at Colorado State
University, has worked designing elements of slaughterhouses and other
farm structures; when tasked with estimating the cost of a new
building, she looks at her plans, then compares them in her mind with
remembered images of past projects. Just by thinking visually, she can
accurately estimate that the new building will be twice or three-
quarters the cost of one that’s come before. After the pandemic began,
she read a lot about how medications can help our bodies !ght covid-
19; as she read, she developed a detailed visual analogy in which the
body was a military base under siege. When she thought about
cytokine storms—events in which the immune system becomes over-
activated, causing out-of-control in'ammation—she didn’t
conceptualize the idea in words. Instead, she writes, “I see the soldiers
in my immune system going berserk. They become confused and start
attacking the base and lighting it on !re.”

Reading Grandin’s book, I often found myself wishing that I were more
visual. My mental snapshots of growing up are 'imsy—I’m never quite
sure whether I’m recalling or imagining them. But Grandin easily
accesses “clear pictorial memories” of her childhood, complete with
“three-dimensional pictures and videos.” She vividly recalls “coasting
down snow-covered hills on toboggans or 'ying saucers,” and can even
feel the lift and dip of the sled as it bumps down the slope; she
effortlessly pictures the delicate three-stranded silk she held between
her !ngers in embroidery class, in elementary school. If her mind is an

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imax theatre, mine is a fax machine.

In the early twentieth century, novels like “Ulysses,” “Mrs. Dalloway,”


and “In Search of Lost Time” asked us to look inside ourselves, at our
own minds. Grandin’s book, similarly, directs our attention to what
William James called “the stream of consciousness”—the ongoing 'ow
of thoughts in our heads. “Our mental life, like a bird’s life, seems to be
made of an alternation of 'ights and perchings,” James wrote. His
aquatic and avian metaphors have a decorous quality; they decline to
over-specify what’s going on in our minds. Grandin’s writing does the
opposite, describing with striking concreteness what’s happening in her
head and, possibly, yours. Her precise descriptions accentuate
differences between minds. In a 1974 essay titled “What Is It Like to
Be a Bat?,” the philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that we’d never
know, because “bat sonar” differs so profoundly from human vision as
to make it unimaginable. Grandin and I aren’t that far apart, but I
struggle to imagine having a mind as extraordinarily visual as hers.

At the same time, Grandin and I have many of the same ideas. We
both understand cost overruns and cytokine storms; we arrive, by
divergent routes, at the same destinations. How different do our minds
really make us? And what should we make of our differences?

randin, who is on the autism spectrum, came to prominence in


G 1995, when she published “Thinking in Pictures,” a memoir that
chronicled her years-long search for a way to put her visual and
perceptual gifts to use. She found a home in agricultural engineering,
where she was capable of visualizing farm buildings from the animals’
perspective. Visiting a slaughterhouse where animals were often
panicked, she could instantly see how small visual elements, such as a

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hanging chain or a re'ection in a puddle, were distracting them and


causing confusion. “Thinking in Pictures” made the case for the value
of neurodiversity: Grandin’s unusual mind succeeded where others
couldn’t. In “Visual Thinking,” she sharpens her argument, proposing
that word-centric people have sidelined other kinds of thinkers. Verbal
minds, she argues, run our boardrooms, newsrooms, legislatures, and
schools, which have cut back on shop class and the arts, while
subjecting students to a daunting array of written standardized tests.
The result is a crisis in American ingenuity. “Imagine a world with no
artists, industrial designers, or inventors,” Grandin writes. “No
electricians, mechanics, architects, plumbers, or builders. These are our
visual thinkers, many hiding in plain sight, and we have failed to
understand, encourage, or appreciate their speci!c contributions.”

In “Thinking in Pictures,” Grandin suggested that the world was


divided between visual and verbal thinkers. “Visual Thinking” gently
revises the idea, identifying a continuum of thought styles that’s
roughly divisible into three sections. On one end are verbal thinkers,
who often solve problems by talking about them in their heads or, more
generally, by proceeding in the linear, representational fashion typical of
language. (Estimating the cost of a building project, a verbal thinker
might price out all the components, then sum them using a spreadsheet
—an ordered, symbol-based approach.) On the other end of the
continuum are “object visualizers”: they come to conclusions through
the use of concrete, photograph-like mental images, as Grandin does
when she compares building plans in her mind. In between those poles,
Grandin writes, is a second group of visual thinkers—“spatial
visualizers,” who seem to combine language and image, thinking in
terms of visual patterns and abstractions.

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Grandin proposes imagining a church steeple. Verbal people, she !nds,


often make a hash of this task, conjuring something like “two vague
lines in an inverted V,” almost as though they’ve never seen a steeple
before. Object visualizers, by contrast, describe speci!c steeples that
they’ve observed on actual churches: they “might as well be staring at a
photograph or photorealistic drawing” in their minds. Meanwhile, the
spatial visualizers picture a kind of perfect but abstract steeple—“a
generic New England-style steeple, an image they piece together from
churches they’ve seen.” They have noticed patterns among church
steeples, and they imagine the pattern, rather than any particular
instance of it.

Grandin likes the idea that there are two kinds of visual thinkers,
because it helps make sense of differences between like-minded people.
It takes visual skill to engineer a machine and to repair it; the engineer
and the mechanic are both visual thinkers, and yet they differ. In
Grandin’s account, an engineer is likely to be a spatial visualizer who
can picture, in the abstract, how all the parts of the engine will work,
while the mechanic is likely to be an object visualizer, who can at a
glance understand whether a ding on an engine cylinder is functionally
consequential or just cosmetic. Artists and artisans, Grandin suggests,
tend to be object visualizers: they can picture exactly how this painting
should look, how this !nial should 'ow, how this incision should be
sewn up. Scientists, mathematicians, and electrical engineers tend to be
spatial visualizers: they can imagine, in general, how gears will mesh
and molecules will interact. Grandin describes an exercise, conducted
by the Marine Corps, in which engineers and scientists with advanced
degrees were pitted against radio repairmen and truck mechanics in
performing technical tasks under pressure, such as “making a

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rudimentary vehicle out of a pile of junk.” The engineers, with their


abstract visual minds, tended to “overthink” in this highly practical
scenario; they lost to the mechanics, who, in Grandin’s telling, were
likely to be “object visualizers whose abilities to see it, build it, and
repair it were fused.”

In seventh grade, I won the egg-drop competition in shop class,


constructing a basket-and-parachute contraption that enabled my egg
to survive being thrown off the second-story roof of my school. But I’m
quite sure that I am not a visual thinker. Grandin’s book includes
excerpts from the Visual-Spatial Identi!er, a yes-or-no test designed by
the psychologist Linda Silverman to divide verbal people from visual
ones:

Do you think mainly in pictures instead of words?

Do you know things without being able to explain how or


why?

Do you remember what you see and forget what you hear?

Can you visualize objects from different perspectives?

Would you rather read a map than follow verbal directions?

Visual people tend to answer yes to more of these questions; I answer


no to almost all of them. Other tests in the book make it even clearer
how much mental distance separates someone like me from someone
like Grandin. Maria Kozhevnikov, a cognitive neuroscientist, has
created tests to distinguish object visualizers from spatial visualizers; in
one of them, the Grain Resolution Test, subjects are asked to judge in
their minds the relative size and density of different objects. Imagine a

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pile of grapes. Are the grapes bigger than the spaces between the
strings on a tennis racquet? Grandin reports that, when she took this
test, she clearly saw, in her mind’s eye, “the grapes being squashed
because they were too big to !t through the spaces between the racquet
strings.” I came to the conclusion that the grapes were bigger—but my
mind isn’t clear-eyed enough to picture the grapes actually being
squashed.

he imagistic minds in “Visual Thinking” can seem glamorous


T compared with the verbal ones depicted in “Chatter: The Voice in
Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It,” by Ethan Kross, a
psychologist and neuroscientist who teaches at the University of
Michigan. Kross is interested in what’s known as the phonological loop
—a neural system, consisting of an “inner ear” and an “inner voice,” that
serves as a “clearinghouse for everything related to words that occurs
around us in the present.” If Grandin’s visual thinkers are attending
Cirque du Soleil, then Kross’s verbal thinkers are stuck at an Off
Broadway one-man show. It’s just one long monologue.

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Psychologists who ask people about their phonological loops !nd that
they’re used for all kinds of things. Loops are a kind of memory scratch
pad; they’re where we store a phone number before we write it down.
They’re also tools for self-management. Young children learn to direct
their emotions by talking to themselves, at !rst out loud and then
silently, often channelling the admonishments or encouragements of
their parents. (“Don’t break it, Peter!” my four-year-old son said
recently, as he tried to connect some Legos.) We use our inner voices to
monitor our progress toward our goals—“almost like a tracking app on
a phone,” Kross writes. Researchers have found that goal-talk is
pervasive in inner speech, with objectives popping up out of nowhere,
like noti!cations on a screen. “Come on,” we might tell ourselves, while
trying to unstick a kitchen drawer. “You can do it! Also—remember

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that doctor’s appointment. Now, back to the drawer!”

In the early twenty-tens, a British anthropologist named Andrew


Irving went up to about a hundred random New Yorkers and asked
them if they’d spend some time saying everything they were thinking
into a small voice recorder. “An element of performance might have
come into play,” Kross concedes. Still, Irving’s transcripts have the ring
of truth. People used their inner voices to muse on attractive strangers
and curse the traffic; often, they “dealt with negative ‘content,’ much of
which sprang up through associative connections.” One woman says, “I
wonder if there’s a Staples around here,” before thinking suddenly
about a friend’s cancer diagnosis; she talks to herself about the bad
news and then, just as suddenly, gets back on track: “Now, is there a
Staples down there? I think there is.” A man re'ects on a broken
relationship and gives himself encouragement: “Clear, totally clear.
Move forward.” It’s easy to get stuck in your loop: monologues can be
insistent, and some people succumb to circular, negative inner talk—
what Kross calls “chatter”—and end up “desperate to escape their inner
voice because of how bad it makes them feel.” One of Irving’s subjects
can’t stop wondering if her boyfriend, who is out of town, has died in a
bus accident or run off with someone else. Kross tells the story of Rick
Ankiel, a baseball player who had to leave pitching for the out!eld
because his inner voice wouldn’t stop talking about “the individual
physical components of his pitching motion.”

People with inner monologues, Kross reports, often spend “a


considerable amount of time thinking about themselves, their minds
gravitating toward their own experiences, emotions, desires, and needs.”
This self-centeredness can spill over into our out-loud conversation. In
the nineteen-eighties, the psychologist Bernard Rimé investigated what

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we’d now call venting—the compulsive sharing of negative thoughts


with other people. Rimé found that bad experiences can inspire not
only interior rumination but the urge to broadcast it. The more we
share our unhappiness with others, the more we alienate them: studies
of middle schoolers have shown that kids who think more about their
bad experiences also vent more to their peers, and that this, in turn,
leads to them “being socially excluded and rejected.” Maybe there’s
another reason my dad, when asked what he was thinking, said,
“Nothing.” It can pay to keep your thoughts to yourself.

Kross’s bottom line is that our inner voices are powerful tools that must
be tamed. He ends his book with several dozen techniques for
controlling our chatter. He advises trying “distanced self-talk”: by using
“your name and the second-person ‘you’ to refer to yourself,” he writes,
you can gain more command over your thinking. You might use your
inner voice to pretend that you’re advising a friend about his problems;
you might redirect your thoughts toward how universal your
experiences are (It’s normal to feel this way), or contemplate how every
new experience is a challenge you can overcome (I have to learn to trust
my partner). The idea is to manage the voice that you use for self-
management. Take advantage of the suppleness of dialogue. Don’t just
rehearse the same old scripts; send some notes to the writers’ room.

hinking in pictures, thinking in patterns, thinking in words—


T these are quite different experiences. But do thinkers themselves
fall into such neat categories? In the nineteen-seventies, Russell T.
Hurlburt, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, came up
with the idea of giving people devices that would beep at certain times
and asking them to record what was going on in their heads at the

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sound of the beep. In theory, if they responded quickly enough, they’d


offer an unvarnished look at what he called “pristine inner experience”
—thought as it happens spontaneously. After spending decades
working with hundreds of subjects, Hurlburt concluded that, broadly
speaking, inner experience is made of !ve elements, which each of us
mix in different proportions. Some thoughts are rendered in “inner
speech,” and others appear through “inner seeing”; some make
themselves felt through our emotions (I’ve got a bad feeling about this!),
while others manifest as a kind of “sensory awareness” (The hairs on my
neck stood on end!). Finally, some people make use of “unsymbolized
thinking.” They often have “an explicit, differentiated thought that does
not include the experience of words, images, or any other symbols.”

Reading this description a few years ago, I felt at last that I had a term
that described my mind: it’s not “empty”; my thoughts are just
unsymbolized. But Hurlburt’s work suggests that it’s a mistake to
ascribe to oneself a de!nitive cast of thought. Most people, he’s found,
don’t actually know how they think; asked to describe their minds pre-
beeper, they are often wildly off the mark about what they’ll report
post-beeper. They’re prone to make “faux generalizations”—groundless
assertions about how they think. It’s easy for me to assume that most of
my thinking is unsymbolized. But how closely have I examined it? In
truth, the textures of our minds are subtle and variable. There’s a reason
James Joyce needed eighteen chapters to describe the mind in
“Ulysses.” Even within a single head, thinking takes many forms.

Quantum physicists confront a problem with observation. Whenever


they look at a particle, they alter and !x its quantum state, which
otherwise would have remained indeterminate. A similar issue afflicts

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our attempts to understand how we think; thinking about our thinking


risks forcing it into a form it does not have. In 2002, at an academic
conference about the study of consciousness held in Tucson, Hurlburt
debated this problem with Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher who is a
well-known skeptic about our ability to describe what’s in our minds.
In a book called “Perplexities of Consciousness,” Schwitzgebel points
out that, during the nineteen-!fties, most people said that they
dreamed in black-and-white, while in the nineteen-sixties they started
saying that they dreamed in color. Surely, he argues, the colors of our
dreams didn’t change; what changed was the ubiquity of color !lm. It’s
tempting to say that, in reality, people dream in color—to suggest that
people in the !fties were wrong about their dreams, and that people in
the sixties were right about them. But Schwitzgebel thinks it’s a
mistake to categorize dreams one way or the other. “We should also
consider the possibility that our dreams are neither color nor black-
and-white,” he writes. Dreams are unreal, and might not lend
themselves to being described during waking life. In describing them,
we give them a !xity they may not have.

After the Tucson conference, Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel published a


book together, “Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets
Skeptic.” The book is a dialogue built around eighteen moments in the
mind of a beeper-wearing recent college graduate named Melanie.
Hurlburt believes that it’s possible to !gure out what’s happened in
Melanie’s head. Schwitzgebel thinks that a lot of what we say about
what happens in our minds is intrinsically untrustworthy, because, in a
sense, thinking is too dreamlike to be described. Ultimately, he suspects
that “we may be fairly similar inside, though we answer questions about
our experience differently.”

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The book is open-ended: it’s up to us to judge who’s right. Take Beep


2.3—the third beep on the second day that Melanie wore her beeper.
Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel recount Melanie’s experience:

Melanie was standing in the bathroom and looking around,


trying to make up a shopping list in her head. At the moment
of the beep she had a mental image of a white pad of paper
(the same writing tablet that she uses to write shopping lists)
and of her hand writing the word “conditioner.” Her hand in
the image was in motion, and she could see the letters coming
out from the tip of the pen. At the precise moment of the
beep, the letter “d” (the fourth letter in “conditioner”) was
coming out.

At the same time, Melanie was saying in her inner voice “con-
di-tion-er,” slowly, in sync with the word as she was writing it
in the image.

Also at the same time, she was aware that her toes were cold.
This was a noticing or sensory awareness of the coldness that
was present in her awareness at the last undisturbed moment
before the beep. It did not seem to involve an explicit thought
process.

There was, evidently, quite a lot going on in Melanie’s mind at Beep


2.3. Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel debate what she has reported. Could
she truly have been aware of all these things at the same time?
Schwitzgebel has doubts. And yet in the nineteen-nineties Hurlburt
used his method to interview Fran, a bank teller who described her
mind as frequently !lled with “as many as !ve or ten” visual images, all
overlaid and occurring simultaneously, as in a multiple-exposure
photograph. A battery of tests suggested that Fran might be right about
her unusual experience: at the bank where she worked, Hurlburt writes,
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the tellers were always counting stacks of bills, and “Fran irritated her
coworkers by repeatedly initiating conversations while counting,
causing them to lose count. The simultaneous tasks of counting and
conversing were impossible for her coworkers but simple for Fran.”

Melanie’s thought stream is funny, unsettling, layered, and rich. At


Beep 3.1, we learn that “Melanie’s boyfriend was asking a question
about insurance letters.” Her focus, however, “was not on what he was
saying but on trying to remember the word ‘periodontist.’ She was
thinking ‘peri-, peri-,’ to herself,” in an inner voice that might also have
been “slightly visual.” Later that day, at Beep 3.2, Melanie was walking
toward her car, “sensing, roughly, its big black shape” but mainly
experiencing “a feeling of ‘fogginess’ and worry,” of being “unable to
think with her accustomed speed.” At the moment of the beep, Melanie
“was in the act of observing this fogginess,” which seemed to exist
“behind the eyes, involving a heaviness around the brow line.” Just
before Beep 6.4, she was throwing out some dried-up 'owers. “I was
thinking that those 'owers had lasted for a nice long time,” she tells
Hurlburt. “It was just kind of an idle thought that was inner speech.”
She notes that at the exact moment of the beep she was hearing not the
words themselves—“They lasted for a nice long time”—but “the
echoes” of the words in her head.

Melanie’s careful attention to her mind is inspiring; it’s as though she’s


her own Molly Bloom. After reading Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel’s
book, I tried to emulate her by attending even more closely to my
pristine inner experience. Did I, too, hear my thoughts—Get back to
work! Put down your phone!—echoing in my head? Was I observing
my feelings even as I felt them? How much could happen in my mind
at the same time? I knew with certainty that I never wrote down

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How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking? | The New Yorker 08/02/2023 09:34

anything on a visualized mental shopping list. But it remained difficult


to say exactly what I did—perhaps because my thoughts are so often
“unsymbolized,” or because I didn’t have a psychologist guiding me, or
because, as soon as you start to think about your inner experience, it’s
no longer so pristine. Hurlburt would say that describing one’s inner
life is hard. Schwitzgebel would say that our inner lives are not
necessarily describable. On a deep level, he contends, our own thinking
is a little like bat sonar. We’ll never know what it’s really like.

ur thinking is mysterious to us. I ask my wife my mother’s


O question—“What are you thinking?”—all the time, and on one
level it’s easy to answer: we can spend all day talking to each other,
sharing our thoughts. But on another it’s unanswerable. Simply by
expressing our thoughts, we change them. To describe our thinking is
to domesticate it. This is why communicating with other people is both
hard and interesting, and why knowing your own mind can be such a
difficult, diverting task.

If we can’t say exactly how we think, then how well do we know


ourselves? In an essay titled “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,”
the philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that a layer of !ction is woven
into what it is to be human. In a sense, !ction is 'awed: it’s not true.
But, when we open a novel, we don’t hurl it to the ground in disgust,
declaring that it’s all made-up nonsense; we understand that being
made up is actually the point. Fiction, Dennett writes, has a deliberately
“indeterminate” status: it’s true, but only on its own terms. The same
goes for our minds. We have all sorts of inner experiences, and we live
through and describe them in different ways—telling one another
about our dreams, recalling our thoughts, and so on. Are our

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How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking? | The New Yorker 08/02/2023 09:34

descriptions and experiences true or !ctionalized? Does it matter? It’s


all part of the story.

Stories aren’t real, and yet they’re meaningful; we tell different stories
about our minds, as we should, because our minds are different. The
story I tell myself about my own thinking is useful to me. It helps me
think, by giving me a handle on my mind when thinking gets slippery.
The other day, I got stuck on a problem that troubled me. So I went for
a swim, hoping to think it through. I wore a wetsuit against the cold
water, and at !rst focussed only on the sensation of cold, and on
steadying my breathing. But eventually I warmed up and relaxed. I
treaded water a little way out from shore, buoyed by the waves, and
prepared to think about my problem; I turned my mind toward it while
I watched a seabird 'oat nearby. Nothing happened for a while. I
watched the bird, the clouds, the silver water. Then I sensed a thought
in need of expression, as I’d known I would. I cleared my throat while
the bird 'ew away. ♦

Published in the print edition of the


January 16, 2023, issue, with the
headline “Thought Process.”

New Yorker
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to do it?

How the World’s 50 Best


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Restaurants are chosen.

Linda Ronstadt has found


another voice.

The Web site where millennial


women judge one another’s
spending habits.

A wedding ring that lost itself.

The foreign students who saw


Ukraine as a gateway to a better
life.

An essay by Haruki Murakami:


“The Running Novelist.”

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Profiles American Q. & A. A Reporter at


Chronicles Large
Justice What the
Alito’s The F.B.I.’s Raid The
Crusade Devastating of Mar-a- Untold
Against a New Lago History of
Secular History of Could the Biden
America the Mean for Family
Isn’t Over January Trump
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How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking? | The New Yorker 08/02/2023 09:34

He’s had win 6th A former federal Relatively little


after win— Insurrection prosecutor and has been known
including general counsel about the
overturning Roe The House for the F.B.I. President’s father,
v. Wade—yet report describes explains the whose story
seems more and both a process and reveals a family’s
more aggrieved. catastrophe and a implications of fraught
What drives his way forward. obtaining a relationship with
anger? By David Remnick search warrant money, class, and
By Margaret on the home of a alcohol.
Talbot former President. By Adam Entous
By Isaac Chotiner

Manage Preferences

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