I’ve spent some time digging through neuroscience papers confirming Laura's work in the Wave about the neuro-biology underpinnings of addiction and the predator's mind and such, so I might have a useful comment or two.
Argonaut said:
I've tried to think without talking, and I found I can do it in two different ways. One is basically just like talking to myself verbally, only in my head. This is how I generally think when other people are around.
That describes a process I went through when my stress levels went up around people who used to make me self-conscious. Stress will blow that more fragile mental mode you hinted at below.
Argonaut said:
The other way takes a lot more work - just letting thoughts arise and process on their own. Using this method, my thinking comes as rapid impressions and images, with almost no words at all. I can think several things at a time rather than slowly "talking out" each idea one-by-one. I have to focus on "staying out of my own way" in order to think like this, but it seems to be a far more efficient method.
I understand that too. I think all you would need to do to make this 'mode' work better for you is simply use it in a goal-directed manner - like when your using the non-verbal area of working memory to hold things in mind while trying to understand the relationships between the various components in order to arrive at insights.
While, at first glance, this post might not seem to be related to "talking aloud", I believe by thinking about the info here, a person could realize that if they weren't in the mental verbalization or sub-vocalization mode, then that would likely solve the routine "talking it out" issue if that's a problem for him/her.
Recent neuroscience has shown that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) shifts between two apparant extremes of configuration, which seem to be suitable for doing different kinds of things. One mode (let's call it the first mode) has been known about for ages. In it, the PFC has a low level of background excitation and localized areas of high excitation. This is good for tasks involving focused attention.
An interesting aspect of focused attention is that when we are using it, we can always say what the next step is, before we perform it because of it's linear nature. This is the mode where you're 'talking it out', or 'working it out' deductively, or programmatically, like in arithmetic.
The other mode (second mode) is a more recent discovery, or perhaps, realization; perhaps because the tasks that it is good for are harder to test using controlled laboratory experiments. The PFC has a medium level of excitation all over, and the tasks it is good for involve “cognitive flexibility” and working memory. For example, subjects are given three words which can all be the second half of compound words, and the subjects have to guess the common first half of the compound words. So given “shoe”, “flake” and “man”, the subject might guess “snow”. Or perhaps, something requiring detection of a pattern in order to fill in a missing piece of the puzzle:
Here, we cannot clearly recognize the problem as a member of a specific category, so we cannot start executing a series of steps, talking out each one before we perform it:
1, 9, 25, 49, 121, ?, 289, 361, 529 (What is the missing number?)
People seem to be much better at doing this when fMRI machines show that their PFCs are in the second mode. Notice that with this kind of task there is no “working out” involved. We can’t state any steps before we perform them - the word “snow” or the correct number either pops into the subjects’ minds or it doesn’t.
This might be interesting:
Functional organization of the prefrontal cortex in humans
_http://www.isc.cnrs.fr/dre/uk/Research_1.htm
What’s really interesting about this, to me, is how the brain shifts from one mode to the other. It’s stress that does it. When we (or other animals) become stressed, we release the chemicals norepinephrine and dopamine, and these chemicals bias the cells in the PFC towards the focused attention mode. This makes sense. The animal is wandering around on the lookout for food or predators, but as soon as it sees a predator it needs to focus in on it, see what it is doing and avoid distraction. So this mode switching would obviously be useful - a bit like “zooming in” on something of interest, osit.
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If you are interested in looking into this stuff, I suggest starting with the following papers (but you don’t have to read them - I can summarize the important bits here):
_http://jn.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/77/6/3326
Noradrenergic Suppression of Synaptic Transmission May Influence Cortical Signal-to-Noise Ratio:
...By Hasselmo et. al. describes low level studies on slices of rats’ brains, and a mathematical model that reproduces what they found. When they dosed the brain slices with norepinephrine they found that “background” signals between cells were strongly suppressed, but signals coming into the slices (from the senses in whole rats) were less suppressed. Most importantly, they say:
"This can be interpreted as an increase in signal-to-noise ratio, but the term noise does not accurately characterize activity dependent on the intrinsic spread of excitation, which would more accurately be described as interpretation or retrieval."
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_http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn.2007.19.3.468?journalCode=jocn
Beta-adrenergic Modulation of Cognitive Flexibility during Stress
...By Alexander et. al. references the Hasselmo paper. They gave human subjects word searching tests as described above, with and without social stress, with and without propranolol (a drug that blocks the effects of norepinephrine).
Although the enhanced “signal” aspect of the ratio would be related to superior performance on tasks of attention, the behavioral role of “noise” is less understood. Based on a computational model, however, it has been suggested that “noise” is a representation of intrinsic associative activity, not simply an absence of coherent input to cortical neurons… Related to this model, we propose that the increased intrinsic associative activity of “noise” occurring with decreased [norepinephrine] relates to improved performance on cognitive flexibility tasks involving flexibility of access to the lexical–semantic and associative network.
In the same paper, they say:
Here we show that psychosocial stress in healthy individuals without any history of stress-induced dysfunction impairs performance on tasks that require flexible thinking… The observed specificity of stress and propranolol to affect only cognitive flexibility suggests a role of the noradrenergic system in modulating the neural circuitry that may play a role in underlying such modalities as creativity and insight.
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_http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v23/n4/full/1395541a.html
The Selective Dopamine D4 Receptor Antagonist, PNU-101387G, Prevents Stress-Induced Cognitive Deficits in Monkeys
...By Arnsten et. al. shows that stressed monkeys suffer similar effects on working memory, this time via a dopamine pathway.
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There are a ton of other papers and studies that presented information that was news to me...including studies done in male/female sexual dysfunction and the mechanisms underlying addiction to games, TV, the internet, etc., etc., and it all confirms Laura's work in the Wave. That's why I so highly recommend reading it - especially the section on addiction. And anything related to non-linear thinking and thinking with a hammer.
If I have made any errors in my analysis and inferences, someone who knows this stuff better than I is asked to please let me know so I can correct any errors. :)
Added Later: Forgot to mention the number sequence above, is the squares of primes, so the missing number is 13^2 = 169.
I admit that I've judged others who think out loud - if they do it in public, at least. I've seen a few people on the city bus who chat away to themselves right in front of everyone. These people may have issues, but it's really only slightly different from doing the same thing in private. Maybe they're just completely oblivious to what others think of them.
