Hear Myself Think.
Today at work I was reminded of one of the stories from Richard Feynman’s “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”. With an interest in understanding his sense of the passage of time, Feynman began a series of simple experiments that involved counting in his head. He found that it would regularly take him about 48 seconds to count to 60. He attempted to change this result by several means, including running up and down a flight of stairs to raise his body’s temperature. This had no effect other than confusing his colleagues.
Feynman also found that reading didn’t interfere with his ability to count in his head, whereas talking out loud did. One of his roommates claimed the opposite, that they could say anything they wanted without interrupting their mental count, but that reading would throw them off. The explanation Feynman came up with was that while he imagined hearing numbers spoken in his head when counting, his friend counted by visualizing the numbers.
Working for Paul I perform a number of different jobs, some of which are very repetitive. For example, assembling 50 pairs of brakes. Each pair of brakes consists of two arms, and each arm takes six or seven steps to assemble.
With some tasks I can my hands take over my mind is free to wander, and it takes large steps. Other times counting is required and my mind remains tethered to the task at hand. When I count, I often move my mouth without making any sounds, and in my head I can “hear” my voice saying the numbers. It seems like I count in my head in the same way that Feynman described his counting.
In his story, Feynman suggests that with practice one could to teach themselves to count in different methods, by imaging the numbers passing visually instead of aurally, or even by the imagined sensation of touch.
At work I tried to count in my head by visualizing numbers, increasing the value each time I finished performing the repeated task. Although I “saw” the number in my head, I found it difficult to stop myself from “hearing” it too. The only way I could do so was by actually saying something else out loud, or by imagining I was hearing something else in my head. “Hum hum hum” worked well, spoken out loud or just imagined.
Following this train of thought, I find myself more often than not engaged in an internal monologue that is explicative and explanatory. It feels as if I’m almost constantly trying to find most elegant way of describing a concept, experience, or situation to an outsider. If it is possible to train myself to count in my head by visualizing increasing numbers, could I also compose narrative thoughts by visualizing the words as text?
On a related note, the vlog Stuck in Vermont has an episode about renowned comix artist James Kochalka. In it he talks about his experience drawing American Elf, the daily journal comic he’s kept for the past decade. In the video, he mentions that he is constantly imagining the current situation in terms of how it would look as a comic. Perhaps this is a similar condition.