Saturday, September 25, 2010

Words That Are Frequently Internally Translated

Words that are frequently translated in my mind, even though some of the annoy me somewhat:

Seattle -> Skidaddleapolis
.cpp -> Cupapistan
uh-oh -> wuzzles
quesadilla -> chalhoulf (pronounced hal-hoof)
America -> Americia
American -> Americian
Canada -> Canadiesis, Cañada
dollars -> dollahues
f*** -> bangles
f***ing h*** -> f***ing Bengal tigers
NBC -> Nabucca
MDS (Media Design School) -> Medusee
SimAnimals -> Shimonoseki Animals
Gmail -> Gahh'malé
CBD -> caboodee
vegetables -> vegan-edibles

(Don't ask me why I associate a different spelling and pronunciation with the internal translation of quesadilla, I don't really know myself)

Monday, September 20, 2010

Metacognition

Recently, I've been fascinated with metacognition for some reason. Metacognition is thinking about thinking - or said in a less mysterious way, reasoning about through processes. Although there are many levels and meanings of metacognition, what has interested me is the way thoughts form in the human mind.

I wonder how people make decisions. Perhaps I should read some journals and articles about it - if you can suggest any, feel free to send me or post the links here. How do people make decisions? Does it follow a string of logic? Do different thoughts pop up in your mind and using some kind of scoring criteria, your mind only makes the highest scoring ones available to you? How do thoughts start? Even a long chain of reasoning has to start with an initial thought somewhere. How does this initial thought get generated? Perhaps people make decisions in a "simulated annealing" fashion, where random thoughts pop up, and thoughts wander wildly, but as a few initial scores or decisions are made during the process, thoughts become "corralled" and more directed?
These are the things that I've been wondering about recently, although I don't know how to answer them. I've tried my best to "observe" myself thinking, but how do I know if any complex system fully analyse itself? Can you observe your thoughts without disturbing and changing their behaviour? Why is it so difficult to stop thinking about anything, and where are these thoughts coming from? Am I the only one that feels this way, or are there categories of people that think in different ways?
Recent interesting information I've received includes how one of my friends had a conversation with a mutual friend, and he tells me she claims to think in series of pictures. My friend and I generally think in terms of inner monologue (and I've been trying to develop that "Flash Thinking" technique I wrote about earlier). Another interesting thing I read is that it's been recently found that people with more grey matter can judge the correctness of their thoughts and beliefs more accurately than people with less grey matter (that's the article I learned about the term "metacognition"). That's interesting - how does the understanding of how people think about their thoughts change as the amount of grey matter changes?

As you can see, I've generated a lot of questions, but very few answers. Perhaps I'll find some of those answers soon... I hope.