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Monday, February 07, 2011

Thinking and Temple Grandin

I am watching a lecture by Ms. Temple Grandin on the types of thinking, and I find that she and I seem to agree on the cognition and how people are different. For Ms. Grandin there are 3 basic types of thinking: visual, pattern, and verbal.
Now the verbal corresponds to language and processing language information, about which we have said a good deal over the past years. Essentially, verbal thinking has usurped the paradigm of cognition, and every "rational" thinking must ape language or be considered "irrational".
Pattern thinking processes patterns and structures in space and time, such as music and mathematics, the mathematics being considered mainly as geometry and topology by Ms. Grandin so it seems, but I bow to her insights and must brood much more over this.
Visual thinking is thinking done in pictures, specific representations of objects from memory. This corresponds entirely to what we always called Imagining: processing image information.

I had postulated the basic thought processing systems as the following types of processing:

Language or verbal processing,
Imaging or picture processing,
Art (plastic arts),
Patterned body movement ( dance, sports... motion in space and time),
Patterned emotion experience (love, hate... emotional space/time),
Mathematics and Logic,
Music, ....
and the Holy.

I have believed that our experience of the Holy is a separate and independent thinking, and is one much overlooked in the present age, being considered as an amalgam of the other types of thinking.

And Ms. Grandin speaks of animals and how they think visually, not verbally, and the effort that requires of us to understand, approaching it as we do from a verbal point of view, so also there are multitudes of children who are being trashed and ignored  by our educational system because it does not recognize the type of minds they have and present suitable education for them. For example, she mentioned how visual classes , such as Art, or hands-on classes, such as Shop, are being dropped, and that this would deprive those children who need such things of any stimulus.

So also there is a chance that we overlook those spiritually inclined. Indeed, in the future there will be Orders of religious who freely join in a community of charity, and whose job will be taking care of society's sick, downtrodden, and the poor. How we shall fund these groups remains to be seen, but by allowing the people in them to focus on the Holy, I am quite sure the eventual outcome will be rather good.

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