The previous article (The Bounded Infinite and Free Will) took me over an hour to type in. I will now spend another hour proof-reading it. That's the speed at which I work — the speed of thought.
What I find intriguing, though, is that the entire idea for the article (complete with references to Free Will, cigarettes, alcohol, addiction, the original Siamese Twins, and Pi) came to me within the span of a minute or two. That's the speed of creativity — the speed of non-thought.
It's amazing how slow we are compared to how fast we can be.
We see the speed of non-thought also in cases of crisis. I've encountered it during motorcycle accidents (and near-accidents), where the speed of non-thought saved me from injury or death, and once during an attempted home invasion, when the speed of non-thought may have saved my life.
From what I've heard, it seems that athletes and martial artists also use non-thought when they excel at what they do, though I cannot claim to have direct personal experience in this matter.
It is my impression that thought evolved to serve non-thought — preparing the organism to react at lightning-quick speed to complex situations. The side-effect is creativity.
Anyway, that's what non-thought just told me. Perhaps it's wrong.
Addendum: Total time to type in and edit the previous article: 4½ hours. Number of new ideas for the article during that time: One (specifically: the final sentence).
The average persons working day consists of having to give rise to the product of slower thought, thats why its hard work, draining, requiring rest, play and sleep to recover.
ReplyDeletethe product allows you to build hierarchies of new development plans that require even harder work and greater time demand, or conversely the work may resolve to fast intuition that can be quickly re-called later.
Athletes in your example spend a lot of their week training, developing new skills or risk being out-competed. Most of that is done in private, You just got to see the final product of all that a lot of the time.