Re: OT: What is your qualia of consciousness / thought? (WAS: does conlanging change your sense of reality?)

On Fri, Apr 03, 2009 at 09:59:02AM -0700, Sai Emrys wrote:

> IME talking with people, there are several different kinds of
> perceptions of what it is *like* to think or just to be conscious.
I find that my stream of consciousness seems to be very verbal at this
point, but I believe I used to have much more non-verbalized thought,
some of it pre-verbal and some of it visual.  (As to why it changed,
I hope it is not just an effect of my getting older; it might be
because I used to have multiple hours per day in math and applied math
(i.e. physics) classes, and no longer do; or it might be because I am
chronicly sleep-deprived.)

Sometimes when I'm tired I receive very slow (and strange) non-verbal
thoughts which I believe are coming from my right brain when it tries
to do left-brain things.  It seems very pleased when it works out in a
minute something that my left brain, if it were engaged, would get in
a second or two.  (Reading "My Stroke of Insight" has reinforced my
interpretation that this is what is going on.)

I used to be able to maintain a verbal input stream (reading a book)
while simultaneously working on a visual problem (playing with a system
of pulleys in my mind, for example), and not even realize the two streams
were going on until the pulley-stream got stuck and asked for help,
interrupting my reading.

Thanks for an interesting question, Sai!

Amanda

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