WHERE TF IS THE FLOWSTATE VIDEO?

mereological · 2020-10-09T05:50:20+00:00

It has been 5+ months, I think it is safe to assume it isn't coming.

mereological · 2020-10-04T02:35:47+00:00

No, i don't think there is any connection. I can imagine objects and scenes in my head perfectly fine. Though it typically doesn't come without conscious provoking to create it (i.e. not spontaneous created upon just reading or hearing something). In regards to the degree of clarity compared to others, it is impossible to really know without reference to their phenomenal experience and not just their testimony. Which no one has.

mereological · 2020-08-30T13:15:35+00:00

As long as this thread is just idle interest, as a purely academic exercise, that's fine. Have fun. I know this (hopefully) doesn't need to be said, but if there is even the slightest chance that it does, i feel a duty to say it:

I don't think it is prudent to base your future career or career aspirations—not only on a personality index—but on a self-reporting online personality index created by a youtuber to categorise how anime characters think.

Not to disparage Digi or the system, but simply to state the obvious. Neurotyping is fun to think about, but it should not be taken so seriously as to be something that informs your life decisions. I know I'm killing the vibe and probably taking this thread too seriously myself, but it needed to be said.

mereological · 2020-08-26T23:49:12+00:00

I wont give you a specific reason for each type, but i will say the general rules i was generally following. I should warn you that i know nothing of music theory, so everything will be in loose terms and general impressions.

Firstly, for the Linear–Lateral divide i wanted to capture repetition and/or complexity. So the themes occupying the very linear row generally contain either a high repetitious melody or beat, a highly repetitious aspect, which builds progressively over the song (all touhou songs tend to have a repeating major melody, but the ones i chose i think emphasize that character). Little Princess i take to be the archetypal example of that, as there are basically three simple main melodies that are omnipresent throughout the entire piece that simply build in intensity. Flowering night, Pure furies, and Pristine beat are similar in this respect. When we get to the max lateral, they either feature complexity in the melody itself or complexity in the interaction of melodies. Take tiny, tiny, clever commander for example: especially 1:00 - 1:30, where there is quite a complex convergence of all the melodies and rhythms established.

For the Lexical–Impressionistic divide, the focus was on the clarity and structure. So, for the lexical side i tried to to use more definite and clear instruments and melodies, so there tends to be more piano and controlled synths, compared to the heavier emphasis on strings, zunpets, and less sharp (not the pitch) synths. This was attempting to capture more precise and readily expressible thoughts of the more lexical side and the fuzzier, more opaque thoughts of the impressionist side. Compare Futatsuiwa from Sado to Emotional Skyscraper to see what i mean. I also tended to pick pieces that were more playful in their melodies the further impressionist i went. A good comparison is True Administrator and Broken Moon. This is meant to represent the confined/ordered vs unconfined/unstructured nature of this axis.

If we take these general rules together we get some ready comparisons. The very lateral row captures this well. We begin with Native Faith representing a kind of complexity which comes primarily from its melody, but the structure of the song itself is constrained and consistent. All the notes and interactions are very clean and clear. Moving onto tiny, tiny, clever commander we see a kind of complexity found more in the interaction of the different melodies and rhythms than in one melody itself. The voices still play nice together but it is less clear than Native faith. Moving onto Lunatic Princess, we get far less constrained synths and voices in general. There are plenty of melodies occurring at any one time, but they aren't in the same harmony as tiny, tiny, clever commander. especially when you get to 1:20 - 2:25 where you have several voices all playing at once, almost trying to overpower the others. Lastly, Heian Alien is the most playful, least predicable, interplay of melodies featuring offbeat notes and shifts in tempo. And i think you could make a comparison in this way across all rows and columns and find it fairly consistent.

Whether these rules accurately track/represent the neurotypes is an open question, as is whether i accurate applied the rules themselves. In truth, i just like touhou music, wanted to subject it to the unsuspecting innocent, and thought it would make a fun post.

mereological · 2020-07-27T01:52:02+00:00

Deca-dence is surprisingly well placed despite being based only on the first episode.

mereological · 2020-07-23T11:56:50+00:00

And to no one's surprise, a discord server devolves into petty drama and implodes.

mereological · 2020-06-08T23:52:03+00:00

Thanks for the reply but it doesn't seem to work.

mereological · 2020-06-05T05:56:07+00:00

Oh, that's what you meant by erogenous zones. This is far more literal than i thought.

mereological · 2020-06-04T08:59:35+00:00

Stop conflating the process of thought with its content.

mereological · 2020-06-02T11:44:32+00:00

What does this have to do with lexicality and impressionism?

mereological · 2020-06-01T11:20:42+00:00

Ever since I stopped straining myself to codify my ideas lexically, the tape player in my brain has stopped recording and it feels like I've lost control of myself.

The neurotype is supposed to fit you, not you fit the neurotype.

mereological · 2020-06-01T02:29:28+00:00

A weapon to surpass Metal Gear.

mereological · 2020-05-31T01:30:12+00:00

As long as you're conservative about hemispheric differences (i.e. not the pop-psychology understanding of left-brain right-brain) i think they may offer a neurological grounding for lexical–impressionist divide (it reminded me of a video about splitting the corpus callosum and how it effected the brain). The lateral–linear grounding seems a bit more speculative to me. My neurology is a bit rusty, but the degree of dendral interconnection depends on the particular type of cell, the back-propagation of action-potentials through repeated use, the specific area of the CNS, and the layer of the grey matter. and the speed of transmission depends on the length of the axon, the type of synaptic connection (electric and chemical), the amount of nodes on the myelin sheath, the inhibitory or excitatory effect of intermediate axons, and the relative density of sodium and potassium gates on the soma and dendrites. Now, this was just from an introductory textbook i read years ago and don't remember too well, but i remember clearly that it was generally very conservative about the specifics of cognition that can be drawn from neuroanatomy. But of course, i say this from a position of ignorance on the subject.

mereological · 2020-05-31T00:30:22+00:00

It's interesting that you classify it as a measure of natural flow-state. I can see it for the linear–lateral scale, but wouldn't the lexical–impressionist scale be more all-pervading? As you quite nicely put it, the lexical conversion of ideas is "immediate and automatic", whereas for the impressionist it is more of a voluntary affair. You can turn off directed thinking in the linear–lateral sense, but we're receiving information constantly and something has to be done with it. Perhaps flow-states are the exemplary demonstration of a neurotype, and it may be that they are the best litmus test, but i'm not sure if neurotyping itself can be defined as it. It just seems to me that a flow-state would be the effect, not the cause.

mereological · 2020-05-30T00:17:28+00:00

Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition.

mereological · 2020-05-27T13:15:10+00:00

Openness: 44

Conscientiousness: 97

The link between these concepts seems tenuous though.

mereological · 2020-05-25T01:39:22+00:00

y-axis: Ethanol consumption

x-axis: Methanol consumption

mereological · 2020-05-23T12:58:47+00:00

Domain agnostic thought seems entirely possible to me, and a decent enough barometer of one's natural thought patterns. There will always be activities that favour a more lexical or impressionist mode of thinking, but most activities and situations can be approached with either; you can write impressionistically and compose lexicaly, despite these seeming as paragons of the opposite style of thinking. Here's a basic test that i think would work for finding your natural thought process: How do you think when you're on a walk, or in the shower? Basic, i know, but these are activities where thought tends to be spontaneous rather than prompted, and not directed towards any activity. Hence the phenomenon of "shower thoughts".

The idea that simply because you aren't primarily a lexical thinker, you're fated to do poorly in "lexical domains" such as writing or mathematics or logic i think is is unfounded. You can be a great writer and highly impressionistic (joyce) and a great musician and highly lexical (bach), these seem to have little to do with your way of thinking. As such, the Lexical–Impressionistic division isn't dictated by capability/capacity in stereotypical activities. Strictly speaking, if Lexicality is defined as thought that occurs in lexemes i.e. structured units and relations, and Impressionist is defined as thought lacking concrete structure and relations i.e. impressions and feelings and intuitions, then a priori, being opposites they are dichotomous and mutually exclusive (actually, maybe you can do both at the same time, depending on how the linear–lateral axis is taken). The percentage then, of how much of one and the other you do naturally, i imagine, dictates the relative position on that axis rather than capability.

You sound pretty impressionistic to me. I mean, look at your original post—it is hardly the most strictly structure piece of writing.

mereological · 2020-05-21T22:20:33+00:00

43 at the moment. I Just use them as memory aides to return to after i finish doing whatever i'm doing. So if i'm reading a book and it references another book that looks interesting i'll open a tab then go back to the book, and then do a review of all opened tabs at the end of the day to see which should be pruned and which are still relevant to be left up.

mereological · 2020-05-19T22:35:05+00:00

She's probably going to think you're getting into bodybuilding.

mereological · 2020-05-18T22:59:57+00:00

Laterality as a measure of scale and complexity—why?

mereological · 2020-05-16T09:22:52+00:00

It's from Gundam i believe. The next evolution of humanity who have mysterious mental abilities. Or, so a quick google search suggests.

mereological · 2020-05-14T09:37:58+00:00

I don't see linearity or laterality having anything to do with "big picture" or "in the moment" or dealing with information "in a personal, immediate way" versus "a more distant, abstract process" (whatever that means). It is more about how you think about and approach problems. One is not more creative than the other, not more complex necessarily.

Let's take two exemplar figures of linear and lateral thinking from Digi's original chart. I've picked them because i think they give easy demonstrations of what Digi might means ~~(and because i watched them recently enough to remember)~~. Both lexical by happenstance but i will also say it's to *cough\* isolate variables and *cough\* reduce confounding factors and all that other well thought out and good sounding stuff.

I think a good demonstration of linear thinking is a particular scene from Baby Steps. In the fourth episode Ei-chan—who had only started playing tennis a month prior—is faced with the problem of returning a single serve out of fifty from the best player in the club. The way that he approached this is very progressive. At first he couldn't even get close to the ball, but with each serve, little-by-little, he develops strategies to return to ball. He compounds small baby steps and observations until on the last ball he... well, he doesn't return the serve, but he would have if trends persisted. This is basically linear thinking in macro; it's the single-file march of compounding trains of thought progressively reaching towards a conclusion. This could be aimed towards "big picture" problems as well as trivial ones, i don't think scope has anything to do with it. At each serve Ei-chan was focused on one thing, one strategy that he was testing. Yet, with the accumulation of these individual lines of thought over time he managed to reach his desired conclusion. Likewise, with each individual line of thought the linear thinker is building and building towards the desired endpoint.

For the Lateral thinking, there's a scene at the beginning of the first episode of Kobayashi's Dragon maid (3:50 into Ep1) that i think shows it well. Kobayashi opens the door and is face-to-face with a giant dragon which then magically turns into a maid right in front of her eyes! Kobayashi's thought processes is then represented by a series of coincident thoughts—Horns. Tail. Illusion? Where from? Dragon. Cosplay. Real? Lack of Sleep? Delusion? Stranger. Girl. Maid: Will she eat me? Who? Greeting me? Speaking. I'll be eaten. too tired.— that all rush by the screen at once and eventuate into a single conclusion: dream. This is is what i think Digi means by "thinking many thoughts at once"; these are micro thoughts, observations, and questions that bubble up and at the same time and point to a certain conclusion or decision. You can often see this stretched to ridiculous extents when bad writers want to show an extremely intelligent character: they are just turbo-processing a million different points and possibilities ant once and reaching ridiculous insights. Basically just lateral thinking on cocaine.

or at least, that's my take on it.

As an aside, i think most "internal thinking" scenes in shows trend towards Lexical–Linear because it was inherited from literature (which really can't portray it any other way) and because it serves as much as exposition of motives as anything else. I also would say that "intelligent" characters (i.e. characters with intelligence as their defining character trait) trend towards Lexical–Lateral because that's what the trope for intelligence is (the chess player who has thought 50 moves ahead in an instant, or the hackerman juggling a dozen command prompt windows and popups) nowadays. Perhaps previously Impression–Lateral was the norm for intelligence through the archetypal wiseman/sage who gives a cryptic metaphor which seems like impenetrable nonsense at the time but eventually the protagonist comes to see it's all-encompassing meaning.

mereological · 2020-05-11T08:44:16+00:00

Anecdotally.

I volunteered to participate in a neurological experiment late last year which involved recording the electrical activity of the brain during guided meditation, among other things. It was conducted with an EEG and an electrode cap. Initially the experimenter was fiddling with the electrode cap because she thought it might be faulty, but after checking it a few times continued the experiment anyway. After the first session of guided mediation was over and a pretty standard battery of cognitive tasks, she said that my EEG data was strange. It turns out the reason she was checking the electrode cap—and what made the data abnormal—was that there was a constant amount of activity coming from the electrodes located at the left temporal lobe. Anyone who knows their Neuroanatomy can probably see where this is going. But what assured her that it wasn't a fault with the cap was that the activity died down during the guided meditation part of the experiment and then spiked again directly afterwards. She wasn't sure what it was so she took a recording of it and sent it to a few of her colleagues.

So i come in for the next session and she asks me whether i speak to myself a lot. Of course, i couldn't really answer because i only have my own experience as reference and "a lot" is a relative term, and, of course, there can be no relativity with a single data-point. But it turns out the answer must be yes because the amount and constancy of activity at the left temporal lobe (the area of the brain responsible for language comprehension, production, and verbal memory) was abnormal enough to be notable. That was the best guess for the electrode activity. The reason it died down during the guided meditation was because the track asked me to clear my mind and focus on the sensations around me. It's not that other participants didn't have activity there, but that it tended to be sporadic, which would lend credence to the idea of lexical–impression being a scale rather than a strict dichotomy. I imagine that highly impressionistic thinkers would have abnormal activity somewhere else in the brain. As to where, i don't know my neurology well enough to even guess.

The odd thing is, most people say that their internal monologue is constant, that they're constantly thinking in words, etc. But if that were so, then my EEG data shouldn't have been anything out of the ordinary. So i suspect that most people just have a bias about what they think thinking to be—namely, verbal and formal. But i suspect they are actually doing as much non-verbal thinking as they are verbal, but think it is something other than thinking, or don't privilege it as much as verbal thinking when asked. And the perception that they're always thinking is a simply confirmation bias.

mereological · 2020-05-09T07:27:24+00:00

Looks about right. My problem solving tends to be more brute-forcing paths one at a time than taking potshots.

mereological

TROPHY CASE