Mental Modeling Quotes

Most architects think in drawings, or did think in drawings; today, they think on the computer monitor. I always tried to think three dimensionally. The interior eye of the brain should be not flat but three dimensional so that everything is an object in space. We are not living in a two-dimensional world.

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

In all our perceptions, from vision to hearing, to the pictures we build of people's character, our unconscious mind starts from whatever objective data is available to us - usually spotty - and helps to shape and construct the more complete picture we consciously perceive.

I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.

Sometimes I implant thoughts, sometimes I extract thoughts, but I don't like to explain it too much. It's based on science, deduction, and reasoning - it's a bit like what 'Sherlock' does, except that's a dramatised version. I look at every clue around me.

Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.

Our brains are like bonsai trees, growing around our private versions of reality.

Acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation.

One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies.

I visualize things in my mind before I have to do them. It's like having a mental workshop.

When computers came along, I felt for the first time that I had the proper tools for the kind of theoretical work I wanted to do. So I moved over to that, and that got me into psychology.

I have a tendency, more than most other physicists, to try to figure out everything all at once, before I publish. And even to try to figure out everything in my head, without pencil and paper.

Whatever man does he must do first in his mind.

We havent really paid much attention to thought as a process. we have engaged in thoughts, but we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process.

I always like to think on a problem before reading about it.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.

Comprehension follows perception.

Whatever one believes to be true either is true or becomes true in one's mind.

Sometimes we become what we see. Sometimes we take what we see and make it the model for what we refuse to become.

We try to organize the world, which isn't organized the way our brains want to organize it. We tell stories about the people in our lives, we project ideas onto them. We project relationships with people, we make our lives into stories. I don't think we can avoid doing that.

Reality doesn't bite, rather our perception of reality bites.

We mostly feel fearful because we feel powerless. We feel powerless, I contend, because of a style of thinking that splits information in two poles that makes us lose all the operative information we need to solve the problem.

The Idea enters the brain from the outside. It rearranges the furniture to make it more to its liking. It finds other Ideas already in residence, and picks fights or forms alliances. The alliances build new structures, to defend themselves against intruders.

Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.

Visualization is daydreaming with a purpose.