Peter Chatterton Non-verbal Thinking

Non-Verbal Thinking and Decision-making

Here's an article about what I call Non-Verbal Thinking, or thinking without words. Everyone does this every day when dealing with familiar things, but I got interested in it during high school and over the years tried to develop it as much as possible. This article was an attempt to save other people the learning curve.

The Canadian branch of Mensa publishes a somewhat high-brow journal every month and I decided to write an article about NVT to see if I could get it published. The article as submitted in Microsoft Word '97 is below, followed by the proof. WARNING: This is not an academic article in an academic publication and should not be judged by those standards. It's a first person thing about what I've done and do frequently. The tone is a bit assertive, but since what I was talking about doesn't seem to be recognized, my choice seemed either to be very timid and constantly say this was only my experience or to go hog-wild and assume what I do extends to other people. Initially I had hoped to make it un-falsifiable by only reporting my own experiences, but I got carried away, although not to the point of reporting other than my own ideas. If I were to rewrite it, I would try a middle approach, but I've had only minimal response so I don't imagine I'll have anything more to do with popularizing NVT.

When to use NVT: Later! Day-to-day decisions are best made spontaneously and analysed later, when convenient. Most decisions aren't especially new and unique since your life isn't that much different from one day to the next. So when a decision is needed, instead of dithering about it, just do whatever seems right and think about it later (using NVT of course!); the odds are your sub-conscious will have popped up the right answer, but if not it probably doesn't matter anyway. If you really have an important decision to make you can usually say "I'll get back to you about that".

When to take action: Now! If something crosses your mind you should act on it right away, even if it's just taking a note. Most new ideas only make sense in their context, so when you move on to a different environment there's a good chance the idea will be lost.

Submission (winWord97.doc)

Proof (adobe acrobat.pdf)

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