Why wont my brain work in "that" way?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So this morning I get to work, and a co-worker asks me for some help on a issue. She was trying to find a quick way to transfer data from a 3270 emulator to a server, format it, and email an okay.

Now, its not my job to do these things, but I am, at least I think so, an advanced programmer type. I know multiple languages from mid-range (VB, C++ etc…) to mainframe (SAR, JCL…etc). So I begin to look into the problem, and after a few hours I have a nifty little program done using the native emulator language to run a JCL job, and kick off a little VB program. Viola! Works great, she’s happy, I feel smart :slight_smile:

So I take a minute and head over to Great Debates and reading a thread I come across a reference to the Higgs Boson, and now I am feeling a hell of lot less smart.

I just dont understand how the mind works. I’m not an idiot…really…but when I start reading about Physics, Astronomy, and like disciplines, I truly feel like a dunce. How can I sit down and program without cracking a book, and yet I fail to grasp even what I would consider some fundamental basics of Physics?

What is it in my mind that doesn’t work, but say Sentient Meat’s mind (who provided the link the original thread), does work? Is it just as simple as a neuron firing in his brain that’s not in mine? Intelligence is Intelligence…right? How are we (in the royal sense…not just him and me) so different?

I read a “Brief History of Time”, and by page 30, I was lost. I read this and I am all “yayay…I got it”. Argg!

2

I have nothing constructive to add except to say that it warms the cockles of my heart to know that there are still people out there who use a 3270 emulator and can code JCL.

My cockles are warmed all over they are… :smiley:

3

Intelligence is not all the same. Here’s a site with seven types of intelligence though I’ve also seen it broken up into more categories or different ones. I am really linguistically oriented, have written 1.75 novels and a slew of short stories, yet can’t add two two-digit numbers in my head without a calculator. OTOH I’ve known a lot of techy computer people who can write up a killer webpage (whereas I can barely grok Geocities) but cannot write a clear email for the life of them; I know because I have to proofread their papers sometimes. Our IQs may be the exact same (not that I believe in IQ tests), it’s just that our different strengths and weaknesses balance out to an average mean. I’m sure it has something to do with different parts of the brain firing differently and/or (most likely and) life experiences that pushed us down different paths, but it doesn’t mean any deficiency on either one of our parts. That’s why I don’t like standard IQ tests at all; there are many different strengths and IQ tests focus on only three main types of intelligence (mathematical, spatial, and linguistic) while totally ignoring others, and lumping all the intelligence types together, leading to the conclusion that a child with an IQ of 150 must be a Rain Man-type math genius. Not so.

The true jack-of-all-trades intelligent person is probably very rare and working in some kind of secret government compound building a weapon to destroy us all and writing an eloquent instruction manual for it. While composing a symphony.

4

Nice to know I warmed a cockle today :slight_smile:

Nice link dave, thanks for that. I understand we obviously all think different, I just dont get the whys of it all. I mean, take my brain and your brain and put them on a table, and it all looks the same! We both read and write in the same language (at least here) So whats the deal?

Stupid evolution…

5

I can code JCL. And Easytrieve Plus. :smiley:

6

I notice I don’t have exactly the same physical native talents as you do either. Despite the fact that we have basically the same plan for human bodies. I can put my knuckles on the ground when touching my toes; I can’t run a six-minute mile to save my life. Yet we both have bodies that look the same! (To an alien from Mars. Trust me, your brain and my brain don’t look exactly the same. Especially if you “look” molecularly.)

I think we are each made up of a whole lot of variants on which evolution can work. My blood sugar plummets faster than yours between meals; I’m more efficiently reminded to seek food when food is scarce, hence more likely to survive; more likely to get fat when food is plentiful, hence less likely to survive. Why shouldn’t you and I each have little variants in our intelligence that might come out as a survival advantage under certain stresses?

Survival and reproduction advantage. Damn, I forgot about the reproduction.

Stupid evolution.

7

It’s also a matter of training. You have had a lot of training to think one field. The people who sit around thinking about Higgs bosons all day have had a lot of rather different training. Training isn’t just learning stuff, it’s also learning how to think about stuff.

An obvious place to see this is to consider the difference between Introductory Physics (real, honest-to-Og, calc-based physics-for-majors) and Physics 101. In Physics 101, the goal is basically to cram a samll amount of knowledge of physics (e.g. what is an electron, what does a ballistic trajectory look like, etc.) into the students’ brains, improve their algebra skills, expand their general problem-solving skills a smidge (usually through turn-the-crank techniques), and talk a bit about how science works. The basic goal of students is survive, memorize, and regurgitate–in other words, aquire knowledge. Intro Physics, though, is a whole ‘nother beast. The goal there is to instill an intuitive grasp of vectors and vector calculus (a big chunk of which is three-dimensional visualization skills), to teach creative problem-solving skills, and to build a solid understanding of the principles of classical physics. The students’ goal is to learn how to think about physics.[sup]*[/sup]

Then they take E&M. And QM. And Stat. Mech. And lab. (Lots and lots of frickin’ lab.) All of these courses are to some degree about aquiring knowledge, but are much, much more about learning how to think about physics problems.

Then, they go to graduate schoool. (In high-energy physics, if they want to understand Higgs bosons.)

There’s no reason to think that you, as a relatively smart person, couldn’t comprehend the Higgs boson if you went through the same training. You may run up against actual limits on the different sorts of intelligence that davenportavenger talks about, but you’re more likely to run out of motivation before your run out of brains. It takes an almost pathological dedication to the subject to actually hack all the training–no matter how smart you are. (IMHO, some people are too smart for physics, and decide the the grinding academic process, the minute sub-specialization, and the disproportinatly small pay check are inferior to having an actual life. :wink: )
[sup]*[/sup]There’s currently a movement in physics education to make the goals of Physics 101 more similar to the goals of Intro Physics, because you’d like even non-physicists to learn some of the higher visualization and problem-solving skills, but it’s really a constant struggle, because the students aren’t interested in learning to think about physics, and, given the chance, will almost always take the path of least resistance (i.e. memorizing steps to solve problems rather than thinking about the physics.)

8

Hey me too!

And Cobol, and REXX, and CLIST, and a whole bunch of other mainframe stuff…

But I miss JCL the most.

I guess we’re dinosaurs, eh?! :smiley:

9

I downloaded my Easytrieves – complete with JCL – before I was laid off. Geeky? Or planning ahead in case anyone happens to need someone with such arcane skills?

10

I dunno, but it bugs me, too. My neighbor and I were talking about this yesterday. I cannot think algebraically. Someone here wanted to plan out a veggie garden and wanted to avoid any shade from their house. All kinds of people posted about different formulas etc to use–I would have planted a lawn chair out back and just watched the sun for a few days.
But, I am a killer at estimation and approximation, and read a lot. That’s enough for me!
:slight_smile:

11

hahahaha…thank you for that! I think I found my long lost brother/sister!

12

Um…check out my user name. I’m a girl, dude. :dubious:
You are slow, aren’tcha? Are you right in the head?

:smiley:
(seriously, watching the sun for a few days makes the most sense, no? And it’s the easiest way to figure it out.)

13

I am reminded of a time when some friends of mine and I tried to give a drunk directions.

It was close to 1 a.m. at an AM/PM. The guy who worked graveyards there, John, was a friend of ours, and we sometimes hung out there after work to shoot the breeze a little.

In walks a tipsy man with an olive drab Army greatcoat and a bristling red beard and long unkempt red hair. “Where’s O’Blarney’s pub?”

My first reaction to him was to give directions relative to a landmark. “It’s next to Lacey Cinemas.”

He didn’t know where that was. He wasn’t a big movie-seeing guy.

My friend Joe gave him mathematical directions. “Three stop lights down that way and turn right.”

Evidently this was not the answer the guy wanted (and I was still wondering how he could count stoplights in his head so fast when the guy answered).

Another friend, Jeff, gave directions as a pin-point on a coordinate system. “It’s at the intersection of Martin Way and College.”

The guy didn’t know the roads very well.

John finally says, “Hey, you remember that big pile of dirt where they’re tearing up the gas station?”

Oh yeah! Now the guy knew where it was.

How could we have been so foolish? It was next to the big pile of dirt.

Everybody’s minds work differently, I guess.

14

Personally I think our brains can work in any way we want. It’s just that they tend to favor certain ways. Kind of like how we favor one hand. It’s like drawing. I don’t draw much anymore but I used to be pretty good. I can still sketch something out much better than most people can. A lot of it is just practice and study though. Understanding perspective and color and how light interacts with objects. One day something clicks in your head and you figure out how to draw a cow. Calculus was also like that. Some people just get math right away. I couldn’t figure jack shit out until one day I just could.

15

You’re not. I presume you did a CS degree? Did you take any courses in, for example, computability/intractability? A typical physicist will be stumped by lots of the concepts in that area just as you are with the Higg’s boson.

Familiarity is the key.

Another example is programming itself. To someone not well versed in programming, an expert programmer looks like some sort of genius, able to pull constructs and keywords out of thin air whilst also keeping track of the overall structure of the program whilst the novice is still reading through each line trying to find the missing semicolon. Once you become more familiar with the notion of programming and become more experienced in writing programs, what was once hard seems easy. My flatmate is a geophysicist student. He didn’t shut up about the program he wrote in FORTRAN that printed “hello world” to the screen for weeks.