Lately, I have been thinking, and I have been thinking about thinking. Fear not, there is no infinite regress nor Münchhausen trilemma, for I am not thinking about thinking about thinking ad infinitum, Rather, I am writing about both thinking and thinking about thinking.
Thinking is an increasingly difficult task in a world where a torrent of invasive stimuli, each tailored for maximum emotional and cognitive addiction, overwhelms one's sensorium. Even under the best of circumstances, cogitation – the focused concentration of an educated intellect – is an all-consuming endeavor. To become one with a set of ideas, to examine them from multiple perspectives, to explore their interrelationships, and to understand their implications, is neither a task for the fainthearted nor for those given to momentary reflection betwixt the churning froth of daily life. To think deeply, to appreciate subtlety, and to understand nuance requires uninterrupted time. By uninterrupted, I mean many contiguous hours, a luxury rarely vouchsafed unsought.
Cognitive psychologists have long studied cognitive load, the total effort used in the working memory. To think deeply about any topic, one must first fill one's memory with the relevant information. Because each of us has a finite working memory, each distraction or interruption consumes a portion of that memory, displacing previously internalized information. We need time to fill our working memories, and the more complex the intellectual endeavor, the larger the cognitive load. To create new insights can require weeks, months, and sometimes years of focused contemplation. To have something worth saying, one must first truly understand, having traced the complete graph of causal chains, the intellectual Feynman diagrams glowing softly in the dark of the still unknown.
Seeking a Metaphor
Despite use of such terms as working memory and interrupts, I am not suggesting humans are biological computers; that lure of ill-advised analogies and metaphors has ensnared too many unwary embracers. However, the analogy is not without relevance, even if only as a cautionary tale. On this, I speak from personal experience.
One morning many years ago, a computer science colleague remarked that I looked tired. I replied that I had slept poorly, consumed by a dream-cum-nightmare. I then elaborated, explaining that I had dreamed I was a hard disk under heavy load, exhausted from seeking in response to random requests. My colleague laughed and then nodded sagely, recognizing my suffering from the consequences of Little's Law, frequent interrupts, and a long work queue. Beyond irretrievably confirming me as a geek, I leave any Freudian interpretation of my dreamy incarnation as an active, though inanimate object as an exercise for the reader, noting only that my nighttime dream embodied my frustration with the day.
Quiet, I Need to Think
We all know the importance of time and reflection; our social commentary and behavior embody it. The phrases "I need some time to think," and "I will work on it tonight when I have quiet time," all capture an intuitive understanding of the need for cognitive loading.
In an age when too much discourse has the enduring substance of cotton candy, the opportunity to speak does not imbue one with the responsibility to do so. Quiet is a virtue with many facets, as the perils of pontificating pundits and instant political and social commentary illustrate. There is undeniable value in reflection before acting or opining, however learned, wise, and experienced one may be. (See Contemplative Reflection and Instantaneous Communication.)
One of the lions of early 20th century business, Thomas Watson, Sr. captured that ethos in IBM's simple motto, "THINK." In that same spirit, the corporate embrace of shared workspaces to stimulate collaboration and, collaterally, to reduce office space requirements, has been tempered by the realization that the increased interaction is not without cost, namely the displacement of critical working memory by office minutiae. The human guinea pigs in these corporate social experiments long ago recognized this intellectual tension, as demonstrated by the proliferation of office headphones to reduce extrinsic stimuli.
Personal Perspectives
For me, thinking deeply, whether creating complex software, writing extended documents, or pondering theorems, requires long hours to internalize relationships and dependencies. I need time to load my working memory, and free my mind from other concerns. Any distraction or interruption consumes precious time to recover, and the recompense for any discontinuity, however brief, can be ten-fold in lost time. Conversely, the rewards of cognitive continuity are emotionally extraordinary; it is an intellectual and emotional bliss sustainable until physiology demandingly intrudes and Morpheus takes me away. When truly engaged, I can work, fully immersed, for ten or more hours without pause.
I am not unique in my love of long form thinking, but all too often, even those who of us who treasure both the experience and its rewards, forget how daily life conspires to prevent it. We fritter time away in inconsequential tasks of no lasting value. Like most things of great worth, long form thinking requires commitment and dedication before its rewards are manifest in insight and in substantive and learned discourse.
Coda
As we grapple with the evolving and uncertain future of the American experiment, the stunning disavowal of fact-based argument, and the seeming repudiation of public higher education as a common good, the criticality of extended thinking – assiduously, diligently, cogently – has never been clearer.
Come now, let us reason together. Learned, shared insight is the true hierophany.
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