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Ask HN: How to Learn 'To Think'?

61 points cannnot_think | 1 comments | 22 Oct 24 00:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | source

I am writing this desperate to find out what to do. Most of my life, I have been 'listening' passively, without thinking. I don't have an internal monologue. I had a neuropsych evaluation which commented on my poor memory and inability to think.

How do I learn how 'to think'? How do I learn to create an internal dialogue to comment on my surroundings and tasks?

I am hoping for a book recommendation, or maybe a blog post. I've heard that Ulysses is a stream-of-consciousness book, but I have not checked it out.

I would hope that books help - but I have read a lot of books and still don't think. I am hoping for a tutorial or something to practice.

1. blueyes ◴[22 Oct 24 05:34 UTC] No.41911480[source]▶
You should start by caring about something so much that you want to both understand it and affect it somehow. When you begin to piece together the system, a model of what you care about, and can begin to imagine how moving one piece will affect another, then you'll be thinking.

I think your question, in and of itself, is a language trap. It's too abstract, and abstractions often fail to motivate. I fell into the same language trap in college. I thought that some wizard teaching philosophy behind the curtain would teach me how to think. But you won't find the secret to thought in the symbols of the analytic philosophers, nor in the cogitations of the continentals.

Roland Barthes once said "Je ne pense qu'aimant," which translates roughly as "I cannot think except by loving." And he didn't mean that love itself was thought, but just that it was only fascination with a subject that drove him to think about it.

I think you should get out of your head, connect to the world, begin to care about some part of it, and let that lead you toward some subject-specific form of thought:

More on same here: https://open.substack.com/pub/vonnik/p/a-few-ideas-that-made...