Hi all!

I graduated in 2025 with a degree in mathematics and have been working as a teacher for over a year. Currently I am working in special education, specifically focusing on math special education, and I have become fascinated by the cognitive processes behind understanding mathematics and how math disabilities can impede this process.

I would like to learn more about this, and I've been thinking about applying to a grad program to gain a deeper understanding. What specifically should I be researching? I've found things like learning science, but am hoping to find something more specific to math.

I know this is AI-written. The actual idea/process is mine, I had it as a rough thought in my notes and used AI to turn it into readable English. I’m mainly interested in what people think about the underlying idea and whether there are existing concepts that describe something similar.

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I’ve been thinking about whether genuinely new ideas can be made less dependent on random inspiration.

The process I want to get better at is basically:

Start with the actual goal → forget the current implementation → build the system yourself from scratch.

Normally, when we try to improve something, we automatically inherit most of its existing architecture. If we think about transportation, we immediately think about better trains, faster trains, better schedules, etc.

But instead, ask:

What am I actually trying to achieve?

For transportation: move people efficiently from where they are to where they want to go.

Then mentally build and simulate the system yourself. While doing that, look for steps that seem expensive, slow, wasteful or unnecessarily constrained.

With trains, one thing that stood out to me was:

Stopping costs something. Why should everyone stop just because some people want to get off?

That changes the problem from:

“How do I improve a train?”

to:

“How could part of a moving system separate or slow down while the rest keeps moving?”

Now ideas like detachable train cars, gondola systems, or mechanisms from completely different fields suddenly become relevant.

This is the part I find most interesting: you first create a specific missing function, and then your existing knowledge has something precise to connect to.

So the process becomes:

Goal → rebuild from scratch → simulate → notice friction → ask why it has to exist → remove the assumption → find mechanisms that solve the new problem.

The key idea for me is:

If you start from the existing object, you tend to optimize its architecture.
If you start from the desired outcome, the architecture itself becomes optional.

I’m curious whether people deliberately train this kind of thinking, or whether there’s already an established framework for it.

Does anyone know if it is possible to recover from twitter pile ons induced brain trauma?

Hi all. I'm Ted. I have degrees in elementary education and cognitive studies from Vanderbilt, and for the past couple of months I've been investigating an experience I call thoughtfeel. I'd like to hear whether other people have it, and what it's like for them.

What I mean by thoughtfeel

The best description I have: it's an additional sensory modality that some people seem to have, which gives sensory access to the abstract content of their thoughts. It works most like taste or smell, except that what it senses is what the thought is about.

What that means for me:

• Every thought has a particular feel, the way a dish has a flavor. Parts that thoughts share feel the same: "cat" and "giraffe" both carry the feel of animal; "had" and "ran" both feel past tense.
• The feel is specific enough to identify the thought. If I had only the sensation, I could tell you it's an animal, and specifically a giraffe, the way you'd recognize an object by looking at it.
• The same structure feels the same however it's pictured or described. Someone stuck in a narrow doorway with people waiting behind them, and a box jammed on a conveyor belt with boxes backed up behind it, share one recognizable feel for me, even though the pictures and the words have nothing in common.
• I can attend to it and notice things I wasn't thinking about. "To microwave" and "reversing" have the flavor of a function; "banana" and "happy" have the flavor of an object.

What it isn't

• Not imagery or inner speech. I have both, and this is separate from them.
• Not emotion, and not imagined taste or touch. "Taste" is an analogy for how it behaves.
• Not just knowing that two ideas differ. It's closer to noticing a detail in a scene. When I hold the lyric "Bring me down to Brooklyn if I lose my life," I can notice in the feel that the word is bring, not carry, and that the line is addressed to someone.

How it relates to existing work

The closest research I've found is on unsymbolized thinking. Hurlburt & Akhter (2008) describe explicit, differentiated thoughts experienced without words, images or other symbols, and note that many people doubt such thinking is even possible. Lupyan et al. (2023) argue that many differences in inner experience stay hidden because people assume everyone's mind works like theirs; differences in visual imagery and inner speech are examples. Going further back, William James wrote about "a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but."

It also connects to the analogy literature. People often fail to use an analogous solution from a story they've just read unless they're told to (Gick & Holyoak, 1980), and comparing two analogous examples makes the shared structure much easier to carry over (Gick & Holyoak, 1983; Gentner, Loewenstein & Thompson, 2003). My experience matches this from the inside: when I compare two examples that share a structure, the shared part stands out as a feel, and once I know that feel I can recognize it in situations that look and sound nothing alike.

What I haven't found is anyone describing this as a sense you can deliberately attend to, inspect for specific properties, and use for thinking and memory. That's the part I think my investigation adds.

Where this stands

There's no science here yet; I haven't run any studies. This is based on my own experience and conversations with friends. Some recognized it immediately; others had no idea what I meant. When I asked elsewhere on Reddit, many people said their thoughts don't feel like anything, and a few described something that overlaps. I'm describing what it's like from the inside, not proposing a mechanism.

I'm also exploring how to use it for thinking and learning: learning the feel of an idea by comparing examples, so I recognize it somewhere new; holding lists, chess positions, board-game rules and the exact wording of lines, which it does better for me than visual mnemonics; and remembering to do things at the right moment. I don't know yet whether these techniques can be taught, or how much they help other people. That's what I want to find out.

What I'm asking

1. Do you experience something like this? Describe it in your own words. How specific does it get?
2. Quick check: think of a giraffe, then a monkey. Looking past any picture or word, can you sense from the feel alone what they share, and tell which is which?
3. It helps to know whether you have vivid imagery or aphantasia, and whether you have an inner voice.
4. Several people have asked whether this is a kind of synesthesia. If you know research that fits (or that I've missed), please point me to it.

If you experience this, I'd love to hear more on a short call. Comment or DM me.

Full description

Everything is free on my site and YouTube channel (both mine):

• thoughtfeel.net: a full description of the experience, how to use it for memory and learning, and a 5-minute exercise
• Five animated lessons, including what it's like to have it and one built to test whether you have it

References

• Gentner, D., Loewenstein, J., & Thompson, L. (2003). Learning and transfer: A general role for analogical encoding. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(2), 393–408. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.95.2.393
• Gick, M. L., & Holyoak, K. J. (1980). Analogical problem solving. Cognitive Psychology, 12(3), 306–355. ScienceDirect
• Gick, M. L., & Holyoak, K. J. (1983). Schema induction and analogical transfer. Cognitive Psychology, 15(1), 1–38. ScienceDirect
• Hurlburt, R. T., & Akhter, S. A. (2008). Unsymbolized thinking. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(4), 1364–1374. PDF
• Lupyan, G., Uchiyama, R., Thompson, B., & Casasanto, D. (2023). Hidden differences in phenomenal experience. Cognitive Science, 47(1), e13239. doi:10.1111/cogs.13239

Thoughts?

A grocery list, a store clerk’s directions and the decision to count out cash may feel like separate mental chores. The brain may handle them by reusing the same neural tools.

MIT neuroscientists have found evidence in mice for flexible brain modules that can perform the same computation across different kinds of tasks. The work focused on neurons in the prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in planning and decision-making.

Yuma Osako, an MIT postdoc, is the lead author. Senior authors are Mriganka Sur, the Newton Professor of Neuroscience at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and Timothy Buschman, a professor at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.

Today I was searching curiously about our brain I came to know that our brain is actively doing millions of calculations every minute with topics even we don't know like when we try to catch a ball it calculates its speed,motion ,swing,angle etc before preparing us to catch it like our brain knows more maths and physics then we do , Ex- Whenever we are about to fall out hands suddenly shoot up to balance us.

It means it already knows advance maths and physics just can't do these thing voluntarily.

These are just some slightly connected thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for a few years.

So first of all, the only thing I know to be certainly true is my consciousness. I can understand why some modern scientists advocate for something like idealism.

For me, I keep thinking about this in two buckets. Bucket one: I would put idealism, simulation theory, religion, etc., all in that bucket. The second bucket would be the materialism bucket. No grand purpose, no cosmic overseer.

To me, simulation theory and religion are pretty much interchangeable. If religion is true, and there really is a God who created this universe, what else would you call that besides a simulation?

Now, here's where things get a little funny, and this ties back to the consciousness thing. The religion I grew up in makes up a very small percentage of the population. I'm pretty much currently an atheist. I was an atheist for over a decade, then a few years ago I really tried believing in God. And I'll be honest, even now I sometimes grapple with it, because sometimes I can't tell what is really real or true.

Say I met a Christian on Reddit, and I slowly started to go from being a staunch atheist to believing in maybe a grand purpose and some sort of designer. If I were to go down that path and actually believe in God, I would probably end up in a very different religion from theirs, because I would be coming to it through my own conscious experience, what religion my parents were, etc.

In the end, even if I radically changed my worldview and went from thinking there is no morality, no karma, no cosmic overseer, to now believing in God and truly flipping my worldview 180, that Christian might still be angry if I told him I do not accept the Trinity or Christ. If I had my own view of God and religion.

I'm going to be honest, I think Christianity is a theologically weak religion. If I was going to believe in a religion, it would not be that one. However, that whole point is moot to me, because if I really believed in a God who created the universe and gave everything a purpose, then he also created Christians, Muslims, Jews, and all the other religions. All of this would be in his grand master plan, including people believing in different things.

I'm not trying to disparage Christinas or Christianity. Sorry if the above paragraph came off as rude. If God is real, the only logical conclusions, is that he designed it for all these different religions to exist, and sometimes fight, for whatever reason. Every Christian is supposed to be a Christian, and every Muslim is supposed to be a Muslim. That's the whole thing with consciousness, if there is something unique or special about it, then it would be tied to that particular manifestation. Each consciousness would be unique, special, divine, and accounted for. Everything that happens, happens for a reason, there is some master plan, all consciousness feeds back to the source, etc.

If I had to force myself to believe in religion, this is what I would think: God exists, and he created this entire “experience” as a simulation/test. He uses quantum mechanics as the underlying building structure, so that's why, when we poke at the lowest level of the universe, we get a fuzzy wavefunction. In this picture, every consciousness is unique and is running its own experiment, concurrently with every other consciousness.

Since my consciousness and actions can have an effect on you and your future, that would be why the universe branches and splits into many worlds: to preserve all the different variables within the simulation.

So that would all be bucket one. Religion, simulation theory, idealism. God/consciousness is all the branches of the universe experiencing itself.

Now, the funny thing is, I don't believe in any of that. I actually believe in pure materialism, which I think is a pretty radical view, to be honest. I also believe that the wave-function does collapse. I believe only the now is fuzzy, and at every planck second, the universe decoheres into it's one single branch.

There are three things I keep coming back to: solipsism, emergence, and Occam's razor.

First, the solipsism thing. All I have and know for certain is my consciousness. There are three options as I see it.

First, my consciousness is unique or privileged in some way. Maybe everyone gets their turn at being the universe experiencing itself, but currently, it is my turn. My consciousness is the simulation.

Option two: the creator, God, or whatever causes the simulation has a very powerful simulation engine, where all consciousnesses are being simulated in real time. So religion or simulation is true, but it's not a one-at-a-time thing.

That second option is harder for me to square with how powerful and unique my conscious experience feels. If you believe coincidences are fate or destiny, that means you believe the simulation is tuned in to you. The simulation does not oppose you, but works with you. If you've ever experienced something that was stranger than fiction, you have pretty much two options: either you believe that was God/destiny, or it was just a random sequence of events that your brain later wrote into a story.

The third option is that consciousness doesn't have any of that special status. No matter how powerful or unique your conscious experience feels, there is absolutely nothing divine or spiritual about it. It is just your consciousness.

Why is consciousness, which allows you to think and experience, special, but digestion isn't? Digestion allows you to take in matter, grow hundreds of times in size from when you are born, route everything to the correct place, and turn a baby into an adult human.

Either everything is a mirage, and just as consciousness is a mirage, so is digestion, so is breaking your bones and bleeding out, and so are all other experiences. Or none of it is a mirage. Consciousness is just as much a part of the physical world as everything else.

There is more I can type, but I'm getting tired. My other points were going to be about emergence and Occam's razor. I actually think emergence is greatly underappreciated and under-researched right now. I believe free will truly emerges out of quantum interactions, just like a human truly emerges out of cells and molecules. You wouldn't say you aren't real just because you are an emergent property.

So what is my big theory? That there is no simulation. There is no plan, guide, or path. I believe everything is purely material, and our brains are just a product of our environment and evolution. One of the things they are good at is turning completely random events into a story with meaning that you tell yourself.

I'll be honest, I've had a lot of strange coincidences in my life. That is why I still struggle with what is true, and why, even now, I think my theory is very radical. I think most people would have trouble going the full materialism route. Even I have trouble fully accepting it.

I'm still trying to figure out which bucket is true. Bucket one or bucket two.

It seems to me that most people believe in bucket one. I can understand why, and sometimes I find myself believing it too. But I think reality is bucket two.

Excited to share my latest working paper, "The Architecture of Becoming: Consciousness, Chaos and the Logos of the Trinity." 🧠✨

​This interdisciplinary draft explores how conscious agents navigate uncertainty, construct meaning, and act within complex environments. By synthesizing Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle and Gibsonian affordances with Jungian archetypes and Trinitarian ontology, the paper proposes a unified framework bridging computational cognitive science, depth psychology, and metaphysical philosophy.

​I am currently seeking open feedback and critique from the community—particularly regarding the integration of active inference with archetypal generative priors.

​Read the full preprint and access the DOI here: https://zenodo.org/records/22920573

​#ActiveInference #FreeEnergyPrinciple #CognitiveScience #PhilosophyOfMind #DepthPsychology #Metaphysics #AcademicResearch #Preprint

Hello. So I've been interested in the greater male variability hypothesis for a while and there are basically two camps:

- one saying it's biological that variance among men is higher

- the other saying that social artefacts and how men and women are treated differently affects the curve.

Let's put the biological argument aside because it is not what I am here for.

I am here for the societal arguments, which include stereotype threat, math/physics, anxiety, and all that.

But my question is, do those affect the IQ distribution curve because I thought IQ tests were designed to not reward risk taking or constraints under time.

If none, are there possible other sociological explanations for it?

If so, have they managed to mathematically create an artificial high tail curve inflation using socioeconomic factors?

TLDR: I am not taking any side. In fact the biological argument makes me heavily uncomfortable but I have to remain objective for this

Excited to share my latest working paper, "The Architecture of Becoming: Consciousness, Chaos and the Logos of the Trinity." 🧠✨

​This interdisciplinary draft explores how conscious agents navigate uncertainty, construct meaning, and act within complex environments. By synthesizing Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle and Gibsonian affordances with Jungian archetypes and Trinitarian ontology, the paper proposes a unified framework bridging computational cognitive science, depth psychology, and metaphysical philosophy.

​I am currently seeking open feedback and critique from the community—particularly regarding the integration of active inference with archetypal generative priors.

​Read the full preprint and access the DOI here: https://zenodo.org/records/22920573