[asgraham]

Really cool dataset! Love seeing people actually doing the hard work of generating data rather than just trying to analyze what exists (I say this as someone who’s gone out of his way to avoid data collection).

Have you played at all with thought-to-voice? Intuitively I’d think EEG readout would be more reliable for spoken rather than typed words, especially if you’re not controlling for keyboard fluency.

[clemvonstengel]

Yeah we do both text and voice (roughly 70% of data collection is typed, 30% spoken). Partly this is to make sure the model is learning to decode semantic intent (rather than just planned motor movements). Right now, it's doing better on the typed part, but I expect that's just because we have more data of that kind.

It does generalize between typed and spoken, i.e. it does much better on spoken decoding if we've also trained on the typing data, which is what we were hoping to see.

[Terretta]

> we do both text and voice (roughly 70% of data collection is typed, 30% spoken). Partly this is to make sure the model is learning to decode semantic intent (rather than just planned motor movements)

Both of these modes are incredibly slow thinking. Conciously shifting from thinking in concepts to thinking in words is like slamming on brakes for a school zone on an autobahn.

I've gathered most people think in words they can "hear in their head", most people can "picture a red triangle" and literally see one, and so on. Many folks who are multi-lingual say they think in a language, or dream in that language, and know which one it is.

Meanwhile, some people think less verbally or less visually, perhaps not verbally or visually at all, and there is no language (words).

A blog post shared here last month discussed a person trying to access this conceptual mode, which he thinks is like "shower thoughts" or physicists solving things in their heads while staring into space, except "under executive function". He described most of his thoughts as words he can hear in his head, with these concepts more like vectors. I agree with that characterization.

I'm curious what % of folks you've scanned may be in this non-word mode, or if the text and voice requirement forces everyone into words.

[clemvonstengel]

I agree that thinking in words is much slower than thinking in concepts would be -- that's the point of training models like this, so that ideally people can always just think in concepts. That said, we do need to get some kind of ground truth of what they're thinking in order to train the model, so we do need them to communicate that (in words).

One thing that's particularly exciting here is that the model often gets the high-level idea correct, without getting any words correct (as in some of the examples above), which suggests that it is picking up the idea rather than the particular words.

[Terretta]

> ideally people can always just think in concepts

Are you pursing an idea of how to help people like this author* access this mode that some of us are always in unless kicked out of it by the need for words?

Very needed right now — the opposite of the YouTube-ization of idea transfer.

It doesn't seem clear this is accessible without other changes in wiring? The inability to "picture" things as visuals seems to swap out for "conceptualizing" things in -- well, I don't have words for this.

An attempt from that essay:

This is not what Hadamard is talking about when he describes the wordless thought of the mathematicians and researchers he has surveyed. Instead, what they seem to be doing is something similar to this subconscious, parallelized search, except they do it in a “tensely” focused way.

The impression I get is that Hadamard loads a question into his mind (either in a non-verbal way, or by reading a mathematical problem that has been written by himself or someone else), and then he holds the problem effortfully centered in his mind. Effortfully, but wordlessly, and without clear visualizations. Describing the mental image that filled his mind while working on a problem concerning infinite series for his thesis, Hadamard writes that his mind was occupied by an image of a ribbon which was thicker in certain places (corresponding to possibly important terms). He also saw something that looked like equations, but as if seen from a distance, without glasses on: he was unable to make out what they said.

I’m not sure what is going on here.

* https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/wordless-thought

A couple of this author's speculations aren't how I'd say it works when this is one's default mode, but most are in the neighborhood. He comes the closest of what I've read by people who do think the way the author thinks — which seems to be most people.

[asgraham]

Interesting! I imagine speech-related motor artifacts don't help matters either, even if noise starts mattering less at scale.

[n7ck]

Yeah -- we have the participants use chinrests as well, which reduces head motion artifacts for typing but less so for speaking (because they have to move their heads for that of course). so a lot of the data is with them keeping their heads quite still, although the model is becoming much more robust to this over time.