"Percepts and concepts interpenetrate and melt together, impregnate and fertilize each other. Neither, taken alone, knows reality in its completeness. We need them both, as we need both our legs to walk with." -- William James
Thinking out loud is the act of expressing in recoverable and external form new thoughts which you encourage your mind into exploring. Often these lead to new avenues of thought. When you think out loud you detect and explore ideas and concepts which are either unknown, or as yet unexplored. This exercise can be the first step in moving from a mental doldrums into new paths of exploration.
Thinking Out Loud can be a valuable exercise in several ways:
By doing so, one can share the results of the learning of a lifetime with others, and in Thinking Out Loud, thoughts become available for another who may gain something, share an insight, improve and better themselves, and in the process make the world somewhat better as a result.
Thoughts are not like apples, if you give them all away, you have nothing, it is more like making a PhotoCopy, or singing or performing before an audience.
In sharing you become personally enriched, especially if your thought are received and result in improvements to yours and others mental processes.
In doing so the world may indeed discover a new PerformingArt called Thinking Out Loud.
It can be a way of keeping up with the rapidly changing world of computing, by creating Pages with a Meaningful Name which captures what the new technology or wave of interest is about. Later you can come back and flesh out the page with information that Fills In The Blanks.
Thinking Out Loud can be a fearful experience:
When you are Thinking Out Loud you expose vulnerabilities and a measure of your intelligence, knowledge and something of the processes of your mind. You may not want to do this.
You may wish to project an image which portrays you as authoritative, secure, knowledgeable and certain. Thinking Out Loud is not the best avenue to do this.
Others may criticize and make light of your thoughts and if you think of criticism as tearing down, it may be devestating to be found Thinking Out Loud. If on the other hand you see Critics Are Your Best Friends, you may find that your thinking is improved by realizing that Critics have chosen to be found Thinking Out Loud with you.
Thinking Out Loud should be used carefully on this site.
Your thoughts should be those with which the Wiki Readers and potential collaborators on this site can relate to and should include some framework for others participation.
Thinking Out Loud a means of making your thoughts, as expressions, Open Ideas
When thinking in this manner, in an open forum, and when your ideas contains new paradigms, it is a voluntary exercise, and may make the general intent of those ideas a donation of your thinking as Ideas, open, to be freely picked up, and used by anyone! See: Is It Really New
About the qualitative difference between thinking and speaking (acting out)
Imagine your consciousness to be a Sand Box. That level of mind in which your perceptions arrive and your imaginations are staged, this mental arena where mostly everything appear to happen in front of your mental eye. There ego rules like a child in a sandbox and makes all kind of experiments.
Imagine your unconscious mind to be the next higher level of mind in terms of subtlety. That part is difficult to see and comparatively vast, like the part of the iceberg which is under water. It is the bigger part of you, the mightier one. All attempts of conscious mind to fight unconscious mind are bound to fail. This part does a hell of Back Ground Tasks for you and watches your little ego while playing in the sandbox.
Now, when You just play in your mind, just think but not act, your unconscious mind sees all that, remembers that, but does not take it seriously. Only when you start to act out, when you speak up, move your body, gesticulate, write down, do any Real World activity, then only your unconscious mind takes it seriously and does not any more take it as only play. Than your unconscious mind starts to actively support your intentions.
You may have thought a hundred time to start doing something, but nothing happened. After You spoke up and said: "I decided that I will really do it now!" From then onwards it will start to happen also in the real world beyond the place of your ideas and dreams.
Whenever you ask yourself why certain 'decision' of yours does not find expression in the physical world, than just look into the mirror and speak to yourself and tell yourself to finally do it. But also be aware of what kind of feelings might arise in you at that time! There may be warning signs which ought to tell you, that there is a problem with your decision, that you got to reconsider it. Because in the moment of speaking up, your unconscious mind may support you in a way of having an argument with your ego, which it did not express as long as you where just playing with that thought. --Manorainjan Holzapfel
See
See original on c2.com 