Wow! Is this a hidden science that we missed to research as a society? Understanding these elementary pieces of thinking seems to me to be a science probably hugely important for AI research and tons of socially relevant questions. Anyone know of scientific papers on this? A catalogue of human ways of thinking, experiments to prove them, analysis of their impact on daily life or career etc..?
> Is this a hidden science that we missed to research as a society?
Yeah, it's called Neurolinguistic Programming, and it's not quite a science yet. (E.g. the Wikipedia entry just straight-up calls it pseudo-science.)
In brief, it started with linguistic analysis of transcripts of videos of therapy session with some very talented and successful therapists. (The analysis was informed by the same Transformational Grammar of Chomsky that also informs formal language design.) It was noticed that some people tend to favor "preferred" sensory systems, and a model of subjective experience was developed that allowed for eliciting and encoding subjective processing "strategies". (E.g. most good spellers use visual memory to recall a picture of a word, and then check it kinesthetically for correctness ("it feels right"), and read it off from their minds' eye. Bad spellers typically do something else. Teach a bad speller the good "strategy" and they can suddenly spell well.)
That was nearly half a century ago.
"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." ~William Gibson
