spatial manipulation

Funny thing we should be reading about anagrams.

The ability to rearrange mental objects is important for us. Is this a core part of our ability to problem solve? This topic is somewhat familiar to me in regards to computer science. I tend to draw, when confronted with some arbitrary project assignment, lots of directed graphs to illustrate the interrelationships of different modules. This, of course, goes hand in hand with manipulating them mentally. Drawing them in a procedural way helps simplify and perhaps impose some order on the mental juggling. (I probably don’t realize now exactly how many little example trees I scribbled in my notebook when I had to write my first B-Tree.) Sometimes it can be revealing if two people share their own directed graphs; the differences in perspective can help solve or convey the solution to the problem.

In any case, maybe this goes back to the conceptual spheres from last time. Why does visualizing things in some spatial sense help us understand relations? Words have a simple spatial component. Then there are path-finding problems which obviously rely on spatial skills. We seem to encounter this problem all the time and we manage to solve it reflexively in most cases. This is a bit removed from how Hofstadter described the tossing up and rearrangement of letters though. The striking point with that idea is that it comes to us so naturally. So naturally its overlooked most of the time. Its just not one of those things you usually think about and its hard to catch in the first place if you’re not looking for it.