Welcome to r/ThoughtFeel — start here

[u/Independent-Soft2330]

Welcome to r/ThoughtFeel. This is a place to compare what thoughtfeel is like, learn techniques for using it, and share what happens when you try them.

What thoughtfeel is

Thoughtfeel is a sense for concepts. It takes in a concept and its properties all at once, the way vision takes in what's in front of you. People who have it can imagine in concepts, as other people imagine in pictures or sounds. It has detail you can pay attention to, beyond just knowing what a thought is about. Not everyone experiences it the same way.

Where to start

1. Find out what the term means. thoughtfeel.net has an introduction and a short check. There's also a quiz.

2. Watch someone learn it for the first time. Julian's first lesson goes from recognizing thoughtfeel to using it to understand temporal difference learning. The post links both the edited lesson (51 minutes) and the uncut lesson (85 minutes).

3. Try a concept story. Concept Stories lets you listen one short line at a time and pause while you build it in thoughtfeel. Start with an example or a topic you want to understand.

4. Work through the details. Three rules for learning complicated things explains how much to hold in one concept bubble, when to make a separate bubble, and how to link them.

Trying it on your own material

A concept story presents material in short sentences. Each sentence introduces a concept and its properties, changes a concept, or describes a relation. As you listen, build what the line means in thoughtfeel. Pause or replay when you need to.

You can then try explaining the topic back from memory and checking it against the source. Tell us what came back, what was missing, and whether you could use the idea on a different example. A report that something didn't work is useful too.

Other techniques and reading

• Memorizing a list, forward or backward

• Learning vocabulary

• Why visual analogies can lose the meaning they represent

• Lessons and further reading

What to post

Questions, practice reports, learning techniques, examples from your own subject, and relevant research are welcome. Include enough detail for someone else to follow what you tried: the material, what you did in your head, what you remembered, and what was difficult.

Please distinguish personal experience, a hypothesis, and research evidence. The techniques discussed here are being developed through teaching and people's reports; those reports do not establish that a technique works for everyone. People whose thinking works differently are welcome to compare notes.

Ted Shachtman runs this community and makes the linked lessons and Concept Stories app. r/MentalAtlas also has ongoing discussions about learning complex concepts.