Re: mental imaging

If by "visualize", you mean "see a picture of it in my head" - no, not really.

Like I *know* a cube can be made of 6 1" squares laid out in a "t" pattern; but even describing it here, it's not like I see a picture of that layout in my head (fuzzy or not). Actually, in the case of this "foldable template", it's almost more a series of instructions describing the lines. Not quite as blatant as what I've written below, but it's the best approximation I can put to paper:

LINE 1.1, 2.1, BOLD LINE 1.1, 1.2, BOLD LINE 2.1, 2.2, BOLD LINE 1.2, 2.2, DASH [...]

(Instructions -> "Cut on BOLD lines, fold on DASH...")

I've not yet had to worry about parasitic loads on a PCB .. but then again, I'm way down at DC out on the boards (eh, okay, 1 or 2 MHz on an SPI bus sometimes, but the RF engineers I know [jokingly] told me that's basically just DC anyway ;) )

It probably isn't a massive handicap to them unless they want to become a sculptor or an artist. They cannot visualise things or recall images.

I rely on my visual memory to figure some problems out and then write them down. I have known people who could solve serious mathematical problems without writing anything down at all - that is impressive.

Playing blindfold chess is another visual memory trick worthy of note.

Visual memory can also defeat some of the oft used simple tests for Alzheimers since one of them is apple, ball and chair - visualising that scene bypasses the memory paths that they are trying to test.

Depending how dark your environment you see thermal shot noise on the retina after a few hours in true total darkness. As in photographic manufacturing plant darkroom conditions or deep cave. It is darker in there than the darkest outdoors.

BTW Happy New Year

About 150 mg of dextromethorphan hydrobromide and in a few hours in a dark room you'll be seeing arcade game racecars zipping across the walls like Frogger, not a problem at all.

Not recommended. Good news is I never got into mescaline or any of that in my younger days.

Why would you have to close your eyes to 'visualize' something?

I think someone's confusing vision with activity in the brain.

RL

Some people close their eyes to better hear voices or music, or appreciate flavors or whatever. Or kiss.

Both need brain bandwidth.

In some university math departments, a professor's office has a couch where they can recline and close their eyes think about mathematics and get paid, too.

I have my best ideas while I'm asleep. 100% available brain bandwidth.

When do you get your best electronic design ideas?

When I've had a chance to relax (note - they're still *bad* by good long way ;) )

;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

It's the other way around; most of the better ideas get me by accident. You just have to notice them, when they occur.

. . . but walking the dog or riding the bike is a good start to the day.

RL

There's a standard "mental imagery vividness test":

Apparently there's a condition called "aphantasia" where the person is unable to visualize imagery in their "minds eye" and can only think in words. Purportedly more common among engineers though I'm unsure what if any disciplines are involved.

But total aphantasia is rare and it's a matter of degree, I expect people who are strongly phantasic might like fiction significantly more

- imagine being able to pick up a book and visualize its contents very strongly almost like you were watching a film. Sure save money on Netflix.

I'm not a big fiction fan, I was moreso as a kid. My test rates me somewhere in the middle, not sure if it's an ability that perhaps tends to decline with age and is strongest in children.

I took Western Civilization in college (graduated with a BSEE in 1969)

- the Professor was spellbinding, and his lectures were standing room only in the largest lecture hall on campus.

My Teaching Assistant for Western Civilization had started out in the EE department, and switched to History about half way through. Why?

He said that while he was passing all the academic courses with good grades, he had observed that his fellow EE students could "see" the electrons flowing, and so could jump directly to the solution.

But he could not see those electrons, and so had to analyze his way from first principles, which would be far too slow to be competitive in a real EE job.

So he switched majors. My reaction at the time was that he was exactly correct, and that switching was a very wise decision.

Joe Gwinn

The only thing more scary to a HS English teacher than a teenager who isn't into Shakespeare is one who's very big into it.

There's a better-than-average chance they're going to be a movie star and a better-than-average chance they'll end up a HS teacher and they'll probably remember you either way..

I think human designers may have some kind of elegance/consistency internal rulecheck independent of the internal electrical rulecheck; that "good" circuits tend to have a certain "look" about them, independent of their electrical validity. Our brain's ability to do electrical rulechecks at more than a cursory level is pretty poor.

In the larger-than-electrons-in-Universe state space there are many circuits appealing to the first rulecheck that are electrical nonsense and vice-versa, but it may be that the number of "ugly" but exceptional-performing circuits in that state space, that completely fail the first human test but pass the physics test with flying colors, greatly outnumbers the set of circuits that meets both checks.

However a human will have extreme difficulty finding them, the implied network analysis problem we're discussing is likely NP hard/complete so can't yet be brute-forced by machine, and AI often has trouble optimizing even known circuits, much less coming up with novel ones.

So even if I'm right I think the overwhelming majority of "beautiful scum"-type circuits are just lost to the curse of dimensionality.

I also grew up around white male Americans. and an important step in my professional development was ignoring the overwhelming majority of stories dudes tell like "I can see the electrons flowing" "I knew I wouldn't be competitive enough so I...", "Yeah Susan is totally into me, we banged the other night, bro" and all the fantastical stories dudes regularly tell, which even many children who still believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy would be straight-up too insightful to take particularly seriously.

I can see the current flowing on a schematic. But positive charges, not electrons.

Probably some non-white non-male people can too.

I think it's a skill that can be learned with practice like many others. and the main reason people stop doing things and get out of certain avenues of study is they just don't like doing them.

The whole "I knew I wouldn't be competitive"-thing sounds like a back-rationalization to me, "I got out of EE because I wasn't getting much out of it and I wasn't really motivated by the material" is much more common, but not as cute a story.

Young adults are fickle, I wanted to be in a big time rock band at age

1. Sounds dreadful to me now but the heart wants what the heart wants in the moment. I was into cognitive science for a while too but the department professors were uninspiring and the material annoyingly abstruse at least for me at 20.

Incidentally I think another reason people leave engineering tracks is that the quality of the didaction at anything but top-tier US universities tends to range from just okay to abysmal.

I think the human brain is a quantum computer that can evaluate the immense solution space in parallel, preferably when asleep.

One trick is to not pre-censor the space. Keep, literally, an open mind.

He said a lot of cool stuff.

I recently read that when he developed the light bulb and city lighting systems, he didn't understand Ohm's Law.

Circuit cookbooks used to be popular. I have a couple. They are interesting to browse.

Jim Willams' two books of essays are great. Some touch on the mental design issues.

AoE is fabulous, worth reading cover to cover, plus the X-chapters.

John Larkin knows even less about quantum computing than he knows about the human brain. His speculations on the subject are random noise.

And how would somebody do that? You approach seems to be to learn as little as possible about about the components you are using - see where they blow up rather than reading the data sheet.

It a lot easier if you have access to lots of different well characterised components, rather than junk. Knowing what you are playing with may inhibit your creativity, but it does let see a lot furhter into where you might go.

And it took Telsa's better educated insights to set up the AC distribution systems we have today. Admittedly, we've gone back to 500KV DC for really long links, but Edison would never have got there on his own.

I never found circuit cook books all that useful.

They can be interesting, but they aren't all that great. He wrote six application notes on the Baxandall Class D oscillator, but never realised the Peter Baxandall had invented it, or suggested using MOSFET switches. Not a lot of creativity there.

It's useful, but very much aimed at physics students, and scientists in general. The treatment of transformers is pretty superficial, but you wouldn't have noticed that.

As far as I know, the best places for turning out BSEEs who can actually design stuff are CU Boulder and MSU Bozeman.

(Insert obligatory vigorous disagreement on the value of rigorous math.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Math is wonderful and necessary. But it doesn't have ideas.

When I was at Tulane, the ee dean told me that undergraduates don't do design, that was reserved for grad school. Funny.

I've employed two, maybe three, PhDs and I didn't find them to be especially creative. They seemed to be afraid to break rules. I do have a very recent PhD hire that I'm optimistic about; she has had a bunch of hands-on experience in power electronics and had ideas in an interview brainstorm.

It would be fun to teach a course on electronic design.