ix Galton's Walk celebrates the Galton who invented the method of free association, and who first used it as he "walked leisurely along Pall Mall, a distance of 450 yards," taking careful note of all the thoughts associated with each object he saw. From that beginning Galton moved next to word associations, and concluded his observations with the remark that "our working stock of ideas is narrowly limited," and that "the mind continually recurs to them in conducting its operations."

ix A basic, tractable fact of psychology, he [Galton] points out, is the fact that everything recurs.

p.1 Javal... wondered how a child managed to read. He looked carefully at the eyes of a child reading, thus discovering "saccades," the discrete jumps the direction of gaze makes as the eyes move. Thoughts jump like glances do.

p.5 [David Hume] I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind that they are nothing but a bundle or a collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.

p.6 We are a bundle of perceptions.

[JLJ - How perceptive of you to say that...]

p.10 Periodic response of a system to unchanging input is the rule down to the level of analysis of the single neuron.

p.10 David Hume was right - the perceptions that make up consciousness succeed one another with inconceivable rapidity.

[JLJ - If this is so, evolution has seen to it that this behavior - and NOT any other - contributes to survival and reproduction of viable offspring in a complex world full of complex interacting agents. The successful management of our predicament requires this behavior. We can pull from this the amazing observation that the mind kind of hallucinates in response to the real, but the hallucinations - whatever they are - contribute to survival and social maneuver in society.]

p.12 I do not know.

[JLJ - What? This is the first book I have read where the author has said "I do not know." Most authors claim to know an enormous amount, and never admit to not knowing. Actually, Galton is responding to a question he has posed, but my point is that published books trumpet 'I know,' or in simpler cases 'I know how to entertain you,' rather than 'I do not know.']

p.17 In many cases in science, one cannot know beforehand what will be found out, or even will be interesting at a better-informed tomorrow.

[JLJ - Actually, get people to make a list of the things that irritate them, and it is not too prescient to predict that some 'irritants' from this list will be greatly reduced, or even eliminated in the future, perhaps as a result of discoveries in science.]

p.20 To what extent is action mindless?

p.24-35 [reproduction of Galton's 1879 paper Psychometric Experiments in which he takes a walk on the Pall Mall]

p.28 [Galton] I conclude from the proved number of faint and barely conscious thoughts, and from the proved iteration of them, that the mind is perpetually travelling over familiar ways without our memory retaining any impression of its existence... It is apparently always engaged in mumbling over its old stores...

p.35 [Galton] We find that our working stock of ideas is narrowly limited, but that the mind continually recurs to them in conducting its operations

p.36 The concretization of abstract matters is a widespread dimension on which people tend to vary spontaneously.

p.38-52 JLJ - Gorky Street, West Avenue maps and memorizing game. Yawn.

p.54 Arieti argues that "normal thought" is concerned with both the connotation and the denotation of a symbol; the schizophrenic is mainly concerned with the denotation and the verbalization and partially abandons connotation.

p.55 Traditional education consists of the force-feeding of knowledge.

[JLJ - So? No one "forced" the advanced student to take the chosen set of classes. You would seriously regret, later in life, not being "force fed" basic math, grammar, science, history, social studies, some classic literature, etc. Someone decided to offer a program for a degree, someone decided to sign up for that program and try to earn the degree, and some employer placed a value in hiring someone with that degree. Crovitz forgets that the 'force-feeding' is followed by tests and exams where the student must demonstrate proficiency. It is this proficiency that is valued by employers. Very few people I know complained later in life about their "force fed" knowledge and truly wished instead to be ignorant. I suppose Crovitz was "force-fed" psychology, and the result in part was this book. So quit your crying.]

p.56 Machines, after all, are just realizations of algorithms for some action, be it simple or complex, easy or hard, amusing or dreadful.

[JLJ - Machines are the executors of algorithms for some action. They neither know what they are doing, nor know what what they do, does.]

p.60 it is rather easy to write paragraphs that cannot be understood.

[JLJ - Yes, I agree, and as an example I cite anything Crovitz has written in this work...]

p.76 if the problem is to generate appropriate action in literate human problem-solving, words may be convenient right now.

p.78 Graham Wallas wrote a book called The Art of Thiought (Wallas, 1926), which is cited everywhere but that few have given evidence of having read... Wallas broke the time-course of problem-solving into four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification.

[JLJ - In my own work, incubation is replaced by the act of taking up a problem after a period of truly not working on it and re-acquainting myself with what I was working on - perhaps by reviewing notes - and coming up to speed with what I was doing, including any partial thoughts and ideas which may have previously been discarded. This re-categorization and re-acquaintance is inspirational in nature to me and usually and practically leads to illumination. The reader can then understand why I make excessive notes to myself in this web-achive of my own thought.]

p.86 With the best will in the world, solution fails us sometimes.

p.88 There has been a timid suspicion on this planet for hundreds of years that there may be algorithms for all heavy things, and we can see the ancients inching toward them, toward algorithms.

p.88 Ramon Lull was born in 1232 in Majorica and died in 1315 at the hands of a Saracen mob he was exhorting to convert to Christianity. During his life he wrote more than enough to give birth to a cult that survived more than five centuries

[JLJ - From Wikipedia: Ramon Lull (also spelled Llull), while still a young man and Seneschal to the King of Majorca, was very given to composing worthless songs and poems and to doing other licentious things. One night he was sitting beside his bed, about to compose and write in his vulgar tongue a song to a lady whom he loved with a foolish love; and as he began to write this song, he looked to his right and saw our Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross, as if suspended in mid-air. The vision came to Llull five times in all, [JLJ - could this have been an ocular migraine with aura?] leading him to leave his family, position, and belongings in order to pursue a life in the service of God. Specifically, he realized three intentions: to die in the service of God while converting Muslims to Christianity, to see to the founding of religious institutions that would teach foreign languages, and to write a book on how to overcome someone's objections to being converted... Llull is the first author to use the expression "Immaculate Conception" to designate the Virgin's exemption from original sin... Llull was extremely prolific, writing a total of more than 250 works in Catalan, Latin, and Arabic, and often translating from one language to the others. While almost all of his writings after the revelation on Mt. Randa connect to his Art in some way, he wrote on diverse subjects in a variety of styles and genres... Llull's Art (Ars Magna)... The Art operated by combining religious and philosophical attributes selected from a number of lists. It is believed that Llull's inspiration for the Ars magna came from observing Arab astrologers use a device called a zairja. The Art was intended as a debating tool for winning Muslims to the Christian faith through logic and reason... Leibniz gave Llull's idea the name "ars combinatoria", by which it is now often known. Some computer scientists have adopted Llull as a sort of founding father, claiming that his system of logic was the beginning of information science... Llull himself explicitly condemned many of the subjects, such as alchemy, that he is purported to have written about]

p.90 "What is invention, after all, except the knack of finding new and useful combinations of old principles?" [Martin] Gardner asks (p.20).

p.91 To simplify any complex system, one can attempt to analyze it into a small set of elements which recur in lawful combinations.

p.92 Zuce Kogan (1956) wrote a book about a little set of ready-made solutions to fit needy practical problems... Polya (1957) reviewed the work of several mathematicians interested in heuristics in the context of a book that expanded on a set of questions to ask oneself when confronted with a mathematical problem, questions that are designed to propel the problem-solver out of incubation's freeze into the warmth of heady action.

p.93 So maybe the awful truth is that thoughts do not change much, but the same old thoughts go round and round.

p.94 Very general methods are especially good, for their field of application is so very wide.

p.94 Luchins' problems show that people prefer old habits - even very arbitrary ones - to new gropings.

p.96 Action solves problems - it is the immediate cause of the arrival at the desired solution.

[JLJ - Directed action solves problems. But how specifically is it that we "arrive" at the solution through action? We most likely stumble upon it, on our way perhaps to something else, or perhaps in conducting a sweep specified by an algorithm, like a detective following leads, using what has worked in the past.]

p.97 In the solution of any particular problem, we must select out of a set of all possible actions a particular action.

p.99 all there is to discovery and invention is putting a couple of old things in a new relation... the "things" can be anything you like... but the relations are small in number

p.100 Success in problem-solving comes from changing the relational-filter before the mind's eye, tacitly rippling through the set of actions that are possible, and then having the wit to recognize a solution when you see one.

[JLJ - Success in problem solving comes from using tricks that work. In a competitive environment, success comes from using tricks that work against tricks that work. For example, a telemarketer has been calling me every day with a spoofed phone number asking me in Chinese to press 9 to claim a package of some kind. If the called party is sucked into the scam, he provides contact information and then is charged a delivery fee. This is a trick that apparently works against Chinese Americans - the former owner of my phone number had a Chinese name and I have an unpublished number, meaning that the scammers thought they were calling a Chinese American. However, I used tricks that work against this trick - I did not answer the phone, I let my answering machine take the message each time. After 5 months they tried one more trick, the message changed to 'this is your last chance to pick up the package', and after that, no more calls.]

p.107-144 [The reader is assigned several problems to solve, taken from a book by Karl Duncker in 1945. You are asked to solve problems which require creative solutions by using a sequence of creativity-inspiring words to overcome what initially appear to be insurmountable obstacles, or problems that require visually creative thinking.]

p.147 Francis Galton... caught a glimpse of the recurrence of the contents of consciousness.

p.148 the digital computer is so interesting and complex a toy it may divert our attention for another hundred years.

p.151 An aim of this book was to clarify the theoretic basis of the study of thought... I asserted that there are three parts to thought... For each a simplified theoretical basis was described; an algorithm was given for each, and protocols of the use of the algorithms were given.

p.151-152 As Justus Buchler (1961, p. 86) pointed out, groping is one price a finite creature has to pay in searching according to a method... Buchler noted (p. 89) that method arises when man comes to recognize his ability to repeat - "to repeat anything at all."

[JLJ - A crucial concept for the theory of complex games of strategy.]

p.152 It is repetition that is the basis of thought as it occurs naturally, as well as thought when it is exposed and unambiguous, and its cycle of oscillation is brought under some degree of control.