Today, we try to think our way to the heart of the
matter. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Physicist Richard Feynman
told about a conversation with his friend Bennie
when they were 12. "Thinking is nothing but talking
to yourself," said Feynman. "Oh yeah?" said Bennie.
"Do you know the crazy shape of a crankshaft in a
car? How did you describe it when you were talking
With that, Feynman suddenly realized that most
thinking isn't verbal at all. If you don't happen
to know what a crankshaft looks like, don't try to
find out without looking at a picture. The shape is
far too complex. Eugene Ferguson uses that idea in
his wonderful book, Engineering and the
Mind's Eye. He goes on to say,
The mind's eye, the locus of our images of
remembered reality and imagined contrivance, is an
organ of incredible capacity and subtlety.
Collecting and interpreting much more than the
information [entering the optical eyes], the mind's
eye is an organ in which a lifetime of sensory
information [in all its forms] -- is stored,
interconnected and interrelated.
As I read that I consider what goes on in my own
head. Trying to reduce thought to words hamstrings
me. The problem of formulating words takes
precedence over the matter I'm trying to think
That may seem pretty obvious if I'm designing a
crankshaft. It's less obvious, but equally true,
when I'm trying to think of a way to make peace
between two friends, or to relive a nice time I had
the day before. Casting thought into words simply
leads me away from the heart of the matter.
Ferguson quotes William James, who said that a
favorite topic of conversation with his Harvard
colleagues was the question, "Is thought possible
without words?" James had no problem with that one.
Of course it was possible. Yet the fact the debate
was going on makes it clear that it was not obvious
I once read William James's personal copy of an
engineering mechanics text in the Harvard Library.
In the back, a young James had reconstructed
graphical solutions of complicated equations. Of
course he understood. You only have to watch
animals to see how sophisticated nonverbal thinking
can be. Yet the intellectuals around James have
colored our beliefs. Ferguson quotes academics who
say things like this:
Some researchers are eager to give the less
intellectual aspects of human personality equal
weight with verbal ones.
He quotes another scientist who talks about
The visual rather than the purely intellectual
aspects of the problem.
How horribly wrong-minded that is! Thought lives in
the recreation of the whole realm of remembered
senses. Thought is at its most abstract and
sophisticated, not when it's first cast into words,
but rather when it goes directly to -- the heart of
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Ferguson, E.S., Engineering and the Mind's
Eye. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Episode | Search Episodes |