Reticular Mindsets

This is a rather big question and I've seen quite a few fragmented discussions about it.

This day (11/5/20) I read an article stating:

Human mindsets are intrinsically reticular.

Yes that is.

And I instantly realized that with respect to art, games may beat novels and movies in that the latter ones are restricted to a fixed and linear form of narration while games are free to narrate out of order or even in a reticular form.

I believe that different forms from the physical world enables us unique methods of expressing, and expressing itself is the core of all arts. That is why I immediately felt the urge to write a blog to record my turbulent mind flow.

Essentially, forms like words or videos are just sets of projections from the real pearls of our thoughts. Somehow sounds like Plato's Ideal World, right?

Expressing Thoughts

When we have some brilliant ideas and want to express it out, we sometimes find it so hard to express them. 茶壶烹饺子，有孔倒不出。Actually, when writing words we are "dimensionally reducing" the network of our intellectual work into a flattened linear structure. This stretches the original ideas and introduces distortions.

There exists a technique called Mind Mapping. It exploits the possibility of expressing our mindsets in a 2D form, which is a nice try. However it lacks in-depth revealing of the content. I think to be thorough we'll need a dynamic interaction means with a hierarchy of graphs. That is, the most natural means of expressing human thoughts may well be Link-Oriented.

However I am not belittling the value of text. One must see that text is highly concentrated and can express intricate thoughts neatly. Perhaps that's why computer programming code are prevalently in text but not graphs.

Learning

When learning, I always deem it valuable to have divergent thinking. I often add link notes on book pages. And I often come across some flashes like "It mentioned X and what is it?", "This X resembles Y but I somewhat forgot or am uncertain bout Y so I want to check it out", "I have another solution that might work out the problem being discussed. I want to try it out or go search the Internet to see if I can get it through" etc..

Learning is not only about adding vertices to the graph in my mind, but adding links to form a strong network. When I click at one point I should be able to diverge into a great number of other points so when I come across a problem I know there will be plenty resources I can use to handle this.

Pitfalls

Human mind, while so strong at heuristics, inspirations, and linking, is ghastly short of cache. Worse, this cache is so likely to forget something just in a blink. This problem becomes trickier when applying divergent thinking. We jump so deep in one recursive tree and when we come back we may have already forgotten where we were. Therefore we do need papers or something else as notes to keep where we are going.

A topology of a mesh is also harder to manage and understand than a linear one. Links will present in \(O(n^2)\) level. Human mind mechanisms are very good at managing links in the mind, but not so good at deciphering it from external sources (perhaps that's why well-structured linear and tree-like text are easier to understand).

To compromise we can adopt a hybrid process: We use multiple linear sources to learn (discuss, present, narrate…) about the same topic, and it is left to the reader to assemble them into a 3D view.

For example, we can read two or more textbooks on the same topic concurrently. In this way we can not only learn more vertices in the text, but also compare between the two books, which means more links in our minds. Great.

In game designing, we can exhibit the same thing using different means. We can use world narrative methods such as a notebook of nobody buried somewhere, a mechanic (e.g. a sorcerer's skill) that tells it as background story, an NPC's retelling of it, and the relics and ruins of it.