When confronted with some thought provoking subjects my mind has an interesting side effect. Unconciounsly, I find myself thinking about the actual thinking. Am I thinking in the correct abstraction level? Are my thought not repetition on some previous idea? Are they permutations of ideas already mentioned? Am I making sense at all in the direction I am going at the moment? and so forth
This type of thinking, which I like to call metathinking is quite good. Thinking is just like most other things in life, practicing it makes you better in it. finding your weak spots and improving them makes you even better. I could say that if I was able to isolate the process of metathinking and do it without the need for an actual subject I would be able to improve my thinking on a fundamental level. This unfortunately escapes me. No matter how hard I try I cant get myself to metathink good without anything that is giving me a direction in which to think.This leads me to believe that I can only metathink well when I can evaluate the progress I made.
The last statement in itself is enough for a long thought, which I might o some other time. For now lets take it at face value. Lets project it to something physical, like jogging. Paying attention to muscle tension, breathing, and body movement while jogging will definitely improve your jogging. So its no wonder metathinking while being busy with something improves my analysis of it. However research has shown the visualizing running correctly, learning to remove muscle tension while relaxing and improving breathing while not jogging also improves your jogging. Of all these exercises the visualization seems the closest to metathinking while not thinking of anything. So why cant I seem to be able to do it?
Hell if I know