One of the Victorian age’s greatest thinkers, Alfred North Whitehead, observed a phenomenon in himself and his contemporary, Bertrand Russell. Russell was a master at reducing complexity down to basic elemental structures, while Whitehead tended to excel at reconciling disparate and even seemingly contradictory facts. Whitehead, with his customary wit, referred to his style of thinking as “muddle-headed” while he described Russell’s as “simple-minded.”
William James, widely considered the founder of the modern psychological study, recognized this cognitive phenomenon as temperaments, which he saw as having, to some extent, a biological nature. James, not at all incidentally, was the first college professor we know to have agreed to an accommodation for a learning difference. A student in one of his Radcliffe classes approached him before an exam and told him a written exam wouldn’t allow her to reflect the full extent of what she had learned from his class. She asked to speak on the exam questions instead. James accepted her argument. The student’s name was Gertrude Stein.
At this point in the 21st century, we have a reasonably durable understanding that there are two dominant ways of processing knowledge, or cognition, within our brains. Cognitive scientist, Rand Spiro, has identified two ways our brains build knowledge. We learn some information through discrete serial processes, in the manner of a digital processor, while our brains build the rest of our knowledge through multiple, irregular, and simultaneous overlaps of elements. In short, the research shows our brains have elements of Russell’s “simple-minded” or sequential style, at the same time, manifesting some of Whitehead’s “muddleheaded” or associative style.
For this purpose, we call Whitehead’s muddle-headed thinking associative attention and Russell’s simple-minded thinking sequential attention.
Warmly,
Francis Sopper