Hofstadter's chapter "The Unconscious Juggling of Mental Objects" intrigued me greatly. This chapter brought to the forefront a great mystery of human language ad thought for me. He discusses doing word problems commonly known as Jumbles, in daily newspapers. These problems are a collection of letters that when arranged in a proper way, spell out a word. These problems are typically referred to as anagrams and raise a great question within cognitive science.
Hofstadter believes that this mental activity of arranging letters in an anagram does not simply take place in the working memory of the letters given or the long-term memory of words known, but instead it takes place as an interaction between them.
I completely understand where Hofstadter is coming from with this argument and I've experienced it not so much in the newspaper's Jumble but in the game known as Boggle. In the game you compete against other players who are trying to figure out as many letter combinations that form words within a given 4x4 random letter grid.
"But how could semi-existent or nascent tokens come to participate in the juggling process, alongside fully-made tokens, on the one hand, and long-term memory types, on the other?" Hofstadter makes this argument when referring to the interaction between working memory (WM) and long term memory (LTM). This system involved many levels, including
I believe that the speed and capacity at which your WM operates, the common 7 +/- 2 chunks of information, involving amounts of data that are processed rapidly can affect how adept one is at solving anagrams. However, as Hofstadter also points out, it is not merely the short term memory that has an impact on an individual's ability to solve such problems but its interaction with the LTM. This is because the long term memory stores the alphabet of letters the person must refer to, as well as that persons vocabulary, along with heuristic rules on how to form words, such as consonant and vowel placement, among other rules.
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