Numbers Go Up, Words Come Down!

Foreword to this post: The reader might not take the lighthearted humor and hidden allusions contained in this post for a mischievous criticism of Douglas Hofstadters work but rather as a funny commentary about the complementary reading experience.

As well written the first chapter of "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies might have been and as thrilling Douglas Hofstadter know how to present the topic at hand, in the end it is merely sequences of numbers and their hidden pattern which seem to absorb the authors interest. Hence, I was relieved to find that he found practical application for such specialized cognitive ability by transferring his expertise to the realm of linguistics. - Well not quite yet, but at least since page 87 we are now juggling with words, or rather letters. But better than 86 pages about numbers anyway.

The task of rearranging letters in a word to form meaningful anagrams naturally involves almost the very same processes as in finding the underlying pattern in sequences of numbers. The proximity to everyday usage and implicitness for humans to learn a language, though, spawns totally new approaches to finding solutions for such kind of problems. Also, this way we are able to apply the found methods to other, more practical problems and formulate strategies which do not ground on sheer numeric templates but rather understandable words, found in a dictionary.

Take for example: P A R L E N I A (Try it!!!exclamation mark!!!)

After some time of memorizing the single letters used in this word, one might easily come up with the partial PLAIN and then we would only have A R E left. There are not too many combinations of order we could put the remaining three letters in: ARE or ERA. Both would make sense alone, but would not really form a proper word, put together with PLAIN. So we shuffle again and come up with other partials.

To stay in the tradition of the author I will not reveal which word I have originally come up with, solely to mock the baffled reader.