In the field of designing control systems, there’s a heuristic that states “keep your feedback loops tight.” My knowledge of control systems engineering is a bit patchy, but I suspect this has to do with minimizing the delay between an event in the real world and the system’s perception of it. The tighter the loop, the easier it is for the system to respond to it’s environment. (Upon googling, I’ve found that this heuristic might be for the benefit of the design engineers rather than the system itself.)

It’s not even necessary to bring in perceptual control theory to apply this to humans. The quicker the feedback, the more accurately you can adjust your actions to produce the desired outcome. I’ll dig up the links later, but I believe the brain is optimized to perform over short causal distances, actions followed immediately by results. When that information is delayed, it creates the opportunity for uncertainty, so when it finally does come, the effects are severely reduced. Learning is hampered. That’s why unambiguous feedback is one of the requirements for entering a flow state. (Anecdotally, I can place much of the difficulty of my job squarely on the fact that we’re forced to operate with months-long feedback loops).

Lately it’s occurred to me that I can apply this heuristic to my thoughts themselves. As far as adjectives go, ‘tangled’ is generally a fairly good one for describing my thought processes. ‘Hazy’ is another one. Except for brief moments of clarity, most of them bear little relation to reality, instead being steeped in various biases and incomplete-understandings. 90% of the time I try to ignore what goes on in my brain.

But that sort of half-assery doesn’t fly when I’m writing. For some reason, seeing the words in front of me makes me that much more cognizant of them. When the words get put to the page, it’s immediately apparent whether they’re sensible or need a healthy dose of backspace. Writing, perhaps because I use different parts of my brain when I’m perceiving outside stimulus, foists clear (or at least, clear-er) thinking onto me.

My hope is that by writing often, and getting near-instant feedback to the sort of thoughts I’m having, that I can ‘train’ myself to think more clearly, to not fall prey to biases and mistakes of logic that (ideally) I would notice immediately.

Failing that, at the very least writing more will at least produce that many more hours of clear-thoughts in a day.