Halo said
Does abstraction and a focus on the theoretical/hypothetical not potentially aid your problem solving skills?
-snip-
Probably, but in a different way than what I'm thinking of. When I say that my critical thinking/problem solving skills increased, I'm talking more about situational affairs, and my ability to react to matters of the physical plane on the fly.
I learn mostly through connecting thoughts, experiences, and memories. I noticed when I was very young that even things that you wouldn't think had any connection with something else, surely derives from, impacts, or is
somehow related to it. Living where I do though, I never had much of a social life, and even if I did it wouldn't be a pleasant one since people in my area discriminate against people with my last name, so most of my time was devoted to learning when I was young. I was constantly in a state of absorption. Sucking in all the information around me. Remembering random bits and pieces of things I heard, even if I wasn't trying to. Sometimes these sorts of, "micro-memories", come up out of the blue, and 90% of the time relate to either my mood, or what I was thinking about. A good example would be the word, "unfettered". Surely not a word you hear every day, but last week I was searching for a word similar to undeterred, and that word popped into my head. I don't remember where, or when I heard it, but something inside just told me that it was synonymous with the type of adjective I was searching for.
Anyway, basically I was living on auto-pilot all through grade school. I even learned to, "sense", people in the halls when I started to grow more reclusive, (like I just knew who they were by the unique movements they made, or something. My whole grade was only 80 people, so there weren't any people I didn't know walking around.), because I would always walk with my head down between 7th and 8th grade, and after a while I could just tell who was who. Once I hit the 11th grade, and went to a trade school for a few hours a day, I started maturing faster, and thinking about everything differently. It was like another dimension was added to my perception of life. The physical aspect, and the relation of things in that plane, instead of just being trapped in my mind with countless random thoughts, and formulas.
It's like a computer's RAM. If you run less programs, the RAM can allocate more space to specific tasks, but if you run more programs it's going to slow the others down.