To Glom Or Not To Glom

...that is the question. What Hofstadter means by the word glom, is to put two things together into some type of chunk. On page 110, Hofstadter talks about higher-level structures having their own properties, and he uses this example. He first takes the letter units "t" "h" and "e" and says that a person can make the word "the" out of these three letter units, but for the higher-level structuring he is talking about is taking "th" (as one glom) and attaching it to "e" to have a two units making up a word instead of three. This brought up a very intriguing aspect to me, and it dealt with what Hofstadter was talking about earlier in the chapter.

From page 99:
"...the way in which we mentally juggle many little pieces and tentatively combine them into various bigger pieces in an attempt to come up with something novel, meaningful and strong."
This quote made me think of the idea of taking a single idea, and making it into something larger (such as a thesis or a dissertation). We, as humans, do this everyday when it comes to "putting the pieces together." When it comes to something as simple as being able to read a newspaper article and understanding what is being said within. So, going from small scale to large scale was an important aspect, how about reversing it?

There is a quote from someone I can't recall, that went along these lines: "I started out wanting to cure the world, I then focused on human anatomy only, which brought me to the brain, which has me working on memory..." So, this idea of starting big, ending small isn't a bad one, but it can be very overwhelming. This was Hofstadter's idea with the terraced scan. Having almost everything laid out in front of you, but then having to sift your way through the "top" portions of these ideas, to figure out what it is you are looking for. He uses the analogy of "don't judge a book by its cover." So, as humans, we also do this on a day to day basis. Getting back to the newspaper example, why did someone choose that particular article to read? As humans, we utilize these methods everyday of our lives.

-Bryan