I've seen many round robin arguments on this site about how much and whether to go by the numbers versus go by taste and other sense impressions -- also how much to learn with precision, but after awhile, that takes the fun out of learning for some.

I think different cognitive styles influence how we learn about this pasttime. Many prefer numbers and calculating, especially thinking types, the many engineers on this site. And I'm not saying others don't think! C. G. Jung distinguished four functions where each pair was a balance: thinking/feeling, sensation/intuition. These functions also often inform each other. For those interested in knowing more, Jung's functions were later encoded along with other Jungian factors (extraversion/introversion, judging/perceiving) into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator that is offered for free online: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp

Related to preferred cognitive style, people have their preferred learning styles. Some are inductive, others are deductive. The engineering types here tend to prefer deductive reasoning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning, the artistic types, aka intuitive cooks tend to be inductive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning.

Neither the engineers nor the artists are wrong, and these styles don't exclude each other. One of the things I like about Jung's psychological approach is that he emphasized achieving balance. For someone who always relies on measuring, intuitive trial and error may yield new growth and vice versa.

As an example, my own style is intuitive, so I like to immerse in everything I can about this pasttime and get a sense of the possibilities. Then I hone in on more precise measurements. I don't know if I would enjoy the learning process nearly as much if I were fussing too much, too early with temperature strips, a naked portafilter, etc. I might miss what I pick up tasting differences in the coffee, feeling the tension of the pull at different grind levels, trying a different machine I've just restored, and so on. In this quest, I've also found it helpful to access what has been measured and to use some of those methods for new growth. I tend to shuttle between the two. As a kid, my math science and education suffered greatly when these subjects were taught exclusively using the deductive method. An inductive/overview approach would have reached me better so that I could have then appropriately applied the deductive method.

I've also liked a concept one of the senior members used (Marshall? Jim?) of acquiring barnacles in one's technique. As I've learned, some of those barnacles have fallen away so my technique appears increasingly simple. For instance, tamping seems so much simpler now and my taste buds tell me I've gotten better at dosing by volume.

My method for controlling my weight is to cook everything from scratch. This means I not only think twice before I eat; I've also become technically fairly competent as a cook (I only recommend this diet if you really enjoy playing with food). I also do occasional experiments (both cooking and coffee). Here's my take on the difference.

In cooking, I probably use five to twenty separate ingredients for any dish I make; going from pantry to plate may involve 20 to 50 steps. Therefore, being tightly focused and ultra precise is your enemy in cooking: being quick, widely competent, and above all, thinking of everything with a floating pattern of attention, is your friend. In your imagination, you are putting together the finished plate, making sure everything is going to arrive in time, in the right shape, and cooked to the right degree. It's lots of details, all juggled at once, all done roughly right.

In an experiment, everything is thought through and prepared ahead of time. The elements being tested or compared are reduced to their simplest essence, and these are then executed as precisely as humanly possible. Thinking about the final result, or anything except the current datum being gathered is guaranteed to create a screw up and require a do over.

Personally, I find coffee to be more like cooking, getting lots of stuff roughly right, rather than one or two things perfect. I'm not sure if this is inherently the nature of coffee or more my personal approach

Some more food for thought on this creative process, then back to tax preparation.

Short-term memory can hold 7 plus or minus 2 bits of information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two IOW one can become cognitively overwhelmed by trying to rigorously track too many data points at once.

Then there's a model of the creative process by Vargiu that I summarize here. It also suggests immersing in the data, then pulling back to let intuition work. I'm pointing you to the sidebar, not the other stuff: http://www.drgaryseeman.com/practice/coaching.php It closely resembles a model by Moustakas. I'll add the references later.

Cooking is not psychology, engineering is not psychology. An eighteen year old freshman pushing unfamiliar buttons in a psych lab may only be able to juggle seven things; but I don;t think this allows one to infer what happens in a someone's head when they exercise a skill. I beleive, when it comes to skills, brains and consciousness are hugely overrated.

I am a very amateur cook; nothing at all special by foodie standards. A simple dish which I do weekly, and on which I learned a lot of my technique is tomato & basil penne. It has nine ingredients. The tomatos require about 9 steps pantry to plate, the garlic 4, the basil 4, the penne 2, the pepper 2, and the salt, balsamic and parmesan 1 each. That's 9 ingredients in 24 steps, plus a few more for the pans, the cleaning, and the flatware. And this is an easy dish; the equivalent of a simple training exercise.

I have no clue how many objects are in my conscious attention when I do it; but since I've been cooking this dish every week for thirty years, I suspect it is zero. It's all muscle memory and cruise control by now, like all true skills. My thoughts when doing this are more judgmental -- opining on the quality of the ingredients I'm handling, the way they are cooking in the pan etc, than thinking about what I'm doing now or next.

The hotel I was staying on my last trip had a short order cook doing omelets for the morning buffet. I noticed his caring but effortless style, so we started talking. This did not stop him adding ingredients to the small pan or prepping the omelet on a griddle (!) as smoothly as before. He was in his mid-twenties, and it turned out he's been cooking for his siblings since he was about twelve, being part of "an everyone works and everyone does chores" family. Doing a short order omelet is not a well paid or well respected task. But it still takes a lot of steps, and lot of manual skills that have to become second nature to be done well.

There is a quality of all around, floating attention these tasks require that is not captured in psychological models. The most widespread skill where floating attention is vital is driving. The tightly focused teenage drivers just starting out always have a few accidents before they get it.

I'm suggesting that espresso prep profits from this more laid back and wide angle focus than microscopic attention to one or two details required in other types of tasks.

If I gave the impression I'm trying to reduce all of this to psychology, sorry, I'm not. Psychology and any other discipline provides maps that are not the territory. I'm offering "food for thought," not more. My posts are in response to seeing people get at each other for favoring different styles, and I'm trying to offer additional perspectives that show how these styles may interrelate.

BTW, the idea of learned skills, operating automatically during "floating attention," can be seen as a set of conditioned responses that are chunked together in behaviors that one no longer has to figure out. Without this, no one would learn to effortlessly ride a bicycle.

I cite the Vargiu creative model and the idea of 7 plus or minus 2 bits held in short-term memory as useful for recognizing the extra attention it takes to learn new skills and the limitations of attention in such situations. So much of the creative process looks to me like learning and chunking. These are words, though. The doing is something more, just like a musical score can't fully capture a soulful performance.

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