Episode 4
Episode 4: Top-down thinking in improv for bottom-up thinkers
If you are a bottom-up thinker, there are certain techniques in long-form improv that might work better if you try to do top-down thinking instead. Why would you do such a thing? And When?
Game and second beats might be challenging to a bottom-up thinker. You need to get used to wrapping up a bunch of details into a single idea, gist, or synopsis regardless of what direction you think in. The synopsis is where top-down thinkers start! Maybe it’s faster doing top down for this?
This episode includes a couple different examples of when I think I probably take more of a top-down approach as a life-long bottom-up thinker.
I also detail a pretty quick way to do a second beat using a form of visual thinking (hyperphantasia), since we were talking about it. Selfish tangent, that, maybe. But it’s in there too.
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Transcript
Welcome to the Neurodiversity and Improv podcast from flatimprov.com.
::I'm Jen deHaan, and I suppose I am hosting this thing.
::And first of all, as a regular disclaimer, these podcasts aren't for telling anyone what to do.
::They are explanations to help encourage classes to be a little bit more inclusive, and teams to understand their teammates better.
::They're not excuses for anything.
::We're not making excuses for our behavior or what we do.
::And of course, these are not for diagnosis.
::We aren't using these episodes to diagnose ourselves or anyone else.
::And we're not talking about therapy or anything.
::This is just about how we think and do things in improv in a cognitive sense.
::So in the previous episode, I discussed what bottom up thinking is and what top down thinking is and how they work in improv.
::I encourage you to go back and listen to that episode because I give examples that will help it make sense.
::This is what each thing is.
::Bottom up thinking is where you are taking all of the details and all of those specifics, all of those little items, and you take them all together and then form your opinion after you have information gathered.
::So you are taking all those details from a scene and then wrapping them up into the gist afterwards, after you have all of your evidence and kind of processed it out.
::Top down thinking goes in the opposite direction.
::Top down thinkers will be using their history, all of their learned experience to sort of form a hypothesis or the gist at the forefront of their information gathering.
::So before they go ahead and go look at those details to support that gist or adjust it accordingly.
::So that's bottom up thinking and top down in a nutshell.
::And you can find examples of both of those things in the improv context in episode three.
::One thing I also talked about is how we can think top down when we need to and by we, I mean bottom up thinkers.
::It just takes more effort and more energy than someone who naturally thinks top down.
::And vice versa, of course, if you are a top down thinker and you need to start doing something bottom up, it will also be harder for you, but it's all still possible.
::And all of this is because these things are fundamentally how our brains are wired.
::It's not something we can change.
::It doesn't mean you, however, can't ever think in a certain way.
::It just might be a workaround or something that you learn.
::You might be doing a version that is not your first choice, and you might only notice, hey, this is just really hard for me.
::I can't do this very well.
::It comes so naturally for that person over there and not for me.
::Well, you might just be doing a different form of thinking than the way that your brain is naturally wired.
::For instance, I never even noticed that I was doing top down thinking in improv until I sat down between doing improv sets and stuff and actually started stepping through how I was cognitively doing something in improv and then noticed, oh, so that's what I'm doing.
::OK, and then that kind of helped me.
::So that's why I'm doing these podcasts, I guess.
::So I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in today's episode.
::This episode is what happens when bottom up thinkers do top down thinking, what that looks like or feels like and maybe kind of how it's done.
::I don't really know how it's done, but I figured out when I was doing it and what that kind of feels like in a way.
::But I'll do my disclaimer, if you've listened to this podcast, you know, I will say this is just me.
::It will work and feel different for you in some ways or maybe a lot of ways, even if you are also a bottom up thinker.
::these episodes are just to help you start the process of thinking about how you do things and noticing them might help you do or think about improv in new and hopefully useful ways.
::Top down, bottom up, neither of them are correct.
::It's just they're different and it's the way you are.
::And we can all do improv and we all bring something good to improv.
::And things are better when people are different, right?
::And one more final note.
::I don't want this to seem like I'm thinking about this during a scene.
::I'm absolutely not thinking about any of this during a scene.
::This is all of what I think in between scenes and between sets.
::It helps me somehow during a scene, however, even though I'm not thinking about any of this during a scene, I am not sure how it just seems to kind of get in there.
::I guess that's the magic and mystery of Improv.
::For the rest of it, I'll pick it all apart and overthink and overanalyze as Improv nerds tend to do.
::All right.
::So the first example we're going to discuss is game and second beats.
::Top-down processing is often what we're using to get to the kind of gist or that sort of nugget of what the game is or what is the thing in this scene we're going to take to the second beat, which is often the game, right?
::So in order to get to that, we need to think about all the details and kind of get to the gist, right?
::You're getting to that nugget.
::What was this scene actually about?
::And to do that, oftentimes you're distilling it down into a single sentence.
::Some improvisers might describe this as a what-if statement.
::What if the tree fell on the house and turned into raccoons?
::That is the worst example.
::That was also improvised.
::That was off the top of my head without thinking.
::Terrible, terrible example.
::But I think you probably, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably know what I mean.
::You're going to a second beat, you're kind of distilling it down to that single sentence of what the scene was about.
::That is top down.
::If you're starting at the top and you're just thinking about this whole scene is one great big block.
::What sentence describes this scene that is top down?
::And then you might go, okay, that sentence doesn't make sense.
::And then you start thinking about the details in the scene.
::That is top down thinking.
::If you're taking all the details in the scene, you're okay.
::We started off in a supermarket and then we did it down the aisle.
::And then a tree came through and then the raccoons jumped out and then the raccoon, okay, how do I get this whole scene into a sentence?
::That's bottom up processing.
::So to do this fast, you need to just kind of think about the whole scene as a great big blob.
::And then you're like, what just what happened in the scene?
::Just stop thinking about the details.
::What happened?
::And that's when you get to that sentence fast.
::That's top down.
::And if you've learnt to move from details to kind of blobbing the scene into one great big blob, what's just what I just need to think of a sentence for the scene, that's forcing yourself to do top down.
::I started as a details person.
::I started with scenes.
::I would think through the whole scene.
::I would think about all the things that happened in the scene and then try to form that sentence based on all the details.
::And that was too slow.
::We do these exercises where you're doing the second beat right after the first beat scene.
::Like back to back.
::And if you stand there and analyze a whole scene and all the details and try to come up with a sentence, too slow.
::And then if you're in an actual, say you're doing an actual herald, right?
::You have the time, you're gonna be on the back line thinking about your scene and not paying attention to the one that comes after you, right?
::So you kind of don't want to do that either.
::So to speed it up, you oftentimes will be forcing yourself to do top-down thinking.
::Now, for me, this was like a learned skill because it was hard, because I was so used to thinking about all the details.
::That's what comes to be naturally, right?
::So I had to force myself to sort of go against my bottom-up thinking in order to speed this up.
::And I sort of detailed it already earlier.
::I think of the scene kind of like a blob.
::I sort of try to blank all the details out and just go, just what happened?
::And then the sentence will sort of come to me.
::I always question myself.
::That's where I kind of go back.
::Okay, does this detail?
::Yeah, that detail fits, that detail fits, that detail fits.
::Fine.
::Okay.
::That's the right sentence.
::And you sort of are just letting go to kind of let that happen, I suppose.
::That's kind of what it feels like for me.
::And the same kind of with, you know, figuring out the game of the scene is largely the same thing.
::It's kind of a letting go and just trying to see the whole thing as a blob for me.
::This might look very different for you.
::But if you are doing the details first, and you think that you might want to speed it up, you don't have to.
::But if you do want to try, figure out some way, like what is the way that you sort of look at things holistically?
::What does that look like for you?
::And then you might figure out what that is.
::And I'll have another example of a bottom-up thinker forcing top-down on herself.
::I'll have another example of that in a second.
::Sort of a larger, longer example.
::But I just want to give just a quick sort of tangent on another way that I approach doing second beats quickly, because it's very different and it's not going to work for a lot of you, but I'll just give a little blip of this.
::And I know that it's going to come up in another episode in more detail.
::But the other way that I do it is using hyperfantasia or sort of a very highly visual way of thinking, because I'm a very visual person and I can really see things in a lot of detail visually.
::I utilize that for a second beat sometimes because I can do it quite quickly.
::Let's see if I set up the first beat the right way.
::So this is the way that I do it.
::And the first beat I try to remember, this was after I figured out that this was possible, try to first of all remember the initiation.
::That's very important for this one.
::What was the initiation like?
::It doesn't have to be exactly the same sentence, but the gist of the initiation.
::So you can start there very specifically.
::And I try to remember the look of where the scene started.
::And that is the hyperventasia.
::That is the visual look.
::Where was I standing and what did it look like?
::What was there?
::And so I try to do my part in setting up that base reality, a very highly visual base reality at the top of the scene.
::And that's just so you can return there in an analogous sense, because you're just going to be taking that initiation, that top of the scene, and directly plunking it visually in the analogous spot.
::What you do from that point is walk yourself visually through the scene again.
::And you will find that you will remember things because you set up this very highly visual first beat.
::You can walk through the scene visually in the second beat.
::And it's very, very fast to do.
::You're putting yourself in the beginning and then working out your analogous scene down the road.
::You're not thinking about any of it.
::But it also means that you can start your second beat within seconds of finishing your first one, because you don't have to think at all.
::You just need to put yourself in an analogous space.
::That's the only thinking that you have to do between your scenes.
::It works if you set up your first beat and it's pretty effective.
::So I also want to add kind of a footnote to that last section.
::And I think it sort of might help illustrate the differences between the different neurotypes.
::I know that it must sound completely wild to say something like, and then you just visually walk through the scene and just kind of do it again.
::This is something I ran across accidentally.
::It's not something I've learned or something I tried to learn.
::Something like hyperfantasia, again, is just like Neurodiversity.
::It's something that's wired in.
::It's just the way that your brain has spent, in my case, like 46 years, probably, processing things.
::The reason I'm bringing this up is because all of our brains are wired differently.
::Now, if I said that in a class, hey, this is just what you do.
::I never would, by the way.
::And then you just walk yourself visually through the scene, and it just kind of works.
::All of you would leave, right?
::Like, that would be an awful teacher thing to do, right?
::But maybe there's a better way of doing it.
::Maybe a teammate's way is a better way of doing it.
::Or maybe I can take their sort of idea or their way of doing it and kind of work it into mine a bit.
::You're like, okay, I can't really do it in that way, but how can I take that and adjust my way to be closer to that or work with that?
::Or have, this is the most common one, have the same result, but cognitively it's processing, it's coming from a different place.
::And I think that's sort of one of the things that we can hopefully take to our classes and teams and teammates and stuff is just that understanding that we all might be coming to the same result, but coming at it from different cognitive directions.
::And they're not really wrong.
::There's some ways that are might be more efficient, like I was just describing in this whole episode, top down versus bottom up.
::It's when us bottom uppers are doing top down because it's more efficient.
::And there might be a lot of questions for a student to get there.
::And I think that is really key for all of us to remember, because someone else at the same time might be using colors to remember certain things.
::They might leave color tags on something or someone who doesn't see visual, has their own way of thinking and remembering and stepping through a scene.
::That for me would be the same reaction as they would have to me just visually walking through a scene.
::It might be numbers or it might be a very linear or some other way.
::I can't even fathom.
::I don't know what that is, right?
::And that's sort of the point.
::I know for you, the way that I do it, you might go, a hat just sounds wild and I don't know.
::But you have another way of doing it that's perfectly valid, smart, efficient for you and should be honoured.
::And I think the more that we start all learning the different ways that we're doing things, I mean, that's just fascinating, isn't it?
::The next example that I promised earlier.
::So the example for that one is the Rat Report.
::So about a year ago, I was doing a new format for this post-Improv show I was not in.
::And I was making videos about that show.
::I didn't want to make videos that were reviewing improv or reviewing the show because that would be lame and who would want to watch that?
::Nobody.
::So I instead did a show that talked about the show without talking about the show.
::That was my, sort of what I wanted to do.
::And then I figured out how to do that.
::I had kind of no idea.
::But I thought, what if I make a show that finds connections across the whole show and fabricates sort of a theme or premise for that show?
::So that's what I tried to do.
::Now, the first time that I did this new format, I took a whole bunch of notes through the whole show that I watched.
::And this is the Rat Scrap Show out of New York.
::I took notes for the whole show in my level of detail, which is way too much detail.
::I take notes that's almost like a transcript.
::That's how I've always done it since school.
::You know, you get writer's bumps on your hand.
::Well, probably a lot of you don't because everybody types now.
::But back in the day, when we didn't have computers, I wrote notes like verbatim.
::And then I started typing notes like verbatim.
::That's what I did.
::So I was collecting all of the details from the Ratscrap show.
::And I had so many.
::So at the end, I then thought, well, here's almost a transcript of the whole show.
::Now make your connections between all the scenes.
::Make your connections so you can make up your fabricated premise, just theme of the show to prove to the people watching my two and a half minute video.
::And I had a very set time constraint too.
::It couldn't be too long.
::That was way too hard.
::And that was also the wrong way of doing it.
::That was bottom up thinking.
::I was doing all the details.
::I was trying to think and sort through all those details to come up with basically a one sentence.
::This is what the show was actually about.
::Did not work.
::I managed to make it happen for that first episode.
::And I realized I kind of had to lighten up my brain.
::I was like, I have too many notes.
::I have too many details.
::So for the following week, next week, I tried again.
::I was like, you know what?
::I'm going to force myself not to take too many notes.
::I'm just going to try to do like a sentence for each scene.
::And if I can think of a sentence to sort of tie up a tag run or whatever, one sentence, so I was consciously limiting myself to not take too many notes this time.
::And then, you know, still after the show is over, you know, I'm stressed out because I have a personally set time limit.
::I have to get this video at the same night.
::And I was like, how on earth am I going to do this?
::And I found myself just staring at the wall.
::I was like, I'm not even going to look at my notes.
::I'm just going to think about the show and it's going to think about like what pops out in the show, what is an overarching theme that brings everything together?
::And I just stared at the wall until it popped out at me.
::And and it did.
::I didn't think about any of the details or anything specific.
::I just tried to stop thinking almost and let it come to me.
::And it worked.
::And so I kept trying that each week and the following week after that, I was like, you know what?
::I'm just going to try lying on the floor and looking up at the ceiling because I can't even see my computer screen.
::I'm not even going to be thinking about looking at my notes file if I just lie on the floor.
::That is top-down thinking, I think, or it's my version of doing so because I had to get rid of all the details in order to make a universal fake connection between every scene of a show and a whole bunch of scenes that don't connect naturally because they weren't meant to.
::So that was the process for doing The Rat Report and I'm sure now, or I'm pretty sure that's my version of doing top-down thinking as a lifelong wired-in bottom-up thinker.
::So now I'm coming to the part of the podcast that tries to let you know how on earth any of this is useful.
::Maybe it's not.
::I might just be blabbing into a microphone at my wall saying a whole bunch of useless whatevers of how I do things that really apply to nobody else or make no sense.
::So I've found figuring out how you do something cognitively somehow helps you do improv in the moment, even if you're not thinking about any of this.
::Of course, with doing a second beat or finding game, it's a lot more obvious how it's useful to change the way that you think about something.
::Perhaps, you know, you have to get to that high level gist.
::So even if you do bottom up thinking still, you know that, hey, maybe I need to narrow it down a bit and think about fewer details, for example, to get to that gist a little bit faster, or you might completely change how you're thinking.
::Like I detailed that sort of blob of a scene that I try to stick a label on.
::But knowing this, knowing any of this helps you out.
::And of course, that's the whole premise of learning, right?
::And learning and growth, and you throw away the things that don't work, and you keep the things that do.
::But with that hyperphantasia example, which isn't bottom-up or top-down thinking at all, that's just sort of a supplemental thing.
::But in that case, after I came to that realization of, oh, hey, this is one way I can do a scene, I did know that the base reality and remembering a pretty solid gist of what the actual initiation was specifically would really help in that case.
::So that was one where it really influenced how I did a first beat.
::I was like, hey, if I want this as an option, I need a really strong visual off the top.
::And I also knew, hey, if I didn't have that, I could throw away attempting to even do a second beat using that technique because I know it just wouldn't work that well if I did try it.
::So that's where analyzing how you think and process a scene cognitively can help you out in improv.
::And I don't think thinking about these things, thinking about thinking takes the fun out of improv.
::Even if you are analyzing things in great detail between scenes, you don't do any of this analysis while you're doing a scene.
::And having these tools kind of, they're just floating around, and your brain kind of picks up and does them.
::So really being a real hyper analytical robot makes you more fun in the end.
::Hi, I'm Jen.
::I go on tangents.
::And I'm a chronic middle-aged info dumper.
::And I commit to it.
::I commit to it hard, almost as hard as I commit to a bit.
::Okay, we've gotten to the end of episode four on top down thinking for bottom uppers.
::I think that's might be what I call it.
::I have improv stuff in places.
::I have flatimprov.com.
::I do a newsletter that is dedicated to online improv.
::So that's everything from live streams and podcasts to classes and jams.
::Speaking of classes and jams, I have some of those at World's greatest Improv School.
::That's wgimprovschool.com.
::The school has a whole lot of stuff.
::So go check that website out.
::And also I want to note that on flatimprov.com, the other website, you can also submit your classes, jams, etc.
::to that site, and they will get listed in the newsletter that I do put out.
::So go to flatimprov.com/submit to add your things.
::And if you want to add something to this podcast, flatimprov.com/substack.
::It has a contact form.
::It has a thing that you can use to upload a voice note, an audio file that I would play on this podcast.
::So if you have something to add, you can send it to me and I'll put it in here.
::And if you want text words, if you want to submit those instead for me to read it out, I'll do that too, because I don't want this podcast to only be what Jen thinks and how Jen thinks and all that sort of thing.
::That's only one person.
::And I'd rather have your voices and experiences here as well.
::So please consider doing that.
::And I'll see you next time.
::Thanks for listening.
