Because the loss of control over his hands was so gradual, Hawking has had plenty of time to adapt. He has gradually trained his mind to think in a manner different from the minds of other physicists: He thinks in new types of intuitive mental pictures and mental equations that, for him, have replaced paper-and-pen drawings and written equations. Hawking’s mental pictures and mental equations have turned out to be more powerful, for some kinds of problems, than the old paper-and-pen ones, and less powerful for others, and he has gradually learned to concentrate on problems for which his new
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