THINKING: WHAT IS IT AND WHERE DOES IT COME FROM?

WHAT IS ‘THINKING’?

Introduction

It is important to realize that the world we live in is ‘out there'. Our minds are separated from it and gain knowledge about it through our senses. Shock waves propagate through the air, strike our ears, are recoded into electrical impulses, and passed on into the rest of the brain which interprets them as sounds, words, and music. Parts of the electromagnetic spectrum strike our eyes and various subsystems in the retina convert this light into electrical impulses that get passed on to various centres in the brain generating 'vision' which, in turn, is an interpretation of our surroundings. Other sensors in the skin and deeper in the body detect touch, cold, heat, pain, various tastes, smell, proprioception (the sense of body movement and position such as where your right leg is right now) and others - a great deal more than five. These electrical impulses in the neurons (nerve cells) of the brain and central nervous system generate our internal model of the external world - a virtual reality model. In the words of Deutsch (1997), ‘All reasoning, all thinking and all external experience are forms of virtual reality’ (p. 121). It has to be a pretty accurate and extremely useful model otherwise you would not be able to navigate through the world and we would not have survived so long as a species. That said, it can differ in some respects from person to person. Some might see a snake and feel fear and flee whereas someone else might recognize the snake as a pet. These are different interpretations of the same stimulus. Furthermore, our senses and our memories can, under certain conditions, be deceptive.

Conscious vs unconscious thinking

Human thinking manifests itself in many ways. It's what goes on in our heads when we:

• • Try to solve a problem;
• • Daydream;
• • Plan what to do;
• • Make a decision;
• • Develop an opinion or belief;
• • React to an event or person;
• • Categorize something or someone;
• • Consider what might have been;
• • Learn a complex sequence of behaviours;
• • Perform a complex sequence of behaviours without thinking.

That last example might seem self-contradictory but it’s there as a reminder that some of our thinking is conscious and some unconscious, and that conscious thought is subject to influences that we are not always aware of. For example, repeating a sequence of actions over and over can lead to automaticity. Learning to read is effortful but once learned it becomes automatic. You can't, for example, stop yourself from reading the first word in next sentence. Automatic behaviour, including habits, is very useful as it allows you to engage in a complex sequence of actions without the necessity of thinking about each individual action in the sequence. Thus, you can drive a car while paying attention to the news or make a cup of tea while daydreaming about that nice young man you met the other day. The knowledge gained from habitual or automated sequences of actions such as riding a bike is known as procedural knowledge (‘knowing how’ to do something). Procedural knowledge isn’t really correct or incorrect but rather it is more or less useful in attaining a goal. Knowing how to ride a bike or how to find a TV channel can be useful. Procedures also include rules for attaining a goal. For example, a procedural rule might be; ‘if the goal is to determine whether someone is female, then check to see if their hair is long". It might be useful much of the time but that’s not guaranteed.

A second way in which our conscious thinking is influenced is through innate pressures. Some of them tend to be reflex actions: blinking when something approaches the eye, babies suckling and grasping objects, and their intuitive knowledge of physics such as the effects of gravity. Other examples of seemingly innate knowledge or automatic responses include smiling, cooperation, child rearing, and the ‘four Fs’: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating. Third, feelings and emotions in general can influence conscious thought including: fatigue, illness, mood, the effects of drugs, stress, fear, excitement, pain, and embarrassment. Finally, you can’t think unless you have something to think about - your thoughts have some content. We are influenced not only by the situation we find ourselves in but also by the information stored in our memories. Some of this information is general knowledge (2 x 6 = 12) or semantic knowledge and can be contrasted with episodic knowledge (I recall sitting in a restaurant in Dubrovnik at this time last year). Episodic knowledge is remembering what you had for breakfast this morning, semantic knowledge is knowing what ‘breakfast’ means. Together these two constitute what is known as declarative knowledge (‘knowing that" something is the case). Furthermore, declarative knowledge can be either correct or incorrect. You might ‘know that’ the earth is flat, but you would be wrong.

Thinking is therefore an interplay between what you perceive to be going on in your immediate environment and the knowledge you have allowing you to predict and

figure 1.1 Chairs: Immediate recognition depends on the culture you are familiar with.

interact with that environment. Recognizing the chair on the left in Figure 1.1 is almost immediate for people brought up in a western culture. However, unless you are familiar with Japan, it might take a little time to recognize the object on the right as a chair.