Exploring the Depths of Thought: Introduction!

about 2 months ago

Okay family, today's blog-isode kicks starts a new series themed:

Exploring The Depths of Thoughts

We are basically going to look deep into our thinking processes. I will try to make this as interesting as possible.

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Ready?

Here we Go!

What does the Word to Think Mean?

In ordinary language, the word think has a wide range of meanings.

It may be a synonym for remembering, as in "I can't think of her name", or for attention, as
in the exhortation Think!", or even for belief, as in I think sea monsters exist".

It can also mean a state when your mind wanders without any specific focus, like when you say, "I'm not thinking about anything in particular".

These different ways of using the word shows that the word has become a blanket term, which can cover virtually any psychological process that goes on within the individual, but you can't really see them from the outside.

But thinking can also mean something more specific, like what you see in Rodin's famous statue of

The Thinker.

Here, when we talk about thinking, we mean things like reasoning, pondering, or reflecting. Psychologists who study thinking are mainly interested in this sense of the term.

To distinguish it from the others, they refer to directed thinking, a set of internal activities that are aimed at the solution of a problem, whether it be the discovery of a geometric proof, of the next move in a chess game, or of the reason why the car doesn't start.

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In all of these activities, the various steps in the internal sequence are directed and dominated by the ultimate goal, the solution of the problem.

What then are the Components of Thoughts?

An old endeavor in the study of thinking is the search for the elements that make
up thought.

Some psychologists have proposed that the ultimate constituents of thought are images.

While others have felt that they are abstract mental structures such as concepts.

We will be looking at both suggestions in today's and tomorrow's blog-isodes.

Lets start with Mental Images

One of the oldest ideas is that thinking involves mental images, seen by
the mind's eye, or heard by the mind's ear.

According to Berkeley and other British empiricists, all thought ultimately comprises of such images, which enter and exit from the stage of consciousness as the laws of association bid them.

But later research have shown it's quite very unlikely that thought is the simple kaleidoscope of mental pictures (or sounds and touches) that this view claims it to be.

Ofcourse Imagery plays an important role in thinking, but by no means an exclusive one, because lots of thoughts goes on without images.

A study was conducted to prove this. Several psychologists asked subjects to describe everything that went through their minds as they tried to solve various intellectual problems.

The solution frequently came without a trace of imagery and also without words.

The subjects reported that when their thought was both wordless and imageless, they often had a sense of certain underlying relationships, such as the experience of
"this doesn't go with that" or a "feeling of if or but".

Simply Put:

Mental images are evidently one of the elements of thought. But they are not the only ones.

Now to Abstract:

Mental images are somewhat like pictures. But some parts of thinking aren't like pictures at all. Instead, they're abstract and symbolic.

A good example, though by no means the only one is words.

Consider a picture of a mouse and compare it to the word mouse. The picture is in some ways quite different from the real animal. It represents a mouse rather than actually being one.

But even so, the picture has many similarities to the creature that it represents, because it looks quite a bit like a real mouse.

In contrast, take the word mouse. This word stands for the same long-tailed, big-eared, and bewhiskered creature that the picture represents.

But unlike the picture, the word has no similarity to the mouse. The relation between the sound "mouse" or the written, five-letter word mouse and the little long-tailed animal
that it represents is entirely arbitrary and symbolic.

Many psychologists believe that the kind of thinking that utilizes mental imagery differs from the kind that underlies words and sentences much as pictures differ from words.

In their view, the language-related form of thinking is more symbolic and abstract than the picture-like form that uses imagery. The attempt to describe the components of this more abstract level of thinking is relatively recent, at least for psychologists.

But some of the key items of such a description are already in the vocabulary of related disciplines such as logic and linguistics.

Examples are the terms concept and proposition, which we would be discussing in tomorrow's blog-isode.

The Bus Stops Here for today:

Thank you, friends, for staying with me through these blogisodes. Your thoughts and opinions are always welcome and appreciated. I'd be happy to hear them. We will build on this in tomorrow's blogisode. Until then, stay safe, friends.