Exploring the Depths of Thought: Problem Solving.

2 months ago

So far in this blog-isode series, our concern has been with the elements of which thought is composed.

Let's now turn from the question of What, to the question of How.

How does thinking operate as we try to solve the myriad of problems encountered in life, whether it's trying to fix a broken lawn mower, smoothing over an awkward social situation,
or solving an anagram?

Regarded in this context, thinking is an activity. It is something an organism
does. Locke, Berkeley, and their many descendants believed that this stream of
activity is produced by a chain of associated ideas, each triggered by the one before.

The fundamental difficulty of this position is that thinking, like every other activity of the organism, is organized.

The individual items in any activity an organism is engaged in generally do not
stand in isolation, but take their meaning from the overall structure in which they
are embedded.

This holds for thought as well as action. A famous paper by Karl Lashley(an American psychologist) illustrates this point with examples from the psychology of language.

Uttering a sentence is not just a matter of stringing one word after another, for the selection of a word often depends not only on the immediately preceding word but upon others spoken both earlier and later.

In English, we say "The dog runs" rather than "the dog run", because the verb and subject must agree with each other. This agreement rule governs our speech even when the subject comes many words after the verb, as in "Down the street runs the excited, barking, hungry, flea-bitten dog.

The fact that we produce the verb with a third-person singular "S" indicates that there is a broad mental scheme that precedes the
actual utterance and determines its various parts.

In effect, there was a mental plan that provided the outline according to which the specific words were produced.

What holds for speech holds for many other activities, including problem solving. The problem solver goes through a sequence of internal steps. These steps are
organized in a special way: They are directed toward a goal-the solution of the problem.

Let's consider a taxi driver who is trying to decide on the best route from the
City to the airport. According to a simple chain-association hypothesis, the initial
stimulus ("Get me to the airport in time for a 9:15 flight") triggers various internal responses (such as "superhighway," "crosstown express," etc.) until the correct solution is inally evoked.

Source

Fascinated already?

But this interpretation cannot readily
explain why the would-be solutions that come to mind, whether right or wrong, are usually relevant to the problem at hand.

Nor can it explain how such potential solutions are accepted or rejected.

If they were merely aroused by associative
connections, the problem solver would be adrift in a sea of irrelevancies: cross-town express" might evoke "uptown local" or "crossword puzzle."

Instead, each mental step is determined not just by the step before but by the original problem.

This sets the overall direction which dominates all of the later steps and determines how each of them is to be evaluated.

The taxi driver considers the super highway and rejects it as he recalls some road construction along the way, thinks
of the crosstown express and dismisses it because of rush-hour traffic, and so on.

The original problem acts like a schematic frame, waiting to be filled in by a "fitting" solution.

Given this frame, the irrelevant word association crossword puzzle" never enters his mind.

Thanks the Power of the Brain family 🧠.

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.♥️