Ever thought on how we think?

“I do not like this person”

“It seems like a good idea”

“I wonder what does this mean”

It is said that humans create more than 6000 thoughts every day on average. In this age of information overload, our brains are constantly bombarded with information. We create thoughts and opinions about them. We do not stop to consider our source of opinions. Consequently, the thoughts make us feel good or bad, depending on our feelings related to them.

In this day and age, we need to calm our minds and be intentional about our mental health. Our thoughts affect us. Because of this, we need to understand how our thoughts are made. This will help us know the trappings of how our primary ways of thinking deceive us from real information.

Let us understand in simple words.

Thinking: Humans communicate information with each other. When the information comes to a human through his senses, he goes through the mental activity to organize and understand the information. This mental activity is called thinking.

There are three primary methods through which humans think on a day-to-day basis to function effectively. Let us try to understand them carefully.

• Mental Imagery
• Concepts
• Prototypes

Mental Imagery: Suppose right now, if I ask you to visualize a mountainous area where people go on tour in winters, what will you see? Your probable image would be dense morning fog, faint lines of mountains, cloudy sky, and a very calm atmosphere. But how did this happen? It happens because of our short-term memory which is also our working memory. It is responsible to gather and store information which we use daily and rapidly. It also happens that short term memories are stored in the form of sounds and visual information.

As humans, we make a lot of decisions by seeing things and gather information. This is the reason images get more attention than written material. Mental Imagery has practical applications too. Humans develop their ability to navigate through space. For example, we look in all directions when we need to carefully park a vehicle or cross the road. While designing our home, we make a mental representation to estimate which piece of furniture will fit with which one.

Research shows that making a mental image and seeing an image are treated as two almost opposite activities by the brain. When we see an actual image, the image goes from the eyes to the visual cortex of the occipital lobe (part of the brain responsible for processing visual images). After that, it reaches other parts of the brain from which older information is compared with newly seen images and we make sense of the image in front of us. But when we make a mental image, other parts of the brain that have old information send the information to the visual cortex and we perceive images in the ‘mind’s eye’ (Kosslyn et al. 1993, Sparing et al. 2002). Research also shows we are able to mentally rotate images also (Shepherd and Metzler, 1971, Kosslyn, 1983)

There is an absolutely fun part of imagery also: We make up daydream of a better life which makes us feel relaxed during stressful times. But this is also the reason why Instagram is so popular. We conclude through constructed and beautiful images that the person’s life must be beautiful too. This is where we need to understand that we need to be very careful on how to interpret images.

Concepts: We humans love to categorize things we see. We love fitting everything into boxes and groups. This helps us to not overthink something and waste our time and energy. This method of thinking also is a type of mental representation. Concepts are the representation of a category. Concepts contain important features that can help us identify an object. Not only this, but it also allows us to identify the new object which may fit in the concept.

There are four different types of concepts. Let us understand them one at a time.

• Superordinate Concept: In this mental representation, we process an object very simple and general category such as “animal”, “fruit”. E.g. We see an apple and call it a fruit.
• Subordinate Concept: Here we see an object and become very specific with its categorization. If we take the previous example of fruit and see an apple, in this concept we go one step ahead. We also say it is a Kinnaur apple. So the concept becomes very specific in the category.
• Formal Concept: Here the concepts are defined by very strict and specific rules and features. Formal concepts are the ones that come in our education system. E.g.  Only flowering plants produce fruits
• Natural Concept: The opposite of formal concept, here people see an object and categorize it due to their experiences with the real world. While formal concepts have very strict rules for categorization, natural concepts have less strict rules. The natural concepts, therefore, are unclear and fuzzy. There are no natural categories of fruits and vegetables, yet we have made the categories for our ease. E.g. we all know that tomato is technically a fruit but we categorize it as a vegetable.

The fuzziness of natural concepts makes us realize that there are many things in the world that are not easy to categorize or fit in one group. This helps us to look beyond the traps of categories and see the concept and its features carefully instead of fearing and shunning it.

Prototypes: It is a subcategory of concept. When we say concept we have anyone example of a category. But in the case of the prototype, we have the best example of a category. When a person asks us to think about fruits, the first example we get is always an apple. This means Apple is the best example i.e. prototype of the category ‘fruits’. Very rarely we will visualize strawberry or papaya as an immediate example of the category of ‘fruits’.

            There are some interesting twists here: exposure plays a big role in forming a prototype. Research has shown that people who grew up around coconut trees thought they are the more prototypical examples of fruit than mangoes. People who grew up in hills saw apples as more prototypical fruit (Aitchison, 1992). Research also shows that expertise also plays a role when it comes to forming prototype. It is seen that when experts at studying tree think about the best example of a tree, they tend to give an example of a tree which has ideal characteristics of the concept of tree, regardless of which tree they grew up with. Non-experts tend to give examples of trees they grew up around. This means familiarity is important for non-experts to cite an example of the prototype (Lynch et al, 2000, Shafto and Coley, 2003)

Just like every topic in psychology, culture plays a vital role in prototyping too. Research shows Americans do not consider the bicycle as a prototype of the vehicle for every day whereas Europeans do (Basile, 2007). There is also a gender difference in prototyping. While cars and buses were agreed as best examples of vehicles, Men ranked submarines as lower than average examples of a vehicle, Women were not sure to rank submarines as vehicles (Basile, 2007).

It is seen that because a concept is any other example and prototype is a best example, people have a difficulty in bridging gap between the two. For example, people took longer time in thinking about olives and tomatoes as fruits because the primary quality of sweetness present in fruits was missing from these both (Rosch and Mervis, 1975).

Thumbanail Image Courtesy: Diego / Unsplash

Article Images Courtesy: Jonathan Cosens (thinking girl) / Unsplash

The post ends here. In the next post, I will focus on problem-solving methods .