Psychology for Dummies (15 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
In this part . . .
P
art III covers human thought, which psychologists call cognition. I discuss both the content of thought and the thought process here. I include a discussion of the concept of intelligence and the different theories of “being smart.” I also cover emotion and motivation in this part. Definitely check this part out if you’re interested in love. Or, if you’d rather read about being angry, there’s something here for you as well.
In This Chapter
Thinking about thinking
Turning on your mind’s computer
Processing ideas
Reasoning like Spock
B efore I talk about the complex psychological area of thinking, here’s a little mental experiment. For background, imagine yourself lying in your bed having just awakened from a good night’s sleep. You reach over to shut off your annoying alarm, toss the blankets to the side, and head for the bathroom. Now, here’s the experimental part. When you get to the bathroom, you forget why you’re in there. The answer may seem obvious because you just got out of bed and walked straight to the bathroom, but you’ve forgotten. You look around and can’t figure out where you are. Nothing seems familiar, and you’re surrounded by a strange world of shapes, figures, objects, sounds, and lights. You look into an object that reflects an image of some other thing back at you, but you don’t know what it is. You’re confused, disoriented, and basically lost. Your mind is completely blank. You can’t even think of anything to say in order to cry out for help. You’re stuck there. What are you going to do?
If the example seems a little strange, or at least a little abstract, it’s for a reason. The situation would be pretty strange. What would it be like if you had no ability to think? The bathroom example might be what it’s like. You couldn’t recognize objects. You couldn’t solve any problems. You couldn’t communicate. You’d really be in trouble. You wouldn’t even be able to figure out how to get out of the bathroom. Have you ever heard the saying, “You couldn’t fight your way out of a wet paper bag?” In this case, you couldn’t
think
your way out of a wet paper bag, or the bathroom either.
We rarely notice our thinking. It’s like background music, always there but never obvious. Thinking seems so automatic and effortless. I used take my “mind” for granted, and I rarely paid any attention to it. The only time that I really sat up and took notice of my mind was when it went on vacation. I guess I didn’t really know what I had until it was gone. But how would I know if my mind was gone, if I didn’t have one anymore? That topic is better left for late night philosophy sessions at the local coffeehouse. For the purposes of this chapter, you can assume that we all have a mind, and that all of us possess the ability to think.
What exactly is thought? A bit later in this chapter, I ask you to analyze your own thought processes, so it would help if you knew what you were analyzing. In psychology, thought or thought processes are called
cognition
or
cognitive processes
, the mental processing of information including memorizing, reasoning, problem solving, conceptualizing, and imagining.
Studying thinking is pretty hard to do. Why? It’s hard to see! If I opened up your skull and looked inside, would I see thinking? No, I’d see a wrinkly-looking, grayish-pink thing (in other words your brain). In the early years of psychological research on thinking, psychologists asked people participating in studies on thinking to engage in something called introspection.
Introspection
is the observation and reporting of one’s own inner experience. Psychologists gave participants a simple math problem to solve and asked them to talk out loud as they performed the calculations. These exercises were intended to capture the steps involved in the thinking process.
Try it! Get a piece of blank paper and a pencil. Your instructions are to solve the following math problem and write down each step that you take, one by one:
47,876 + 23,989
The answer you came up with should have been 71,865. If not, don’t worry about it; we’ve all got our weaknesses. Actually, if you got the wrong answer, the introspection technique may be able to show you what you did wrong. Take a second to go over each of the steps you went through to solve the problem.
You’ve just participated in a psychological experiment, and it didn’t hurt a bit, did it? The introspection technique should have been able to capture your thought processes related to a relatively simple problem-solving task.
Now, imagine how hard it would be to use introspection to analyze all of your thoughts. It would be pretty difficult, if not impossible. Part of the reason psychologists don’t use introspection anymore is that it is too simple. It can’t capture the sophisticated thought processes. These days, psychologists use computer modeling and other complex means of researching thought. Another reason introspection fell out of favor is that some of the most important aspects of thinking — those that we tend to take for granted — are not readily available for our evaluation. No matter how far inside our mind we look, we still can’t discover its building blocks; we only experience its final products.
With the advent of the modern computer, psychologists and related investigators began to look at the operations performed by computers, called
computing
or
computation,
as potential models for human thought. This was a significant breakthrough. Using the computer as a model for how thinking occurs is called the
computational model of mind
(and thinking). The idea is both profound and simplistic: The mind, and all of its complex processes, such as perceiving, thinking, problem solving and all the rest, are an information-processing procedure, a computation. The mind is an information processing machine.
Your mind goes through four basic steps when processing information:
1. Stimulus information from our senses reaches the brain. (You see Michael Jackson moonwalking for the first time.)
2. The meaning of this information is analyzed. (Your brain thinks, “Wow. Those are phat dance moves.”)
3. Different possible responses are generated. (Your brain tries to figure out how he’s doing that dance.)
4. A response is executed and monitored for feedback. (You throw off your shoes and try it out on the kitchen floor.)
So, thinking is a process that involves the analyzing of information. But what is “information?” For starters, consider that thinking is always about some
thing
or things. When I’m thinking, I’m thinking about something or some object a car, a person, an event, and so on. What kinds of “things” or objects does a computer use in its calculations? Consider a calculator, one of the most common types of information processors. What kinds of objects does a calculator use in its operations? Numbers or symbols, right? Thinking involves the processing of mental or thought symbols. Thought symbols are mental representations of objects in our world. The following paragraph illustrates this point.
Sit back for a second, get comfortable, and conjure up an image of a pink rose in your mind. Concentrate so that the image is clear, the green stem and leaves, the pink petals, the thorns, and so forth. Try to imagine the rose in detail. If someone comes into the room as you’re doing this and asks if there is a rose in the room, what would you say? If there isn’t actually a rose in the room, then you’d say “no.” But consider the idea that there is actually a rose in the room, or at least it’s in the room because there’s one inside your mind, the rose that you’re thinking of. So, if I cut open your skull and looked into your head, I’d see a pink rose, right? Of course not! The rose only “exists” in symbolic or representational form inside of your mind. When you read the word “door” on this page, you have an image of a door in your mind. You have the thought of “door.” How is this possible? Symbolic representation! The word “door” is a linguistic mental symbol for that wooden (typically), rectangular thing attached to the front of your house.
Thinking consists of symbols that represent information about our world and the objects within it and the manipulation of those symbols. The mental manipulation of these symbols is based on combining, breaking down, and recombining symbols into more complex strings or systems of symbols that have meaning. Take the word “door” again. It consists of simpler parts called letters, and the specific combination of those letters gives rise to the specific word and image of the object called “door.” The letters could be rearranged to spell the word “odor,” which is an entirely different thing and thus an entirely different thought. Hopefully you can see that even a simple system like the alphabet can give rise to an almost infinite set of larger and more meaningful symbols or representations.
Where do all these symbols come from? The symbols are generated by sensing things in the world. When I see a rose, there’s a corresponding symbolic representation of that rose in my mind as I think about it.
Turing’s challengeAlan Turing came up with something called the
Turing test.
A popular parlor game at the time involved placing a man and a woman behind two different doors; guests had to communicate with them by typewritten notes. The point was to guess correctly who was the man and who was the woman based only on their answers to questions of your choosing. Turing proposed the comparison be changed to a computer and a human being — and if guests were unable to determine whether the computer or the human being were answering their questions, the computer would have to be considered intelligent
.
