Thinking || Nature of Thinking || Building Blocks of Thought || Culture and Thinking || NCERT Based Notes

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Introduction and Nature of Thinking:

Thinking can be understood as a mental activity directed at solving a problem, making inferences, judging certain facts, and deciding and choosing between options.

Thinking is the base of all cognitive activities or processes and is unique to human beings. It involves manipulation and analysis of information received from the environment.

For example, while seeing a painting, you are not simply focusing on the colour of the painting or the lines and strokes, rather you are going beyond the given text in interpreting its meaning and you are trying to relate the information to your existing knowledge.

Thinking, therefore, is a higher mental process through which we manipulate and analyse the acquired or existing information. Such manipulation and analysis occur by means of abstracting, reasoning, imagining, problem solving, judging, and decision-making .

Thinking is mostly organised and goal directed. All day-to-day activities, ranging from cooking to solving a math problem have a goal. One desires to reach the goal by planning, recalling the steps that one has already followed in the past if the task is familiar or inferring strategies if the task is new.

Thinking is an internal mental process, which can be inferred from overt behaviour. If you see a chess player engrossed in thinking for several minutes before making a move, you cannot observe what he is thinking. You can simply infer what he was thinking or what strategies he was trying to evaluate, from his next move.

Building Blocks of Thought:

Thinking relies on knowledge we already possess. Such knowledge is represented either in the form of mental images or words. People usually think by means of mental images or words.

Suppose you are travelling by road to reach a place, which you had visited long back. You would try to use the visual representation of the street and other places. On the other hand, when you want to buy a storybook your choice would depend upon your knowledge about different authors, themes, etc. Here, your thinking is based on words or concepts.

Mental Image:

Try to remember your earlier experience in reading a map, remembering the different places and subsequently locating them in a physical map in your examination. In doing this, you were mostly forming and using mental images.

An image is a mental representation of a sensory experience; it can be used to think about things, places, and events.

Concept:

A concept thus, is a mental representation of a category. It refers to a class of objects, ideas or events that share common properties.

Why do we need to form concepts?

Concept formation helps us in organising our knowledge so that whenever we need to access our knowledge, we can do it with less time and effort. In the library, you have seen books organised as per subject areas and labelled so that you would be able to find them quickly with less effort. Thus, for making our thought process quick and efficient, we form concepts and categorise objects and events.

Levels Of Concepts:

Concepts usually fall into hierarchies or levels of understanding. The levels are classified as:

• superordinate (the highest level),
• basic (an intermediate level),
• and subordinate (the lowest level).

While speaking we mostly use basic level concepts. When a person says, “I saw a dog” a basic level is used. Such a statement is much more likely to be made than “I saw a four legged animal that barks and wags its tail” or “an animal”. The first (subordinate) is far too specific than is needed for conversation, while the second (superordinate) is far too vague to convey the intended message.

Children also learn basic level concepts first and then the other levels.

Most of the concepts people use in thinking are neither clear nor unambiguous. They are fuzzy. They overlap one another and are often poorly defined. For example, under which category would you put a small stool? Would you put it under the category of ‘chair’ or under the category of ‘table’? The answer to these questions is that we construct a model or prototype .

Prototype:

A prototype is the best representative member of the category. Eleanor Rosch argues that in considering how people think about concepts, prototypes are often involved in real life. In prototype matching, people decide whether an item is a member of a category by comparing it with the most typical item(s) of the category.

Culture and Thinking

Our beliefs, values, and social practices influence the way we think. In a study conducted on American and Asian students, pictures like the following (underwater scene) were used. The subjects were asked to have a look at the scene for a brief period and then were asked to describe what they saw. The American students focussed on the biggest, brightest, and most outstanding features (for example, “the large fish swimming to the right”). In contrast, the Japanese students focussed on the background (for example, “the bottom was rocky” or “the water was green”).

Based on these kinds of findings, researchers concluded that Americans usually analyse each object separately which is called “analytical thinking”. Asian people (Japanese, Chinese, Koreans) think more about the relationship between objects and backgrounds, which is called “holistic thinking”.

Analytic thinking involves understanding a system by thinking about its parts and how they work together to produce larger-scale effects. Holistic thinking involves understanding a system by sensing its large-scale patterns and reacting to them.