On Thinking
Kevin Langdon
Thinking may be regarded as consisting of a number of steps: searching for patterns in a data stream display, conjecturing relationships among the elements observed, attempting to verify these relationships through direct observation, interposing constructs as inferential aids, drawing conclusions, and choosing the next display. These steps are examined in more detail below.
I’m observing where my attention is directed in order to ascertain what I’m up to at this moment (as well as what’s outside), as I’ve forgotten just as much as I estimated I could get away with and be brought back into context by the cues I expected to see. When my estimate is too high, I have redundant coverage and the opportunity to study the alternative ways my mind conceptualizes an object; when my estimate’s too low, I'm in the speechless state in which I have no memory hooks available for real-time retrieval the information I’ve been processing.
As I observe, I soon notice a particular unknown regularity in the overall perceptual pattern in time. At this point, I may reconnect broken threads of association, short out the bulk of short-term memory through confusion severe enough that my buffers are flushed reflexively to flush out self-contradictory reasoning, or take a new direction of thought suggested by the data before me.
In the first and third of these three cases, I’m in a position to make an informed conjecture regarding an underlying pattern; in the second case, I can only continue to watch.
The best verification is the simplest and most sense-based. I notice, however, that my way of verifying is paranoid at one moment and gullible the next: fear of a particular possible catastrophe or greed for a desired result turns my attention away from the global scanning which is its real duty; belief in suggestions randomly received from various sources also biases global attention. Such suggestions are valuable only insofar as they indicate new pathways. Beyond that point, they enslave the attention.
In drawing a conclusion, I synthesize a reasonable rule of thumb from the considerations brought to bear on the subject at hand, taking into account the biasing influence of my memory lapses and my failure to fully verify the elements of my working model. Rules of thumb derived in this way become part of my collection of inferential aids.
It is a poorly-recognized aspect of thinking, pointed out by William de Carle, that the mental apparatus selects aspects to be emphasized in the next thought cycle as part of each cycle. The activity of thinking also leaves an associative memory trace for each concept touched by a cycle of thought, in addition to whatever relationships I think through explicitly.