The Nature of Thoughts
Have you ever wondered what is a thought, how thoughts come about, and how we are able to think in different capacities?
The human mind has been quite impenetrable throughout humanity’s history, with the exception of a few deeply introspective individuals and philosophers who broke some ground. But over the last few decades, we’ve been slowly lifting the veil on the nature of our minds. These breakthroughs were achieved through the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and other cognitive sciences. Before we discuss what a thought is, however, we have to cover some basic ground about the nature of the human mind, and the human experience.
We Predict the World into Being
Generally speaking, our brains work by using perceptual and conceptual models that represent different aspects of our world. Most of the fundamental models are built during our childhood years. These conceptual models are then used by our brains to swiftly predict and present the world to us, rather than having to constantly process the overwhelming sensory information coming in from the environment. This is to prevent us from falling into an endless processing loop of catching up with the world’s rapid moment-to-moment events.
Similar conceptual models are built by the brain to predict and create the sensations and feelings coming from the body, and this same principle of prediction applies to action, cognition, language, and music.
The process of predicting what’s in the environment is what we call perception, or more specifically exteroception; these are our senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. When the brain turns its predictions towards the external part of our body, it is called proprioception, and it is how we know the location of our body parts even without looking at them, and it is also how we know our position in the environment. Finally, when the brain turns its predictions to the internal body we call it interoception, this is how we perceive the feelings coming from within us, how we can feel our heart beat, and how we can feel our empty stomach churn from hunger.
So Does the Brain Process or Predict?
You might be wondering why I’m using the word predicting as opposed to perhaps processing, well the reason for this is that our intuition gives us the impression that the brain operates on an outside-in perspective. Which means that we receive information from the external environment, which then travels in through the sensory organs and into the brain for “processing”. This is absolutely true, but it does not convey the full picture. In actuality, the brain mostly operates on an inside-out perspective, where the brain pushes out its prediction models of what’s happening in the environment, and then matches it against the information coming in. When there is a prediction error between what the brain expects and what is actually perceived, the brain corrects its internal representation model. This mechanism is what ultimately shapes our attention, perception, and motivation…whether we realize it or not.
This means that instead of seeing the objective reality out there, we are actually only seeing a subjective model or representation of the reality that is generated by our brain. To make this point even clearer, you might recall #TheDress, the post that sparked an internet debate in 2015 over whether the color of a dress was white and gold, or blue and black. Both sides were insistent that they were seeing a different color than the other, so what was happening here, who was right?
The truth is, both sides were right, neuroscientist Dr. Anil Seth explains in an interview with The Guardian “The version that people saw depended on whether their brain had taken into account an adjustment for ambient lighting when generating their reality. People who spent more time indoors were more likely to see the dress as blue and black, because their prediction machine was primed to factor in yellowish lighting when preparing the hallucination”
So What are Thoughts?
Cognition is when the brain tries to predict what will happen next. Emotions are the continuous synthesis of both our interoceptive feelings and our cognitive reasoning in relation to the environment. Emotions and reason are intimately intertwined and should not be separated. In fact, you can think of emotions as the goal-based modality of cognition, and reasoning as the instrument-based modality of cognition, one provides us with the why, the other provides us with the how. Individuals with damage to certain brain regions can lose their emotional capacity, preventing them from making the most basic decisions, simply because no emotional value is “assigned” to any decision and hence inhibiting effective reasoning.
Building on the above, since cognition gives us the how which gets translated into action; we can simplify cognition as internal action, or an internal form of responding. To clarify, we always have motivations arising within us, when these motivations are very strong (e.g. survival urges), they can drive us to a reflexive action that happens relatively outside of our control; however, when these motivations are normal, we have the chance to internally respond before acting.
Think about the following questions…Should I go to the kitchen and cook dinner, or should I order takeout? Should I drive to the lake, or should I call a cab? Note how all these thoughts are action-oriented, and even our abstract thoughts are rooted either in action, or in a representation of some aspect of the world. We are only able to mentally visualize planets rotating around the Sun, because we’ve seen how physical objects can spin and move as a result of forces acting on it. Do also note how we constantly use physical actions and objects to fill in for abstract metaphors, for example, “we are cut from the same cloth”.
Ways of Thinking
This brings us to two different types of thinking that we constantly use, verbal and visual thinking. Verbal thinking, or inner speech, is sometimes also referred to as symbolic thinking, since it is rooted in the abstract symbols of language. We can also deploy visual thinking and imagery; where we imagine the preparation of the meal we’re going to cook, or the lake we’re heading to.
These two ways of thinking are innate to us all; however, if a child was never taught language, they will never develop inner speech, they might develop a limited form of symbolic thinking on their own, but even this would be quite a difficult feat to accomplish. On the other hand, some individuals are born with a condition called aphantasia, and they cannot visualize imagery in their mind’s eye. In short, both are ways of thinking that are impacted by genetics and the environment, but if we already have the propensity for one of them, they can be improved over time.
We also have two modes of thinking, both of which can operate in a verbal and visual capacity. These two modes are what Dr. Daniel Kahneman refers to as System 1 and System 2 thinking in his 2011 book “Thinking Fast and Slow”. He details how System 1 is fast, instinctive, emotional, and gives us “good enough” predictions, while System 2 is slower, more deliberative, more logical and gives us precise predictions. Note that system one’s “good enough” predictions are prone to biases, and ultimately depend on the quality of the brain’s conceptual models (i.e. experience and knowledge).
One way of simplifying these two modes of thinking is what we usually refer to as our conscious and subconscious minds. Thoughts that easily come to the mind are mostly generated by the subconscious system 1, while deliberate and consciously guided thinking is managed by the conscious system 2. If I ask you what is the the sum of 2 + 2, you automatically know the answer, no effort required, hence system 1. Whereas if I ask you to solve 524 x 3, you’ll begin guiding, structuring and sequencing your thoughts in a purposeful manner through system 2, and might visualize the arithmetic or use a pen and paper. This requires mental effort, but if similar problems are repeated enough times, your brain’s arithmetic model will improve and the changes will get carved into your nervous system…eventually being deployable through system 1 in the future.
Even though these discoveries were made by Dr. Daniel Kahneman through the approach of psychology. Dr. Gyorgy Buzsaki explains in his 2019 book, “The Brain from Inside Out” how he arrived to similar conclusions through the approach of neuroscience. Our brains have many different types of neurons, but they tend to be roughly divided into small, rigid, and strongly firing neurons, that readily respond to little stimulation and represent the neuronal minority. We also have large, flexible, weakly firing neurons, which require strong stimulation to fire and represent the majority. When we use system 1, in a sense, we are using the strongly firing rigid neurons since they are energetically efficient for the brain, system 2 is underpinned by the weakly firing flexible neurons that are energy intensive and hence can give us “mental strain” and lead to mental fatigue.
What this all means in daily life is that the brain’s default and preferred way of being is system 1; which is plagued with cognitive biases and superstitious thinking (in the absence of rich knowledge and experience). Not only that, but system 1 is also driven by our emotional instincts and can therefore, easily get us in trouble during heated and uncertain situations. Yet because of system 2, we have the ability to stand back in the moment and avoid an immediate system 1 reaction, by directing our attention and thoughts towards alternative actions and responses. Whenever an answer comes to mind with no roots in our memories, experiences, or knowledge, we should not take that answer as immediately being correct or true. In actuality, we should second guess ourselves in these moments and think deeper, in search for better answers; whilst still being mindful of not falling into the abyss of overthinking.
30-Second Recap
Our perception of our external and internal worlds is more of a constructive and predictive process within the brain, rather than a passive reading out of the environment.
Thoughts are the brain’s attempt to predict what happens next, they are internalized actions, and provide us with the opportunity to efficiently simulate responses in our minds before we choose the means to achieve an end…one that is rooted in our feelings and emotions.
Thoughts can be verbal or visual, and both types of thoughts can be improved with training. We have our subconscious, fast, system 1 thinking that brings thoughts into our awareness, and then we have the slow, conscious, system 2 thinking that works to improve and/or filter out what’s brought up via system 1.
System 1 thinking is easy and friction-free, but it is only consistently reliable in our modern world when enriched with robust mental models, experience, and knowledge. System 2 is energy intensive, hence requiring mental effort, and can eventually give us mental fatigue. This doesn’t mean that we should avoid or minimize system 2 thinking simply because it’s uncomfortable, instead, we should learn to use it wisely when the situation calls for it.
