New Minds, New Thoughts, New Future
How the Boundaries of Thoughts and Minds are Being Re-shaped, and What that Means for Us
I’ve been obsessed with thinking for some time now. I want to understand how we can do it better. But in order to improve any process, you need to have some understanding of how the current one works. Nor do we know as much as we’d like to about the supposed place where thinking happens: in the mind. For all the work that various disciplines have done, there is still so much about thinking and minds that we just don’t understand — but not for lack of trying.
The What and How of Thinking
Part of the problem is the subjectivity of thought. Scientists — whether psychologists or neuroscientists — know plenty about what happens in the brain when people report certain thought processes or experiences. But we don’t yet have a way to know the subjective “what it’s like” of those experiences — as people have them. This might be something we could ignore, if only such experiences were incidental to the meat of thinking and basically bland in nature. But that is not the case. Our subjective experience while we’re engaged in thought is complex and difficult to describe. What’s more, in many cases that subjective experience can be what motivates us to follow a given train of…
