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Why do people think


Why People Think | Psychology Today

Thank God for broomsticks!

Cognitive science is all about showing that people's thinking isn't rational -- that their explanations are either expressions of gut reactions or justifications for their beliefs and lives. As Jonathan Haidt wrote in the New York Times:

I developed an idea from Howard Margolis, the distinguished social scientist who died in 2009, that two basic kinds of cognitive events are “seeing-that” and “reasoning-why.” (These terms correspond roughly to what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and others call “System 1” and “System 2” and that I call the “elephant” and the “rider.”) We effortlessly and intuitively “see that” something is true, and then we work to find justifications, or “reasons why,” which we can give to others.

Here's how these ideas manifest themselves in politics, psychology, and film.

Politics. Politics is an experiment to demonstrate how people bend reality to suit their belief systems. And recent events have managed to drive this obvious point home with triple force. First, Republicans explained away sagging Romney poll numbers by blaming inaccurate, biased polls. More recently, they have claimed that the improved economic picture is the result of Obama's manipulating unemployment figures reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But Democrats have simply outdone these puny Republican cognitive adjustments with their reactions to President Obama's remarkably feeble effort in his first debate with Mitt Romney. I reviewed these reactions in the Huffington Post. And when I sent the piece to my friends, I got these responses:

How do you debate with a liar who's response to everything is, "What? I never said that." What strategy is possible against someone like that?

My (silent) response was, "I don't know, isn't that what a debate's about?" A more sophisticated version:

Romney won the debate; Obama won the election. If Romney was to have a chance to win the election, he had to convince people that they couldn't trust Obama. Instead, he made claims and promises that, when challenged by Biden and Obama's team, will convince people that they can't trust him. Obama did the right thing by not playing on Romney's level. With a month to go, enough undecided voters will realize that he's the one they can trust.

Never mind that my HuffPost piece already included these reactions! Of course, I shared my good friends' frustrations -- but do their explanations really account for the events and their political consequences? Clever, yes, but reality-based? I don't think so. More like wistful thinking. Of course, Republicans' response, in order to justify their lives and worldviews, was (as I also said in the HuffPost piece) "Romney won because the conservative point of view he defended is the right one." Same as the Democratic reaction, but with a different brand.

But the best rationalization for Obama's failure, to my mind, was the one told me this morning by a gym-rat friend of mine, and attributed to Al Gore: "Obama's been running around the country and, exhausted, the high altitude in Denver impaired his cognitive functioning. " That's one worthy of the new neuorpsychology of everything! Which leads into the next section.

Neuropsychiatry. My previous post is about how the new neuropsychiatry of addiction, which claims that "addiction is all about the dopamine," makes no sense. As Maia Szalavitz quoted Larry Young, "a pioneering researcher on sexual and social bonding and co-author of The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction," in critiquing Naomi Wolf's Vagina, which explains women's depression as being due to dopamine failure through sexual frustration, "the fallacy is that she’s saying dopamine is primarily involved in sexual pleasure, and that’s not the case. Dopamine is involved in reward and motivation for everything we do in life — whether we’re eating good food, drinking good wine or interacting with our kids and family.” Relating women's sexual desire, feminism, and happiness to dopamine -- or why some things are addictive or some people become addicted to them -- is like saying these things are due to people having brains and nervous systems.

Here is an even a better description of how people turn to neuroscience as the best way to justify their personal beliefs and prejudices, as described by John Breur, author of The Myth of the First Three Years, a carpet bombing of the intensely faddish view that neuroscience tells us about making young kids smart and educating children. After "following research and awarding grants in education, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience," Bruer found that their claims, “especially those offered by childcare advocates who were not brain scientists, seemed farfetched. But that is not unusual in popular articles about science and research." Breur describes a colleague's report on a conference she attended in Colorado (aren't all such conferences held there?):

I had expected to hear about new research linking brain development, child development, and education. Instead, she began her briefing with a one-word description of the workshop: "Bizarre." She told me, and my subsequent reading of the workshop report confirmed, that there was little neuroscience presented in Denver and certainly none that I had not previously known about. There were, however, Susan told me, wide-ranging policy discussions, bordering on the nonsensical, in which early childhood advocates appealed to what might be most charitably described as a "folk" understanding of brain development to support their favorite policy recommendations. Reflecting on the Denver meeting and its report, it seemed as if there was, in fact, no new brain science involved in the policy and media discussions of child development. What seemed to be happening was that selected pieces of rather old brain science were being used, and often misinterpreted, to support preexisting views about child development and early childhood policy.

Films: Okay, what's this have to do with movies (and television)? People spend so much time -- all of their mental and emotional energy really -- justifying their existences, that they LOVE movies and TV series about people confronting life-and-death situations where all of their intellect and emotions are devoted to survival. That includes the "Mission Impossible" TV and movie series, the "Bourne" series, "The Hunger Games," "James Bond," "Star Wars," "Harry Potter," this weekend's top film ("Taken 2"), etc., etc. This paradigm also explains the success of television reality series, including "Survivor," "The Amazing Race," and the host of "survival TV shows." Screw belief systems and worldviews when everything depends on the reality-basis of your responses (the films' creators, on the other hand, made the movies and shows to justify their lives and Weltanschauungs).

Oh, you might not believe any of this, if it interferes with your standard paradigms for viewing and approaching the world.

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To understand how people think, look to their actions, not their words

Actions not only speak louder than words, they also happen first and faster, Stanford psychologist Barbara Tversky says. Catching a falling cup, rolling one’s eyes at a bad joke – responses like these happen before people find the words to describe their actions and emotions.

In a new book, psychology Professor Emerita Barbara Tversky says that spatial thinking is the foundation of thought and evolved long before language. (Image credit: Getty Images)

That’s why to understand how people think, Tversky argues that one must understand how people act and come to understand the world through their spatial reasoning. Spatial thinking is the foundation of thought and evolved long before language, she says.

Here, Tversky discusses the influence of spatial thinking on abstract thought and communication from her new book, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought.

Tversky is a professor emerita in psychology in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of psychology at the Teachers College at Columbia University. She is also the president of the Association for Psychological Science. She has published more than 200 articles about memory, categorization, language, spatial cognition, creativity, design and gesture.

 

In your book, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought, you say that spatial thinking, not language, is the foundation of thought. Why?

Spatial thinking comes from moving and acting in the world. All creatures must do so to survive. Actions in space create spatial representations in the brain; simply looking isn’t enough. There are far too many things and possible relations in the world to notice and represent in your mind. Spatial thinking evolved long before language and is supported by all our senses. Altogether half the cortex is involved in spatial thinking.

What’s amazing is that abstract thought uses the same brain circuitry that underlies spatial thought. Thinking is finding relations and paths between things. Just as our feet move from place to place along spatial paths, our minds move from thought to thought along conceptual paths.

Barbara Tversky (Image credit: Roslyn Banish)

Animals perform impressive feats of the mind, yet they seem to lack language as we know it. Babies wow their parents with their cleverness long before they can talk. Extraordinary and ordinary people alike think and make discoveries, both remarkable and mundane, by acting: Einstein imagining flying into space at the speed of light, an architect designing a building, a coach planning a football play and the players executing it. Dodging bicycles walking on campus. Or walkers when we bike. We quickly grasp each other’s actions and intentions and use those to plan our own. All that happens far too fast for words.

 

Are there other ways that spatial thinking is expressed?

We talk about actions on ideas as if they were actions on objects: We raise ideas, tear them apart, link them together. Our gestures reflect those actions. Gestures are often defined as actions on ideas. Usually we aren’t aware of our gestures, just as we’re not usually aware of selecting each and every word as we talk. Words simply pop out of our mouths and gestures from our bodies. Quite often, information gets expressed in gesture that doesn’t find its way to words. When people tell you how to get from A to B or how to do something – like open a lock or fold a shirt – watch their hands. Gestures are often more precise than words, and certainly more direct.

Gestures do more than help others understand. They actually help us think and talk. Try sitting on your hands and explaining a complex route or process. Research, our own and that of others, has shown that if people are prevented from gesturing when they speak, they have a harder time finding words, and if people are prevented from gesturing when they study complex descriptions, they don’t learn as well.

Gestures – actions of the body – serve as social glue, and our ability to quickly infer intentions, emotions and meaning from these actions enable us to work together.

 

Where else do we see visual-spatial communication?

Everywhere. In the ways we arrange our homes and the world, books ordered on bookshelves, dishes arranged by size and shape, 1-1 correspondences and repetitions in table settings and facades of building. You see it in maps, timelines, diagrams, graphs and sketches. Designers and artists say that the discoveries they make in their own sketches is a wordless conversation. Music, mathematical notation and even written language have crucial spatial components. Ancient maps, tallies and depictions of events have been found all over the world and fascinate us to this day.

“Gestures do more than help others understand. They actually help us think and talk.”

—Barbara Tversky

Maps are remarkable for another reason. Maps typically depict environments that can’t be seen from a single place. To make a map either in the mind or on paper, the mind needs to bring together information from many experiences, even multimodal ones. Some errors, predictable ones, inevitably arise from that integration. Here’s one from experiments we did long ago at Stanford: Most people mistakenly think that Berkeley is east of Stanford when in fact it’s west of Stanford. This seems to be because we upright the Bay Area in our minds.

Maps map real spaces and diagrams map conceptual spaces, both in orderly ways. Decades of research have shown that well-crafted maps, diagrams and graphs are more effective than language for conveying a broad range of concepts, certainly STEM concepts, but many others as well.

 

How can people apply your research to their lives and how they think about thinking and communicating?

Research into spatial thinking can give insight into how we think using the body and the world – what goes on under the tiny tip of the iceberg that is conscious.

90,000 “How people think” Read the online book 📙 author Dmitry Chernyshev on MyBook.ru

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In the phrase “creative thinking”, the key word is thinking. It is a creative act in itself. Everything new, interesting, complex is food for the mind, and the surrounding world supplies this food in abundance. And you can process the material into new ideas using the techniques from this book written by the famous Russian blogger (40,000 readers!) Dmitry Chernyshev, whose work as a creative director in an advertising agency has been associated with the daily generation of ideas for almost a decade and a half.

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Date of writing: January 1, 2013 volume: 273565
edition: 2017
ISBN (EAN): 9785001004752

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Reviews of the book "How do people think"

Rated the book

How do people think?
The same.
Such an unequivocal verdict to mankind is made by the author of the book and for more than three hundred pages he tries to argue and prove this idea. In his opinion, a person does not have exclusively his own opinion on any issue, and his entire consciousness is essentially woven from external factors that instill norms and values ​​in an individual from birth. And indulging in thoughts about something, an ordinary person thinks in exactly the same way as any other, even a genius.

The fact that we think in the same way as the geniuses thought, I think, should inspire optimism. There are no chosen ones. The difference between an ordinary person and a genius is only that an ordinary person thought or did a little and stopped, while geniuses continued to think and do.

The main obstacle facing people are the stereotypes with which a person is stuffed from his very birth, one way or another forming a limited personality in him. And this programming deprives him of the opportunity to go beyond the usual thought process.

We must pay tribute to the author, he does not try to prove his hypothesis, indulging in complex philosophical reflections for 300 pages. No, the whole book, by and large, is a huge compilation of all kinds of parables, legends, unknown facts, puzzles, reasoning and fantasies. Much of this can be seen by reading the author's personal blog, however, the collection of these notes under one roof makes this book unique in its kind. In the process of reading, you involuntarily join the game that the author has started, and, I must say, in this regard, the publication does not have any age limit.

This work is not something ingenious and innovative, but in general it serves a good idea: it calls to break down the walls inside the human mind, showing how boundless fantasy is and what abilities each of us has. To make it all come true, you just need to try a little. Somewhere like geniuses. Because we think we are the same with them.

P.S. Special thanks to the author for this paragraph. All teachers of literature should print it out and hang it on their wall.

Children should not be taught only by examples of "high" literature. They read the most interesting books outside of school, and this is basically wrong. In the first grade, one should read not poems about the Motherland and about nature, but Moomin, in the third grade - The Three Musketeers, in the seventh - Remarque and Maupassant.

If we proceed from the premise that the purpose of education is not to fill a bucket, but to kindle a fire, then Dostoevsky should be removed from the school curriculum. This is not a children's book at all. The main goal of literature lessons at school is to instill a love of reading. If this can be done, then the person will read all the necessary books himself. Continuing the metaphor of a fire lit in a person, Dostoevsky is a huge log that is placed on a small fire, preventing it from flaring up. At best, only one or two students in the class understand at least a little something in Dostoevsky. It's just an unbearable burden for children. And the knowledge that Raskolnikov killed the old woman with an ax has nothing to do with literature.

November 5, 2014

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Rated the book

I read a lot of popular science literature, so I already knew a lot of what is written in this book, especially thinking, education and human abilities. But the facts and quotes, of which there are a lot in the book, surprised and pleased me, but I didn’t always catch the logic, I couldn’t understand why they were here and what it was all about.

It is very difficult to admit that all people think in the same way, this is an obvious and banal fact that our brain constantly denies, like so many really logical things. The book contains many practical recommendations for the development of thinking and the brain as a whole. You need to learn to notice the little things, to divide the subject into components, to be able to observe and analyze, sometimes let your brain go "free swimming", in the sense of not straining and not trying to "give birth" to a thought, but give it information and wait. I read all these obvious things not in the first book, which is why they did not become a discovery for me and even disappointed me to some extent...
There are a lot of funny moments from history and life, very funny tasks and riddles, you can take note of them not only for development, but also to brag to your friends and amaze them with original riddles and interesting facts.

Definitely, this book is much better than most banal books on self-development, although not much from another area, but it is better to read it than some "Not Noah", it contains enough useful recipes for life and development, but only for those who do nothing haven't read anything like this yet.

March 16, 2020

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Ravenwyrd

Rated the book

This book is interesting only as a collection of quite informative (and often funny) cases and vivid, memorable quotes. D. It will not teach anyone to think "correctly" and easily generate new ideas, of course, magic does not happen, but it is quite possible to draw some food for thought from it. I remember the definition " twittering consciousness ". Quite important for a "modern person", unfortunately...

And, as an example...

When a person arrives in an unfamiliar city, he seems to get a second wind. something that the locals don't pay attention to, but what's interesting is that when he comes home, he seems to go blind

Two more... there is no other way to think than creative.) First of all, you must know yourself very well. Know what you like and when you think best.
The first will help you reward yourself for a good thought and, as a result, enjoy it. After all, the main condition for progress in any field is to enjoy the work that you are doing.
And the second stimulates the thought process. For example, Schiller was brought into a creative state by the smell of rotting apples, Zola tied himself to a chair, Wagner liked to hold silk in his hands, Charlotte Bronte peeled potatoes, Agatha Christie washed dishes. Milton, Rossini, Leibniz, Kant and Descartes worked while lying in bed, Beethoven poured ice water on his head. When Balzac lived in poverty, he wrote on the bare walls the names of objects that he would like to see in his house: "tapestry", "Venetian mirror", "chest of drawers", "painting by Raphael". This inspired him.
Someone thinks well in the rain, someone - sitting by the fireplace. The British believe that almost all great scientific discoveries were made in one of the three b - bus, bed, bath (bus, bed, bath).

The greatest danger awaiting your ship is the traps of meanings. These are reefs and shoals. The interlocutor listens attentively until you reach some key word: politics, painting, anarchy, feminism, the death penalty, contemporary art, parenting ... And then his own idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe subject turns on. Cloud of meanings surrounding this word. And from that moment on, he no longer listens to you - he wants to tell you his own story.

January 20, 2014

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Quotes from the book “How People think”

But the availability of knowledge leads to an interesting effect - people cease to value

April 6, 200003

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to become a spirit, a plant, an animal…), the most difficult thing is to be a human, and we have to use it… Buddha imagines a turtle at the bottom of the sea and a bracelet floating on the water. Once every six hundred years, the tortoise sticks its head out, and very rarely does its head stick into the bracelet. And the Buddha says, “It is no more common than with the turtle and the bracelet that we become human.” There was a good exhibition in New York a few years ago. The camera was loaded with film, put on the self-timer and thrown off the skyscraper. He flew, spinning, and shot what accidentally fell into the lens - windows, people in the windows, walls, a piece of the sky. And then crashed on the asphalt. The photographs taken by the camera in flight became the exposure. It seems to me that this photo session is a good metaphor for our life. Nobody asked us if we want to be born. Do these parents? In this country? Is it at this time?

April 6, 2021

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Borges had a beautiful metaphor in his lecture on Buddhism. He wrote about the probability of becoming a man: “Of all the fate that

April 6, 2021

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Dmitry Chernyshev

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90,000 Reviews: “As people think”, Dmitry Chernyshev

July 12, 2013knigs

0

Thinking is the height of bliss and the joy of life, the most valiant occupation of man. (с) Aristotle

The function of the brain, the stage of information processing, the highest level of cognition, the process of establishing connections between objects… All this is about thinking. A psychological and physiological mechanism that gives a person a reason (naively) to consider himself the crown of nature. After all, only we humans have creative thinking.

However, the author of this book claims that thinking is a creative act in itself, and everyone can think in a non-trivial way if they learn the ABC of thinking.

The author is Dmitry Chernyshev, one of the most popular Runet bloggers (more than 40,000 subscribers). Dmitry is a person with an original view of everyday life. This is noticeable primarily in his photographs (some of them are presented in the book). It is difficult to call him a photographer - Dmitry is a photo artist. Even just an artist.

During his life he changed many professions (from a loader to a creative director in an advertising agency), and the accumulated experience was put into an artistic word and published in the form of a book.

“How people think”, Dmitry Chernyshev

Twitterization of thinking

Some 7-10 years ago, I remembered dozens of phone numbers: my mother’s worker, sister’s house, girlfriends, pharmacy, school, railway ticket office, etc. And also postal addresses (with indexes!), birthdays.

Today only a couple of the most important dates and contacts are remembered. Everything else - disappeared, erased as unnecessary. After all, an electronic gadget and the Internet are always at hand - they will help out, remind, prompt. Comfortable? Still would! But alas, it's not safe.

Dmitry Chernyshev touched on a very important topic - twitterization (read - degradation) of thinking. The rapid development of technology greatly simplifies our lives. Too simplifies.

How to tie shoelaces? Google! How to cook dumplings? Google! How to take out a splinter? Google! How not to forget how to think?..

Unfortunately, the search engine will not give an answer to this question. Likes, tweets and reposts kill people's ability to think for themselves . The Internet has launched a process of global change in human thinking. Where it leads? Wait and see.

"How people think", Dmitry Chernyshev

Pros and cons of the book

Let's start with the "minuses". There are only two of them. Yes, and quotes are not accidental. "Cons" ≠ disadvantages. These are just personal feelings, something that was not enough, not enough.

  • Science. How People Think is not a non-fiction or even science-entertainment book. Just popular and entertaining. It contains hundreds of interesting historical facts that illustrate the process of thinking, but, in my opinion, do not explain it. The author's narrative lacked (slightly) medical background. I would like to slightly reveal the neurophysiological secrets of the human mind. Although, perhaps, this is my personal habit, instilled in other books of the MYTH, almost all foreign authors take scientific research as a basis.
  • Instructive. The book How People Think opens with an alphabet of thinking - very useful (sometimes funny) icons that subsequently guide the reader which mental process should be involved in this or that case. Also from time to time there are mini-tasks (for example: “Imagine that you decided to found a new religion…”). But all this does not add up to a complete guide to action. Of course, this book is not a textbook. But I wish it had more tasks. It would also be great to make a site where readers can post their brilliant ideas (yes, yes - each of you is a bit of a genius).

Pros