Thread: How do you think?

Maybe it depends on the left-right balance of the brain? I think in three spoken languages, the various coding languages I know, and images.

At it's base, it must be about signals and messages send from your mind to a section of the brain. When you look at somthing that appeals to you, I rekon a message is sent to another part of your brain that has seen this vision before and operates that area. This is proberly completely wrong but hey, we can all have an input.

Oh, and I think programmers think the most of all human beings!

I've never thought about it before. To be honest, I don't think of my thoughts as images or words. They're "just there". It's probably a linked list gone horribly wrong.

I do know that when I'm sitting idle, I can jump through a different topic of thought every second or two. For example, I could be watching television when a Coca-Cola commercial comes on. It might cause me to think about blood sugar, which leads me to running/jogging, which leads me to think about some of the older homes I pass by on my normal running route, which makes me think of the 1940s, which brings me to World War II, now onto the Manhattan Project and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The commercial hasn't finished yet as I look over to my wife and say "Boxcar".

"What?"
"Boxcar. The name of the plane that dropped the second atomic bomb."
"Okay."
"I think it flew in the first mission with the Enola Gay as the weather plane or something."
"Whatever."

As far as I know, I've always had this thought process of skipping around. It doesn't prevent me from focusing on things, but when I'm not paying attention to any particular topic, I really hop around.

I only think in images when I particularly require images, when I'm imagining things or when I remember visuals.

Otherwise I think in more or less complete sentences, in German (my native language), English or a mixture of both.

Bockscar. It bombed Nagasaki. But you couldn't have done it better Deckard. It's actually quiet extraordinary our mental capacity to establish relationships.

We think by relationship. That's how we do it. Conversely is also quiet extraordinary our brain incapacity to retain details. Sometimes we may even seem to think we know those details. Both other memories and experiences may have thwart them slightly. (two friends talking about a camping experience last year may come up with different stories and none of them is lying).

Retained details is what we fight harder to achieve. It can only be done through repetition and, again, by association. It's much easier to understand a formula when we are told how to apply it in the real world, for instance.

This is bits and pieces of what I read some time ago on a book by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.

I do both. I see images when trying to imagine something, but when doing something logical I think it through in English (or Spanish) sentences.

> Why on earth would a body attempt to kill itself?

Oxygen is in fact highly corrosive. Our survival was nature biggest mistake. Too late now.

Interesting question.
I believe thought is mostly a subconscious process. The words or images that you actually notice when thinking are just conclusions of the thought process that get stored in memory (or not) and can be used again as new input.
Basically, the bigger the leaps between the words/images you think of as thoughts, the harder your line of reasoning is to explain to someone else, because the only way to convey your thoughts is to repeat those intermediate conclusions to someone else, who then also has to subconsciously verify whether you didn't make any errors inbetween the different conclusions. Additionally, having too many intermediate conclusions in one line of thought will make it harder to follow for someone else as well because he has to store every step in his/her memory.

Maths, in a way, is a formalisation of the thought process because it explicitly states which steps between different intermediate conclusions are allowed and which are not. As humans, the subconscious thought steps we make are a result of experience (possible steps are dismissed when they produce the wrong results and get stored when they produce correct results; as a result steps that usually work but aren't necessarily always correct are stored as possible steps in our brain allowing for incorrect reasoning) and differ from person to person.

At least that's the way I view thought.

Anyway, when I think it's also mostly complete sentences in my head, mostly in Dutch, sometimes in English (particularly when thinking about technical subjects).