50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...
by Tyler Volk
Day 15 - The Braided Streams of Thinking
Thinking needs definition. The obvious, default assumption is that thinking is the inner language heard in the head. It is the inner voice, or inner dialogue, the sentences that comment, admonish, instruct, (give orders—yikes!), rehearse future conversations, and on and on (and often much too much, on and on).
This morning, in bed, awake at four AM, thinking about thinking, I observed what seemed to be a number of substantial feeder streams (brooks?) to the overall stream (or river?) of consciousness. I experimented with each flow in turn serving as a focus for attention, as a trail to follow. Can each feeder stream be considered a type of thinking?
Inner language, the default, is probably the easiest to agree on. We all have it in abundance. It is like conversation, only with yourself. Other inner “people” can chime in during an inner dialogue, so the mental chatter can be truly conversational. But no one other than yourself is talking. It seems uncontroversial that we internalize actual flows in thinking that we hear in real conversations with others, and then use those flows as prompts and templates for our own dialogue-type thoughts. Perhaps as children all we had were real conversations, but then eventually we learned to talk to ourselves in our heads, silently. Now the inner speech even flows when I write, as I hear but do not hear with ears the words I type to myself.
We can also have an inner stream of images, which, as seen, plays into the process of desire. Often a sequence of images is accompanied by inner speech, for instance, when we rehearse upcoming scenes in the theatrics of our lives. Sometimes the images flow by themselves, as geometric shapes or colors, or even memories without sounds. Although I call them a flow, usually they are more sliced and diced than inner speech. Images can be rich, because they mimic, though distinctly weaker than, the sumptuousness of the actual visual world.
Because it is auditory, the stream of inner music is similar to inner speech, and it could be considered a kind of thinking as well. The obsessive-compulsive repeating riffs and lyrics in my own inner music often seem more like breathing than thinking. But imagine a Mozart or Beethoven composing with their inner stream of music, and then writing from within the mind the results heard down on paper, with a few edits here and there. Clearly, a Beethoven composing a piano sonata is thinking.
Theorists have noted similarities between music and the structure of language. Notes or phrases are like words, which build into musical sentences, then paragraphs and chapters, all within the grand book of, say, a symphony or pop CD. My own musical thoughts become much closer to what I would call real thoughts with real variety when I let them flow forth into the world as I “think” them, for example, when I’m jamming on real guitar to a cycle of chords in my head. For me, this is exploratory, melodic daydreaming.
The three types of streams of thinking I’ve considered so far have their outer world expressions: real conversations for speech, sketching or making photos for imagery, listening to actual music. These streams of thinking, in either purely inner forms or as interactive modalities with the world outside our skin, correspond to three of what Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner has called seven “forms of intelligence.” The three so far are verbal, artistic-visual, and musical. Are Gardner’s other forms of intelligence also kinds of “thinking”?
Mathematics, Gardner’s fourth form, seems to fit the bill, and it, too, can be done either “in the head” or in collaboration with the material world of pen-and-paper or computer programs. Gardner’s fifth intelligence, the kinesthetic, is the kind that dancers and athletes excel in. Using our bodies is a kind of thinking. Psychologist Merlin Donald has developed a persuasive theory that shows how, during the course of the evolution of human intelligence, coordinated and culturally-encouraged movements with the body could have led to a symbolic nonverbal “language” that preceded complex spoken language.
Number six on the hit parade of intelligences is interpersonal communication. At first glance, that seems identical to language. But there is another way to think about thinking during communication that focuses more on the emotional resonance that happens between people. Indeed, Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker, in their book The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intelligence Evolved from our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans, claim that emotional resonance and signaling (for example, the back-and-forth smiling of mother and infant), create the groundwork in young brains for the later cognitive capacity for higher conceptual thought. Thus emotional empathy could be considered a form of thinking. It is interesting that the prominent thinkers noted here for the emergence of human linguistic thinking have pointed out how language might have piggy-backed on other, evolutionarily earlier cognitive modes. Some forms of thinking might therefore serve as a platform for others in our cognitive systems.
Gardner’s seventh form of intelligence is introspection, the ability to watch our own inner cognitive world. This seems related to the other forms of thinking—but how? Introspection is more than just being aware of the various streams. Introspection is watching them, observing the mind’s streams. This watching, in its pure form, is not verbal, nor visual, musical, mathematical, kinesthetic, or interpersonal. Introspection is something puzzling, the ability to watch the streams as they braid themselves into a whole river of self. Is introspection a stream onto itself, a kind of thinking? I am striving to improve this one. Starting when we were young, we had classes that helped train us in the various modalities of thinking. Consider the periods in elementary school devoted to English, art, music, math, and exercise—all different forms of thinking. We even took on learning, from parents, churches, or straight from the school of hard knocks, in how to get along with others, and thus training in the interpersonal stream (though that skill tends to be relatively neglected, probably to the detriment of the world).
But almost derelict in our formal training is introspection.
References
Donald, Merlin (1991) Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gardner, Howard E. (1993). Frames Of Mind: The Theory Of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
Greenspan, Stanley, & Shanker, Stuart (2004). The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intelligence Evolved from our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans. New York: Da Capo Press.
© 2024 by Tyler Volk
Coming Up Next: "Day 16 - Compressing Time with Imagery"
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