Where is thinking?

We think inside and outside our head

We take it as obvious that we think in our head, that the brain is the organ in which thought occurs. [i] But what is now obvious was once obscure. The ancients thought that we think with our heart. Even Aristotle got it wrong. After watching a headless chicken run around like…well…a chicken with its head cut off, he concluded that the brain is a radiator—an organ that functions to cool the blood. People continued to get it wrong until 1664, when the English physician Thomas Willis wrote the first accurate account of the brain.

No sooner was the brain-heart issue settled than a new one appeared, called the brain-mind problem.[ii] Peer into a head from the outside and you’ll find a thumpingly physical three-pound brain. Peer out of a head from the inside, as you’re doing right now, and you’ll find there are no things to thump. “In here” there is only the ethereal thought-stuff of mind. It’s as if our heads contain two parallel universes, one material and one mental, one made of matter, the other made out of matter. How do physical brains produce mental experiences? How does mind arise from brain? After centuries of study, the brain-mind problem remains a mystery—perhaps the greatest mystery known to man.

No matter the mystery, the idea that the brain-mind is the locus of thought is well established (perhaps too well established, as we’ll soon see). The question then becomes—where in the brain-mind does thinking occur? Using brain scanning technology, scientists have made considerable progress mapping the geography of thought. But mapping mindscape poses a real puzzler—how do you say where something is located in the mind when there’s no where there? You can experience the mind’s “wherelessness” by doing a thought experiment. Stop reading for a moment, think a thought, and then say where it’s located in your mind. You can’t do it. The only way out of this problem, it seems, is to say that when it comes to mapping the mind, the best we can do is to say where mental entities are located relative to one another, using terms like above, below, and intermediate. With that in mind (somewhere), there are several ways to describe where thinking occurs in the mind.

Thinking is in between perception and action

The first way is to say that thought lies intermediate between perception and action. We might well ask—why? What purpose is served by placing thought between the images we perceive[iii] and the motor actions we formulate in the mind? The answer lies in the nature of mediation.  To mediate is to be the medium for bringing about some result. The fundamental purpose of thinking is to bring about an action that is appropriate to whatever perception is at hand. In a world that is full of good things and bad things, we don’t want to take just any old action. Rather, we want to take effective actions—actions that enable us to achieve or obtain good things and avoid or eliminate bad things. Thought is the means of generating effective actions.

The second way to describe the location of thought is to say that it lies beneath the threshold of consciousness.[iv] But, how can that be? We seem to think with the images and words that we consciously experience, so how can it be that thinking occurs in the subconscious? Before I answer that question, consider the following:

• Think of a time when you were engrossed in a problem or question, then let it rest, then sometime later the answer just popped in your head (probably in the shower). The solution-finding process—thinking—must have taken place. It’s just that you weren’t conscious of it.

• Remember an occasion when you said something to someone, only to realize that it wasn’t what you meant to say. For that to happen, there must have been a thought—in your subconscious—that you meant to say that was different than the one you said.

• Consider a circumstance when you were struggling to explain something to someone and apologized by saying, “I’m having a hard time putting this into words.” The this that you were referring to was the subconscious thought that you were trying to express in words.

If thought is something other than the words and images we experience, then what is it? Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive scientist and the source of the foregoing examples, proposes that we think in a language of thought called mentalese, in which concepts are represented by symbols and ideas are formed by symbol-transforming operations, or computation.[v] Conceptual representation and computation occur below the threshold of awareness. The end products of these computations are translated into the images and words that we consciously experience. Mentalese, Pinker explains, acts as the mind’s lingua franca[vi] in the sense that it serves as the medium of communication between imagery and language—it is what enables us to describe the images we perceive and perceive the images we describe.

With the foregoing description, then, imagery and words are expressions of thoughts that we think subconsciously. But this idea is only half correct, for images and words not only express our thoughts, they also exert some measure of control over them. Borrowing from semiotics, the study of signs, MIT professor Marvin Minsky lumps images and words under the more general heading of signals, or signs.[vii] He then uses the analogy of steering a car to explain how signal-signs work to direct the thinking that occurs subconsciously, “[R]otating the steering wheel is merely a signal that makes the steering mechanism turn the car. . . .Our conscious thoughts use signal-signs to steer the engines in our minds, controlling countless processes of which we’re never much aware.”

The first two accounts locate thought in the mind at a spot between perception and action and beneath images and words. The third account is provided by Andy Clark, a philosophy professor at Edinburgh University in Scotland, whose research interests include the cognitive role of human-built structures.[viii] Clark proposes that the human mind extends outside our bodies into technologies that we think through. He uses the example of multiplying two numbers. Most of us can easily multiply 7 x 2 in our head, but when it comes to multiplying two large numbers like 72,431 x 36,287, we use a calculator to compute the answer. When this happens, Clark explains, the mind and the calculator function as a “unified cognitive system” in which the pathway of thought “loops” through the calculator. In other words, the brain-calculator combination gives rise to a mind in which some of the thinking occurs outside our bodies in the technology.

Technology augments intelligence, but doesn’t replace it

Clark goes on to explain that technology augments intelligence. You can demonstrate this to yourself by doing another thought experiment. Try multiplying 72,431 x 36,287 entirely in your head, i.e., without using a calculator, pen and paper, or any other sort of technology to think through. Unless you’re some sort of mathematical savant, you can’t do it. You are literally less intelligent without the technology than you are with it. Now consider the historical progression of the cognitive technologies that mankind has thought and thinks through—sticks and clay tablets, pen and paper, chalkboards, whiteboards, abacuses, slide rules, calculators, computers, smartphones, and so on. Clark notes that throughout history man has engaged in the “. . .culturally transmitted process of designer-environment construction: the process of deliberately building better worlds to think in.”

Once we let thought out of the (skin) bag to loop through various technological props, it’s free to loop through other things, including other people’s heads. Let’s start into this idea with another thought experiment. Imagine that your computer is equipped with speech technology and that you ask it for the product of 72,431 x 36,287. It responds with the answer 2,625,037,867. Now imagine that you ask a mathematical savant for the product and she gives you the answer. In the first case, your thinking looped through the computer that you thought through. In the second, your thinking looped through the savant that you thought through.  To put it another way, just as the mind-computer combination functioned as a unified cognitive system, so too did the mind-mind combination of you and the savant.

You’ve probably never looped through the mind of a savant, but you loop through other people’s minds all the time. As explained in the blog post titled What is Thinking?, most of our thinking involves a train of thought in which one idea links to another, which links to another, which links to another, and so on. When two people engage in a dialogue, the train loops round and round—the first person says something that links to an idea in the second person’s head, which stimulates an idea in the first person’s head, which sets off an idea in the second person’s head, and so on. I’ll have much more to say about this sort of inter-thinking in future blog posts, but for now I want to emphasize the where of collective thought and intelligence. When two (or more) people inter-think in this way, it’s fair to say that the thinking occurs in the unified cognitive system comprised of their two minds.

We take it as obvious that we think in our head, that the brain-mind is the organ in which thought occurs. But what is seemingly obvious is, in fact, obscure. Science is just now beginning to show us that, like Aristotle did, we’ve got it wrong. Thinking also occurs in unified cognitive systems comprised of brains and technologies and the combination of two or more brains. And with that insight, mankind’s greatest mystery takes on a whole new dimension—the brain-mind problem becomes the brains-technologies-mind problem.

[i]  Hooper, Judith and Teresi, Dick.  The Three-Pound Universe.  New York, NY: Dell Publishing Co., 1986.  This short history of the brain is abstracted from a more detailed version provided by Isaac Asimov in the Forward to this book.

[ii] The brain-mind problem is also known as the body-mind problem.  The distinction between the body and the mind can be traced back to the ancient Greeks.  Once it was known that mind arises from brain, not heart, the body-mind problem (presumably) became the brain-mind problem.

[iii] Imagery includes visual images as well as images that are generated by the other senses—hearing, touch, taste, and smell.  Perceptual images are formed when we sense things directly.  Recalled images are retrieved from memory.  Imagine, for example, the sight of a tree, the sound of a car horn, the feel of wool, the taste of an apple, and the smell of a rose.

[iv] The term consciousness is given a number of meanings.  Here, we are using it to mean to access, as when we speak of a conscious part of the mind to which we have access and unconscious, or subconscious, parts that are inaccessible to introspection.

[v] Pinker, Steven.  The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language.  New York, NY: W. Morrow and Company, 1994.  As explained in the article on this blog titled What is Thinking?, the central paradigm of cognitive science is variously called the Computational-Representational Understanding of Mind or the Physical Symbol System Hypothesis.  The “equation” that summarizes this theory is: Thinking = Representation + Computation.  Pinker proposes that the representation and computation occur in the subconscious in a language of thought called mentalese.

[vi] Lingua franca was a mixture of Italian, French, Spanish, Arabic, Greek, and Turkish that served as the medium of communication among the speakers of these different languages.

[vii] Minsky, Marvin.  The Society of Mind.  New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

[viii] Clark, Andy.  Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence.  New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003.