Thinking
Someday, someone linked a sound to a meaning.
Then, by repetition, others reproduced the same sound and meaning.
Languages are born by the growing acceptance of sounds and meanings by a certain group of people.
When that happens, language is a magical tool.
This first step, to create meaningful sounds, is clear not unique to us. Other animals are also capable of the same.
But for humans, an incredible next step happened:
We were able to 'say' sounds in our brain without using our vocal chords.
What an awesome trick ! It created a continuous flow of sounds and ideas in our heads. Certainly, a life changing ability supported by the language learning.
In the context of this book, let’s call this moment 'thinking'.
So, How does thinking operates in our head ?
One sound after the other.
We think by putting sounds from our known language one after the other in our head.
By thinking such as "I am going to the supermarket", we have to say every sound in a mental narrative.
This concept of thinking is different than using our imagination and dreams. With imagination we are putting images one after the other, creating a cinema effect inside our head. Rather, with thinking, we are concatenating one sound after the other with our known language.
Just to emphasize, the language you know is the root of your thinking. To opposite this idea, imagine you have no clue about the sounds and meanings of the Finnish language. Is it possible to think in Finnish ? No.
Now lets have a jaw-dropping fact. We learn a language over time. It is a slow and progressive effort, sound by sound, meaning by meaning.
Babies learn their first words around 12 months old. With 18 months, they know between 50 to 100 words. At 24 months 200 to 300 words. They jump to a 1000 one year later.
Between 5 and 7 they've accumulated a vocabulary between 3000 to 5000 words.
An adult may reach 40,000 words and we estimate that English speaking University students tend to be around 60,000 words.
As a species, this is phenomenal.
Just imagine the effort and time accumulating all this knowledge. As result, thinking becomes the predominant mode of our mental activity as adults.
Thinking is great and practical but it may create a dark side, a repetitive cycle, a forever telling a story in our heads.
Have you ever stop and ask yourself how expensive "thinking" is?
Thinking is brutally expensive. Every sound must be memorized first, usually by repetition. Then, a series of neuron paths are activated and, over time and effort that knowledge becomes graved in our brain.
When you are thinking, your brain is like a fireworks show. Every sound must be recover, activated, linked and released.
Thinking is so intense for the brain that we could argue that also does not accept simultaneous action. We cannot think 2 stories at the exactly same time in our heads.
Sure, we can hold 2 or more stories in our heads but we will be switching from one to the other to keep their meanings alive. Just try these 2 phrases:
"I am super-man"
"Your nose is huge"
Can we say both phrases in our mind at exactly same time ?
No.
Just compare this mental limitation to our ability to process things in parallel. Right now we are reading, listening and probably regulating our hormonal levels at the same time and your brain is cool about it.
For thinking, the brain limits itself, no parallelism is possible. It requires a great deal of focus, memory, logic and energy to create the sound sequences and to follow them into meanings in our heads.
As an adult, if we are thinking all the time, we get exhausted. Like a mental marathon runner.
This is not a criticism. It is just our experience and we should understand the energy consumption or our thoughts.
If we are thinking on how to solve a problem and we are passionate about it, that is wonderful! Keep thinking hard.
If we are just babbling all day long in our heads, then we are probably wasting energy.
This distinction is very important.
In sustainability you try to avoid spending energy for a low output. For the mind, it could be the same, one sound after the other.
Is it the same for images ?
Now lets check the electric car: Our imagination.
This book is an ongoing project. The content and the chapters may change before the final release.
Follow me on twitter at @JSapplied
References
http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs-wm/45322.pdf
http://drfredtravis.com/downloads/Travis_preprint.pdf
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16369.full
https://www.bm-science.com/team/art39.pdf
http://csl.anthropomatik.kit.edu/downloads/Biosignals_paper114.pdf
http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/Sarasso_ClinEEGNeurosci_2014.pdf
http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/mbeeman/documents/FleckCortex2008.pdf