Where is thinking?
We take it as obvious that we think in our head, that the brain is the organ in which thought occurs. But what is now obvious was once obscure. The ancients believed that we think with our heart. Even Aristotle got it wrong. After watching a chicken run around 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 popped up, called the brain-mind problem. 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 at this very moment, and you’ll find 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 brain cells produce mental experience? 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 in the brain. But mapping the mind 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, about 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 a number of ways to describe where thinking occurs in the mind.
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 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 by which we generate effective actions.
The second way to describe the location of thought is to say that it lies beneath the threshold of consciousness. 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, and sometime later the answer 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, 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. 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 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, in fact, 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 lumped images and words under the more-general heading of signals, or signs. He then used 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, beneath images and words. The third account is provided by Andy Clark, a philosophy professor at Edinburgh University, whose research interests include the cognitive role of human-built structures. 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 (or pen-and-paper technology). 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 (or pen and paper). 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.
Clark goes on to explain that technology augments intelligence. Trying to multiply two large numbers without a calculator or pen-and-paper makes the point. 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, BlackBerrys, iPhones, 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 our heads 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 a 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 to multiply the two numbers, 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 peoples’ minds all the time. As explained in the 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, 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 that arises from the mind-mind combination of the conversation partners.
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) we’ve got it wrong, that thinking also occurs in unified cognitive systems that are formed by brain-technology and brain-brain combinations. And with that insight, mankind’s greatest mystery takes on a whole new dimension—the brain-mind problem becomes the brains-mind problem.
Kevin W. Holt, the founder of Co.Innovation Consulting, is a strategic planning consultant and meeting facilitator based in Phoenix, Arizona. He works with commercial, government, and nonprofit organizations to develop innovative strategies and solutions. His strategy consulting and meeting facilitation practice centers on the use of proven processes mapped to collaboration technologies (e.g., electronic brainstorming) and specialized software tools (e.g., the Blue Ocean strategy canvas). The technologies enable him to serve as both an offsite meeting facilitator and a virtual meeting facilitator for strategic planning workshops, innovation labs, brainstorming sessions, feedback sessions, and other types of meetings. Kevin is the author of Differentiation Strategy: Winning Customers by Being Different, published by Routledge in June 2022.