Notional thinking

Thinking in images

Visual image thinking

Visual action thinking

Fig.2. Types of thinking

The most important operations of thinking are analysis, synthesis and generalization.

The processes of thinking include judgments, inferences, induction and deduction.

2. Consciousness

The most important difference between humans and animals is the ability of humans to think in abstractions, to think about the past critically evaluating it and to think about the future developing and implementing plans and programmes for the future. All this taken together involves human consciousness.

Consciousness includes: the reflexive ability – the readiness of consciousness to cognize other psychic phenomena and himself/herself as a person/human being; mental imaging of reality and communicative ability. Consciousness is also characterized by intellectual schemes present in the human mind and determining the ways by which a person perceives, processes and stores information. Consciousness is impossible without language and speech.

3. Subconsciousness and psychological settings

Consciousness is not the only level on which psychic processes, properties and states of a human are represented and not everything that is perceived by a human or controls his/her behaviour is actually realized (consciously) by him/her. The subconscious (unconscious) is another level where the same psychic processes, properties and states of a human actually function and influence the human behaviour but without his/her realization of them, i.e. without their entering the area of consciousness.

There are unconscious senses, unconscious imagery, unconscious memory, unconscious motivation, etc. Dreams also lie in the area of unconscious.

The subconscious (unconscious) lies at the bottom of very many human actions and deeds, so that only studying it we can clearly understand the actual behaviour of a person which may seem quite illogical from the point of view of consciousness. The subconscious (unconscious) also plays an important role in creative processes (see further).

One of the demonstrations of the work of unconscious (subconscious) are human settings that represent acquired readiness or inclinations to act or react in a certain manner without thinking (unconsciously) to certain stimuli. A setting is developed when identical or quite similar stimuli requiring identical or similar reactions are often encountered in person’s experience. After multiple identical (or similar) reactions they cease to be actually realized so that such reactions become totally automatic (unconscious). On the contrary, when a stimulus (e.g., a situation) is encountered for the first time, a human consciously analyzes it and consciously reacts – which is called the level of objectivation that is the opposite to the level of settings. But with multiple repetitions what was first done on the level of objectivation may pass to the setting level, i.e. the actions start to be performed automatically.

4. Psychology of creativity

Creativity/creative thinking requires using untraditional approaches, leaving the path of standard thinking for solving a principally new task or problem that has never been solved/encountered before in the experience of an individual or the general experience of humankind (like when scientific discoveries are made).

Creative (non-standard) solution of a problem (discovery) is most often a three-stage process.

The first stage is the conscious analysis of a problem/task from all possible angles and taking into account all possible factors and parameters. The more thorough such an analysis is, the more chances there are that the problem/task is eventually going to be solved successfully. But if the problem/task is really something that has never been solved/encountered before in the experience of an individual or the general experience of humankind, the solution will rarely be reached through the conscious analysis only because consciousness sets limitations connected with the already established knowledge and beliefs that may not allow a person to perceive radically different approaches that a radically new problem/tasks requires. Then the person may stop analyzing the problem/task consciously or even believe it to be unsolvable.

Yet, it does not mean the absolute end of working on the problem. The problem/task continues to be analyzed subconsciously (unconsciously) and it is in this area that the solution is usually found. It is so because the subconscious (unconscious), unlike the conscious, does not suffer from the limitations imposed by the established knowledge and beliefs. If a relevant prompt comes from within (like an apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head), the subconscious (unconscious), continuing to process the information related to the problem/task, “seizes” that prompt and generates the solution. But it is only the “bare” solution without any argumentation or substantiation.

Such argumentation and substantiation proving the correctness of the solution found is developed during the third stage when the problem/task already solved on the subconscious (unconscious) level returns to the level of consciousness for final analysis in the process of which logical arguments and proofs are to be found to confirm and substantiate the correctness of the solution discovered subconsciously (unconsciously).

The psychological mechanism discussed above characterizes practically all great scientific discoveries in the history of science.

Lecture 3. Psychology of memory, retention and forgetting