How the Brain Determines Its Thinking

When I was a college sophomore at the University of Tennessee, I decided to spend the summer with my fraternity buddy, Sam Harris, whose family had moved to Hollywood. I met the girl friend, Irene, of his girlfriend, and the four of us spent many date nights that quickly spawned love among us. Sam married his girl, but being a college student living in another state 2200 miles away made it too difficult to nurture my love relationship. On one date night, Irene said to me with some consternation, "You are always thinking. Why is that?" Well, I don't know why that is, but it is true. Surely, I am in the habit about thinking of all sorts of thinking.

One of the things I have been thinking about lately is how the human brain decides what it thinks about. Not all thoughts are chosen. Some are imposed from the outside, as for example, with thoughts being triggered by sensory input, spurious surfacing of memories, or thoughts triggered by something we read or heard from somebody else. There is also the fact that many, perhaps most, of our "thoughts" are unconscious.

Converting Unconscious Thought to Conscious Awareness

Unconscious thought is basically the consequence of neural processing of which we are unaware. The brain processes a great deal of information unconsciously, such as control over our viscera, our habits, our prejudices, our feelings, and so on. These processes surely influence our conscious thought and behavior in ways we do not consciously realize.

Conscious realization and thought involve at least two basic steps: 1) some kind of neural tagging to select which unconscious sensory or cognitive processes to make available for conscious processing, and 2) the process of conscious realization itself. Electrophysiological research reveals that these two processes are separated in time, and thus they may reflect two different processes. For my purposes here, I wish to focus on the tagging process that the brain might use to identify the various local circuit neural activity to make available for conscious awareness.

The brain is a global workspace of interacting modules. Processing is often parceled out to certain circuits. For example, bodily sensations are routed to the sensory cortex. Precise movements are handled by the motor cortex. Sound and vision have separate processing circuitry. There is a face-recognition area in the parietal cortex. There are executive controls handled by specific areas of neocortex. Religious thoughts are handled in different cortical areas depending on the nature of religious thought. And so on.

Brains are wired to constantly surveil sensations in need of conscious detection and interpretation, ideas to be understood, feelings to be accommodated, memories to be retrieved, problems to solve, and plans for future actions. The point is that the brain not only has some sort of mechanism for routing processing needs to specific cortical modules but also must have some way to scan its workspace to tag those modules that would benefit from conscious access. Of course, tagging is not necessary for situations where a stimulus so pronounced that it demands attention. For example, a sudden unexpected thunder clap is so pronounced that it triggers conscious attending by its own characteristics. But for routine thinking, whether mind wandering or intentional control over a sequence of thoughts, the brain must have some way to tag which modules need conscious access and in which sequence.

The basic idea is that the brain has a default mechanism for scanning its unconscious operations for momentarily novel or relevant information in widely distributed local networks that are specialized for certain kinds of thought. Such scanning could enable attentional focus, leading in turn to linking of diverse local networks through temporal coherence within and among local circuits, especially in high-frequency bands, that improves signal-to-noise ratio and sharing of information by those local networks.

Scanning via non-living systems. as in radar, commonly involves detecting reflection from targets that have been scanned by beams of light or sound. Cognitive scanning obviously cannot work that way, but an analogous mechanism would involve recursively re-entrant feedback between neural signals that are scanning the moment-to-moment neural activity in the local circuits of the global workspace. Re-entrant interactions can alter the timing and phase relationships within and among the various local circuits, which effectively tag those circuits that have sufficiently novel or relevant information that warrants conscious access.

If we knew how the brain achieves such scanning and tagging, it might help us develop training methods to make our conscious analysis more rigorous and effective. I am developing a scholarly paper for publication that suggests some possible mechanisms and ways to test them. We will have to see how those ideas evolve.

 

 

 

Specious Reasoning: It Is Everywhere, Often UndetectedSpecious Reasoning: It Is Everywhere, Often Undetected

 

Specious reasoning is any argument or analysis which has the apparent ring of truth or plausibility but is actually incomplete, deceptive, or even altogether fallacious. Such arguments are attractive because they are seemingly well-reasoned or factual. They  can be deceptively persuasive. When an argumentation style is based on specious reasoning, it is called "Sophistry."

 

Below are some modern examples of sophistry:

 

"Impose gun control to reduce crime." The fact is that guns prevent more crimes than they cause.

 

"Give the mother automatic custody of children in divorce to reduce divorce." In fact, that leads to more divorce, as it reduces incentives to maintain a marriage.

 

"Raise taxes to increase revenues." In fact, creating disincentives to earn not only directly decreases revenues by decreasing the amount of taxable income but also stifles economic growth.

 

"Give children contraceptives to reduce teen pregnancy and disease." In fact, abstinence education does both better

 

"Support so-called 'civil rights' organizations and leaders to oppose racism." In factby constant harping and race-baiting, they are the primary promoters of racism today

 

"Listen to the experts." The experts don't always get things right. Besides, they often disagree.

 

Specious reasoning typically accompanies arguments aimed at advancing personal agendas.

 

The apparent increase of speciousness in today's agenda-driven social discourse provided a big part of my motivation to write my recent book about truthfulness: Realville. How to Get Real in an Unreal World. Specious reasoning typifies all of the seven forms of untruthfulness in that it:

·       Often relies on outright lies.

·       May cheat others out of benefits by giving advantage to others.

·       Encourage the specious person to deny their argumentation weakness and delude themselves and others.

·       Provide a way to deceive others.

·       Pretends to have unwarranted stature and valuable argument.

·       Withholds relevant ideas that would otherwise challenge assertions.

 

 

Different Specious Category Examples

 

Opinions Without Evidence

 

This category is probably the most common form of specious thinking. It does not involve flawed reasoning, because in the absence of factual evidence there is nothing available to structure an argument around. One just happens to have certain opinions. Facts be damned. Such opinions are typically formed from emotions that have been stirred by various forms of specious reasoning.

 

The disdain for evidence often arises as a natural consequence of anti-science or unappreciation of the nature of scientific thinking. Scientific thinking requires one to question even one’s own suppositions and opinions. Most assuredly, opinions need buttressing from objective evidence and verifiable truths. In a post-modern world in which everyone is allowed to have their own truth, such objective thinking is hard to find. Former Dean of Science at Texas A&M, Mack Prescott, once said to me, "Liberal arts courses are required in college, because people think you can't be educated without them. I think that science courses should be required in college for the same reason."

 

Straw man

 

This is a weak or sham argument set up to be easily refuted. Sometimes it is called a "red herring." This is a change-the-subject strategy aimed at distracting a rhetorical opponent onto another subject. For examples, check this web site.

 

Selective Argument

 

This is an argument that ignores all unfavorable evidence. The argument that is presented is advanced in a way that precludes consideration of alternatives, especially ones that are more viable. Typically, the impression is given that there are no viable alternatives. Almost everyone advancing an agenda selectively omits facts and arguments that don't help their case. Always think about relevant things that people don't say.

 

Flawed Premise

 

The logic may be impeccable, but useless if the premise is flawed. This is a common rhetorical trap. Once you accept the premise of an argument, your positions have to be consistent with the premise, and you are thus constrained in what you can reasonably say about it.

 

Syllogisms are frequent sources of flawed premises. One example is the inference that "kindness is praiseworthy" from the premises "every virtue is praiseworthy" and "kindness is a virtue." This example is fine, because of the two premises, both are generally regarded as true. However, syllogisms have more than one premise, and the more there are the greater the chance that one or more of them is not valid.

 

Circular Logic

 

Basically, the problem here is that the argument one intends to defend is pre-supposed to be true. The conclusion is assumed as a premise, rather than justified. The argument is not proved, just re-stated as if it were true. This fallacy is sometimes called “begging the question.”

 

Virtue Signaling

 

Symbolic statements and gestures that convey virtue are frequently used to impart authoritativeness. Who can argue against virtue? Thus, those who signal virtue are attempting to gain stature, both for their own social worthiness and to advance their cause. This also makes the signalers feel good about themselves and self-righteously superior to others. Factual or logical deficiencies in their positions are masked by the signaled virtue. As we see on a continuing basis, this is a common strategy for advancing problematic agendas of politicians, celebrities, and media elites.

 

Gaslighting

 

This form of specious thinking comes from the 1944 film, Gaslight, in which a husband manipulates his wife into thinking she has a mental illness by dimming their gas-fueled lights and telling her she is hallucinating.

 

Gaslighting occurs when a person or group is conditioned by false suggestion to question their values, sanity, perception of reality, or memories. People experiencing gaslighting often feel confused, anxious, and unable to trust themselves. The point is to make the target trust the accuser.

 

In today’s world, the common form of gaslighting is to condition whites into thinking that they are racist. The technique is basically a form of conditioning in which repeated charge from supposedly more moral people generates a belief that it is true and thus creates a guilt that is exploited.

 

Logic Errors

 

Many cases of specious argument are based on common mistakes in logic. I have explained some thinking errors in a post several years ago. Such errors are typically inadvertent, but sometimes they are used deliberately in in discourse to buttress positions.

 

How can you protect yourself from the specious thinking of others? First, check to make certain you are not just responding emotionally, agreeing because this is what you want to hear. Next, check to see what actual evidence is presented and the likelihood that it is reliable. Look for conflicts of interest and hidden agendas. Finally, try to think of alternative perspectives that have not been presented.

 

Resources:

 

Cline, Austin. 2019, Begging the question. https://www.thoughtco.com/begging-the-question-petitio-principii-250337

 

Huizen, Jennifer (2020). Gaslighting. Medical News Today, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/gaslighting

 

 

Education Requires More Than Literacy

 

I recently attended a lecture by a prominent Texas historian,  James L. Haley. The focus of his talk was on the lessons of history in the context of the American revolution against England and Texas' revolution against Mexico. The theme was that the U.S. founders and Sam Houston in Texas used their knowledge of history to create a form of government that could avoid the errors of the past if the voters were educated. The  founders were themselves generally quite literate, reading history in the original Greek and Latin and absorbing the ideas of leading formation of a new government Renaissance philosophers. 

Haley went on to point out that today our government is imperiled because so many Americans are illiterate and thus incapable of correct knowledge about political issues and electing wise leaders. He presented a litany of statistics showing a shocking percentage of Americans who cannot read at all, cannot read at the fourth-grade level, and cannot read above 8th grade level. The clear implication was that to save our country, we need a more educated pool of voters.

While I accept that literacy is important, I think it is a myth to attribute our hyper politically correct "woke" cultural to illiteracy. In the Q&A that followed, I raised the following point: "I am not persuaded that education is the solution. The origin of much of our cancel culture originates in the universities." Liberal arts professors seem to be obsessed with race, gender, revisionist history, and Marxist ideology. James heartily agreed with my point, but the paradox was not explored, because time was running out.

How can education be a solution to illiteracy when the source of our current historical and political dystopia largely originates with ostensibly the most educated professors in the universities and more and more youngsters go to college? Could it be there is something wrong with how professors were educated and how they in turn educate citizens these days?

The answer is a resounding YES. Civics is no longer taught in K-12. History, when taught at all, is commonly taught from a revisionist perspective. As a professor with over 58 years of observing university teaching practices and consulting with the middle school teaching community, I disparingly conclude that we no longer teach youngsters HOW to think but focus on WHAT to think. Educators have confused education with indoctrination. We tell students what they must learn and then test them for compliance. Too many teachers and professors were trained, not educated in the classical education sense. The focus of teaching at all levels is on WHAT to think.

The problem is illustrated by how few people know about logic and logical fallacies, which I tried to address in a recent blog post. The problem extends to a general inability to think critically and creatively about what one reads and hears. Where are the Socratic teachers of today who are showing students how to engage reading content, ask penetrating questions, develop reasoned possible answers, distinguish evidence from opinion, test knowledge for accuracy, and how to learn from history instead of erasing it? When it comes to reading literacy, many youngsters have such limited vocabulary and reading skills that they cannot handle the extra cognitive load of critical thinking about what they read.

In his essay on college graduate illiteracy, Dale Ahlquist concludes, " The rise of incomplete thinking has been marked over the last several decades by a near-total loss of true humanities studies at many colleges and universities.  It’s a terrible scandal that, without authentic humanities education, universities around the world are manufacturing cohort after cohort of uneducated people " He explains the cause of the scandal this way: " Everyone agrees, or claims to agree, that we want citizens who can think for themselves. But our education system, our commercial culture, and the latent message of our social media are precisely the opposite. We want everyone to get in line."

Literacy alone is not the answer. We already have too many under educated college graduates, as has been amply documented in numerous surveys. Some shocking examples are found in Walter Williams's essay,

Though I am known as a "Memory Medic," many of my followers misunderstand my emphasis on improving memory ability. My whole point is that the quality of thinking depends on what you remember. Remembered knowledge is what one uses to think with. The less you recall from past learning, the less knowledge you have to inform rigorous thought.

Improving the way reading skills are taught would surely help. But recall that the pupils of Socrates were not necessarily all that literate in reading Greek. The main value of Socrates' pedagogy was that he showed his pupils the value of avoiding knee-jerk thinking, of questioning and thinking about reasonable answers, that his was a mind-set habit they could learn, and that such practices help to minimize error and foolishness.

 

Sources: 

Ahlquist, Dale (n.d.) The Scandal of Uneducated College Graduates. Principles from Christendom College. https://www.getprinciples.com/the-scandal-of-uneducated-college-graduates/

Williams, Walter (2016). It's Little Mystery Why So Many College Students Are Illiterate. March 29. CNS News. https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/walter-e-williams/campus-lunacy

A key to thinking straight is to get your facts straight. I urge readers to check out my book, Realville, which explains how to wade through the swamp of the seven main forms of untruthfulness.

Lesson 6. Concept Maps.

Facts and ideas can be mapped in ways that show how they relate to each other. The map drawing usually begin with outlined notes, because few people can think fast enough to construct a map in real time during a lecture or video. In simple mind mapping, basic ideas are stated within circles, forming word clouds, and arrows are drawn from “parent” to “daughter” clouds. A useful addition is to write in brief text along the arrows that explain what the relationship is, as illustrated in Figure 1.

Fig. 1. Simple concept map for the relationship of cells and their organelles. Cross-linking is not shown because it is not particularly useful for this simple information cluster.

Each circle object in the map can be expanded to whatever level of detail is required. In the map above, for example, from “History” you could add a circle for “Hooke” with a labeled connecting arrow saying “the first pioneer was.”

Think with Concept Mapping

Recall lesson 4, where we made the point that thinking about what you are trying to memorize makes the memory process easier and more reliable. Memory becomes easier when you think about the context and ancillary information associated with your memory targets. If the material you are trying to learn is complex, it often helps to convert your notes into concept maps. In concept maps, you draw circles or other geometric shaped word clouds to act as containers for key information, and then you think about how the various items in the circles relate to other items to create concepts. You draw connections among the various circles and write in a few words to state the nature of each relationship.

This process is like so-called mind mapping, except that concept mapping captures information as nodes in an interconnected network, unlike the tree-like structure of mind maps that have one central idea with multiple branches. Concept maps allow multiple cross-connections among the various idea nodes and typically emphasize multiple inter-dependent relationships among the nodes.

The basic task is to think about the relationships among the linked word clouds. A good practical way to automate thinking is to make concept maps as you read, listen to lectures or watch education videos. With pencil and paper write down key words in different locations on the page for major facts and ideas as you encounter them in the learning material and draw a circle around them. Then, perhaps after the lecture, video, or reading, examine each item one at a time and draw a line to any of the other items to which it is associated. Along each line, write in a few words to state what the relationship is. For example, you might link idea A with idea B with the description “makes me ask,” “led to the wrong idea that,” “leads to the truly original idea of,” or whatever might be appropriate. Note that comments work best if they are based on active verbs. This learning strategy is useful for several reasons:

1. Maps give the learner a “bird’s eye view” of the big picture.

2. Learners must engage with the material (i.e. be especially mindful) in order to draw the  

map of key concepts.

3. Learners have to organize information in meaningful ways, a process that requires them to  

think, which facilitates memory storage and retrieval.

4. Information is displayed spatially, which in itself facilitates storage and retrieval. 

Memorizing things by mentally relating them to their location in space promotes remembering because the part of the brain that forms lasting memories (the hippocampus) is also the part of the brain that creates subconscious mental maps of objects in space.

How to Make the Maps

As with creating regular notes, doing it by hand is more engaging and more likely to be memorized easily. However, with maps created by hand, you can’t move objects around; you must erase and write back in. However, that is less of a problem if you have a computer with draw capability. Another option is to create an initial step of placing sticky notes on a wall and moving them around physically to see what is the best spatial layout.

Map construction can be facilitated by computer. There are many elegant computer programs, and some quite satisfactory programs are free (search Google for “free mind maps”) (I like X Mind). Most programs make it easy to move ideas around in the map and make multiple, non-linear links. Not all programs allow elaboration along linking lines, and you may have to write it in by hand. 

Actually, I think maps are a better memorization aid if they are hand-drawn, because that makes the process more personal, more flexible, and perhaps more engaging. If you change your mind about something you put in the map, you either have to erase it or re-draw the map. One option is to draw the map by hand at first and then re-do it later by computer.

Too much text annotation adds to clutter. Clutter is inevitable with broad topics that involve many ideas. Some computer programs create a map that requires a huge sheet of paper to get printed, and you can’t get it all on an 8.5 x 11 sheet without compressing the text so much it is unreadable. The solution here is to make multiple maps, one an overview of the whole thing (main ideas and first- or second-order sub-topics. Then each major sub-idea can have its own map.

Maps to Study By

Maps used for study purposes need to be kept compact and simple. Memorization is facilitated by using icons or drawings to represent ideas is more effective than a lot of text. Some computer programs even have a library of icons you can select. Just make sure the icons are effective representations of the text they substitute for. You might want to use text and a representative icon, but base your memorization rehearsals on the icon.

Concept maps not only direct you to think about and organize academic content, they also promote memorization because concepts are laid out in spatial arrays.

The study emphasis should be on the relationships. That will automatically help memorize the factoids in the word clouds and stimulate your thinking to develop new understanding and insights. Also, make it a point to note the spatial location of key word clouds.