T hinking

1. Thinking By Hassan sonbol Lecturer of psychiatry MUH

2. Definition • Thinking is some kind of ongoing mental activity with internal representation of the outside world • Thinking occurs in the mind but is inferred from observable behavior. • Thinking is a process that manipulates knowledge in a person’s cognitive system. • Thinking is directed toward finding solutions to problems facing the individual

3. How do we Think? • We store information from our experience with people and things; we make mental representation of these experiences in our minds. Then we generalize our experiences like learning is better early in the morning, all students who wear spectacles are studious. Thinking relies on a variety of mental structures to form a thought. These are symbols, concept, schema

4. Symbols is an object that can represent other objects. For example, a stop sign, a cross on the church, a red cross on the ambulance. A symbol conveys a meaning, it provides information about some object or event to which it refers and thereby suggests appropriate action to the persons who perceives it.

5. Concepts it is the organization of a variety of different objects or events into categories. Concept learning is based on principles of generalization and discrimination. A child learning the concept of dog may generalize all small animals as dog. Later with parental correction and with personal experience the child is able to discriminate dog from other small animals. Language ability helps us to form concepts from concrete to the abstract ones. The inability to form abstracts is characteristic of certain disorders like, schizophrenia.

6. Schemas are general conceptual frameworks regarding certain people objects and situations in one’s life. You correlate ‘exams’ with studying most of the time, and cutting down on social activities. This visual representation provides expectation about the features likely to be found in a particular situation. Schemas are the primary units of meaning in the human information processing systems. We comprehend new information by integrating new inputs and what we already know. We also have schemas of events; these are referred to as script. A script is a cluster of knowledge about sequences of interrelated, specific events.

7. Imagery you need an imagery to plan the arrangement and setting of your things. Imagery is the mental picture which is an important tool for solving many problems. Mental imagery is the ability, which varies between individuals, to experience ‘internally’ something resembling but not identical with a percept, visual, auditory, olfactory, etc. These mental images may be memories of previous events, scenes, etc. or apparently original as, for example, in the case of some creative artists. The ability to experience vivid and detailed images which are then projected into the environment and perceived as if external is known as eidetic imagery. The images may be referred to as autonomous and controlled imagery respectively.

8. Cognitive Maps A cognitive representation of a physical space. Cognitive maps help people to visualize a situation like one draws a visual route to reach a particular destination. Visual thought and verbal thought differ in the ways information is processed and stored. Visual thought increases complexity and richness to our thinking. Visual thinking can be useful in solving problems related to spatial or geographical relationship.

9. Language Thinking involves the manipulation of internal or covered representations of external and overt events or behavior. Language serves two major functions, it helps us to communicate with one another and it provides system of symbols and rules that facilitate thinking. Language like any other external behavior may be represented internally, and much human thinking involves a kind of internal speech. There are also many examples of nonlinguistic thoughts

10. Neurological Basis of Thinking Luria, the Russian psychologist, on the basis of studies of children, has regarded the internalization of speech as the major factor in the development of thinking. He has also shown that patients with lesions of the frontal lobes may suffer from loss of speech control as well as more general disorganization of behavior, and presumably of the thinking process underlying it.

11. Types of Thinking • Purposive and Fantasy Thinking Autistic thinking is a personal, idiosyncratic involving fantasy day dreaming ‘‘being in your own world’’. can be important for creative acts. But in extreme cases it can be abnormal as it generates delusions and hallucinations. Realistic thinking is logical, takes account of external reality and, clearly, is involved in reasoning and problem-solving. • Convergent and Divergent Thinking Convergent thinking applies to problem solving which involves focusing on to the one and only correct answer—the sort of problem that has commonly been used in conventional tests of intelligence (e.g. ‘fat is to think as…, tall is to …..?) Divergent thinking requires the production of as many answers as possible

12. Functions of Thinking • Reasoning is a process of realistic, goal directed thinking in which conclusions are drawn from a set of facts. Reasoning is classified as deductive and inductive. Deductive reasoning involves drawing a conclusion that follows logically established rules. Examples of this reasoning is that A has high blood sugar, so he has diabetes. Inductive reasoning uses available evidence to generate a conclusion about the likelihood of something. Inferences are accomplished by integrating past experiences, weighted value of the importance of the evidence and creativity. Examples of this type of thinking are probing into a murder case

13. Problem Solving This is the important part of our thinking that moves from an initial state to a goal state by means of a set of mental operations. In other words, problem solving involves the acquisition of an appropriate response to a novel situation. The ability to find an answer to the question that is to solve a problem is a cognitive ability which has a goal. psychologists have explained it on the basis of different theories. These are Learning theory : According to Thorndike the cats placed in the puzzle boxes learned to pull the string that got them out of the trial and error process. Here the cats were only learning a new habit because of the reward and reinforcement of getting out of the box. The cats did not understand the mechanism of pulling the string led to the escape.

14. Gestalt theory : The work of German psychologist Kohler (1927) is an example of Gestalt approach where famous experiments of insight learning were conducted on the chimpansee, Sultan. The bananas were placed outside Sultan’s cage, out of reach, and he was given a stick, he would use the stick to pull the bananas to him. Sultan’s problem occurred when neither of the two sticks he had was long enough to reach the bananas. He tried to get the bananas with one of the sticks but was not successful and walked away. Suddenly, he went back and by chance combined the two sticks together, make a single long stick. With this he could immediately reach to the bananas.

15. Stages of problem-solving Preparation: to understand the problem Production: to generate possible solution. Simple problems may be solved just by collecting correct information. The more complicated problems require complex strategies. The two basic kinds of solution strategies are algorithms and heuristics. An algorithm is a strategy that exhausts every possible answer till it comes up with the correct solution, it guarantees a correct solution. Algorithms are rarely used because they do not exist for many problems and they are very time-consuming. A heuristic is a “rule of thumb” that can lead to a very quick solution to no solution at all. Heuristics may involve planning that ignores some of the problem information while focusing on other information or it may involve analysis that tests for a difference between the state that currently exist and one that desired and doing something to reduce the difference. Evaluation: to decide how good is our solution.

16. Decision Making It may be a simple decision as to which dress to wear, or complex decisions like whether to join Pediatrics or to take up Radiology for post graduation. Decision making is an important part of all science-based professions. This is a process leading to the selection of a course of action among alternatives, it produces a final choice and is an action or an opinion. Decision making is a kind of problem-solving. In which we are presented with several alternatives among which we must choose. for example, while treating a patient with intestinal carcinoma, you are not sure whether the patient would benefit with chemotherapy, radiotherapy or surgery. You take the risk of deciding one type of treatment that is to be given.

17. Personal Biases in Decision Making • Selective search for evidence • Premature termination of search for evidence unwillingness to share a view • Selective perception • Wishful thinking or optimism • Choice-supportive bias—when we distort our memories of chosen and rejected options to make the chosen options seem relatively more attractive • Recency—tendency to place more attention on recent information and either ignore or forget more distant information • Repetition bias • Faulty generalizations

18. Judging is a process by which we form opinions reaching conclusions and make critical evaluations of events and people on the basis of available information. Sometimes we make spontaneous judgments based upon our attitude. Often decision making and judgement are considered as two sides of a coin.

19. THANK YOU