Thinking

luka

Well-known member
I've never thought before. How do you do it? When people talk about thought as an active thing, like press-ups or something i get all confused. Things occur to me, pop into my brain, but it's passive, they just appear and i observe them. can someone explain thinking to me? what does it involve? how do you do it? is it fun? is it difficult? is it useful?
 

sufi

lala
I think about what shoes I'm wearing. I think about a few women
me too#

i'm anti- thinking
i like contemplation, reasoning even,
and sometimes if something worries me - a problem or a dissonance - sometimes i find just to stop for an instant and concentrate on it, think it thru will deal with it
but i try to reject theoretical structured, and above all abstract thinking - can lead down blind alleys and become cornered in dark crevices of immorality and obscurity

coherent analytical thinking is the root of all evil :(
 

arcaNa

Snakes + Ladders
i like to empty my mind of all thoughts and not "think" too much at all...
but i am, therefore i think... consciousness is a weird thing.
i could almost swear certain people in this world doesn't possess one.
especially this creepy little man in a big,white house.
 

Backjob

Well-known member
ish

Thinking is a pain in the ass. Thinking is that horrible circular trap that leads you into thinking you're useless and the world is shit.

Thinking is the reason for benzodiazepines and loud music and taking a book with you when you go into the toilet to shit.

Creative thinking = conversations. Somebody says something and that gives you an idea. All the best shit happens that way. Thinking a problem through isn't 'thinking' that's just cranking a handle till the answer comes out.

Thinking = "what am I going to do with my life and how am I going to go about doing it".

Thinking = a reason to roll another zoot and get a comic book out the box.
 

MBM

Well-known member
I think too much. So I try not to do it anymore. It's not very productive.

What's a shame is that thinking has been cordoned off from other human actions.

It should always be "thinking-and-something" and that something might be running, gardening, talking, I dunno, even fucking?
 
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luka

Well-known member
well, i'm glad i'm not alone, i would like to hear from someone who does think though.
 

mpc

wasteman
i like to think that i think, but i'm not sure if i do.

in fact, i think do.

i'd recommend it to others.
 

luka

Well-known member
ok, good, now go on, tell me what it involves. how do you go about it? i'm intrigued.
 

mpc

wasteman
i'm sure simon sdc is a thinker, he'll be able to explain stuff. i prefer thinking to reading. i'll elaborate when i have more time.
 

turtles

in the sea
wow, suprised by all the anti-thinking talk 'round these parts. me, i like thinking (i think). i think a lot. though i do agree with backjob on the thinking = insomnia part.

but what is thinking? how do you do it? a tuff question. Maybe the simplest answer is just sort of an inner monologue with yourself. Talking through things in your head. Though it's not quite like just talking it's more complicated than that, it goes a bit quicker, there are leaps between thoughts. But nevertheless that's more or less my subjective experience of thinking, just talking things through. Sometimes when i'm considering some more abstract concept, i imagine myself trying to convince someone of my case, and try to think of what i would say to convince someone.

I'm guessing this is what you people mean by "thinking": a sort of conscious deliberation on something that is not directly related with what you're currently experiencing at the moment. Because of course an argument can definitely be made that as long as your awake you're doing some sort of thinking, conscious or otherwise.

Another interesting point (for you non-thinkers) is the theory espoused by some cognitive psychologists and such that your conscious mind really doesn't do most of the thinking anyway, that the vast amount of thinking is done nonconsciously, and that all the conscious mind really does is kind of create a narrative for all that has gone on, a narrative which may or may not accurately reflect what actual nonconscious thoughts occur. So conscious thinking might be mostly bunk anyway...
 

luka

Well-known member
cheers dave. do all the thinkers think in this way? by holding imaginary conversations? or do you do it differently?

i do recognise what you're describing. when i was a teenager i did that at night, and it did make it hard to sleep. it stopped years ago though. i doubt i could make it come back. i'm not sure how in control of it i was, it was almost like dreaming.
 

turtles

in the sea
luka said:
do all the thinkers think in this way? by holding imaginary conversations? or do you do it differently?
I dunno, i may do it more literally than a lot of other people...i have a tendancy to actually start talking to myself out loud if i'm working on a particularly hard problem and i'm alone in a room. Freaks the hell out of my roommates who think i'm having a conversation with someone and then walk by to see that i'm sitting alone in my room. For some reason everyone seems to think talking to yourself is "bad" or "weird"...;)
 

jd_

Well-known member
I talk to myself too. It usually slips out all of a sudden and then I realise how far I was gone into my imagination. It's not a big deal or particularily bad unless you are on the subway or something, although I think anytime you are caught doing it people are going to question how solid your grip is, especially if you are laughing to yourself.

I don't understand the question of the thread really, because it doesn't seem like there's any point where you stop thinking. I mean you can direct it like someone was saying into more abstract stuff that really doesn't relate to the reality around you but how do you stop it?
 

luka

Well-known member
i don't talk to myself like that. i don't think like that. every now and again something pops into my head like,
make a cup of tea
or
take a piss
or
go for a walk

or sometimes a funny image or something will occur to me
but usually there's nothing there. i want to know what it's like in other people's heads. what's going on in there. well, there's a level of awareness, i'm conscious obviously, but to say there's not a moment when you're not thinking strikes me as odd. the moments when a thought occurs to me are few and far between, and this is not a boast, i'm not saying it's great not to think, thats not the purpose of the thread, i'm curious about your inner experience, what its comprised of.
 

jd_

Well-known member
I've always got a bunch of stuff that needs working out so I start just going over things if my brain figures it's not really needed for the time being. I keep picturing things that don't happen too, I've always done that since I was a kid, imagining the train de-railing, getting shot suddenly by a sniper, stepping in dog shit. I'm sure it's worthless but it's always been automatic and I'm used to it. I really like reading stuff I don't understand too and that sparks all these fragmented ideas that I can't really get a proper handle on but that come back over and over because of it. I find there's lots of stories and jokes in things too if you are paying attention, lots in people's body language. What are they doing today that they weren't yesterday? I make up bits of music in my mind. See boss fights from Gradius V. If nothign intersting is happening right then there was probably a good one right before that gets a rewind. Remember things that seemed interesting and think them over, try applying them to my own experience. Think about whatever I'm doing. I dunno man, just tons of stuff like that, probably a lot that is so natural that I'm forgetting about it.

Its suprising to me that you recognise each one so clearly, it's cool, I lose focus sometimes and it can be liek white noise.
 

turtles

in the sea
jd_ said:
I've always got a bunch of stuff that needs working out so I start just going over things if my brain figures it's not really needed for the time being. I keep picturing things that don't happen too, I've always done that since I was a kid, imagining the train de-railing, getting shot suddenly by a sniper, stepping in dog shit. I'm sure it's worthless but it's always been automatic and I'm used to it. I really like reading stuff I don't understand too and that sparks all these fragmented ideas that I can't really get a proper handle on but that come back over and over because of it. I find there's lots of stories and jokes in things too if you are paying attention, lots in people's body language. What are they doing today that they weren't yesterday? I make up bits of music in my mind. See boss fights from Gradius V. If nothign intersting is happening right then there was probably a good one right before that gets a rewind. Remember things that seemed interesting and think them over, try applying them to my own experience. Think about whatever I'm doing. I dunno man, just tons of stuff like that, probably a lot that is so natural that I'm forgetting about it.
Wow, that actually sounds quite similar to a lot of my own thought experiences (except not so much on the imagining stepping in dog shit/boss fights from Gradius V bits :)). But still I think the general gist of it seems quite familiar to me.

Also, the bit about how its rather involuntary is very true IMO. I really can't stop myself from thinking unless i'm actively enganged in some task. I've often wanted to learn some proper meditation techniques just so i could stop thinking for a while and just clear my mind. Haven't gotten around to that yet...

Also i think another important thing is that people definitely have different styles of thinking. Myself i'm very linguistic/narrative in my thinking, but a lot of other people are more spacial/visual. I worked with a boss who was very visually oriented, caused a lot of problems with me trying to explain abstract programming designs to him in (what i thought were quite clear) words and him constantly complaining "I don't understand, give me a diagram!" (he was also a complete asshole, but that's another story). Anyway, i imagine more visual thinkers have less of an inner dialog thing going on, though not necessarily any less thoughts.

i find this all quite fascinating.
 

jenks

thread death
i find that in many ways i am quite a slow thinker - often the implications of a situation take quite a long while to sink in - that's why my wife trashes me in an argument - i need to go away and think it about stuff and by then it's too late...
however i have always held this idea that the brain carries on doing your thinking for you whilst you get on with the mundane - i think that's how inspiration works - that moment of clarity that occurs at unexpected moments - plath once said she did most of her serious thinking in the bath looking up at the cracks in the ceiling (cue cracked jokes about plath) and i can see this, it happens to me all the time - these ideas then come with incredible clarity, fully formed and quite robust.
as to the different ways of thinking - this is all the rage in education at the moment - the 6 (or is it 8 this week?) different types of learner - visual, kinesthetic etc even OFSTED expect to see evidence of learning styles being catered to.
 

jd_

Well-known member
I think it's mostly visual for me. It can be totally just sound sometimes, but that's usually connected to some sort of visual thing. If I'm thinking in words though I don't see them, I hear them. Sometimes I hear sounds connected to visual stuff too, I know for as long as I can remember I'd hear machine guns + bombs going off connected with drawing, maybe from Sgt. Rock/Haunted Tank comics when I was a kid. I know I'm not alone though because friends of mine have heard me making explosions to myself while I was doing something and laughed because they say they do the same exact thing. The visual/sound ideas though I have a hard time relating back to words and I find the result when I try to don't convey the ideas properly. It's usually only something I do when I have to explain something to somebody else anyway, so I just avoid doing that whenever I can.
 
my thoughts are not visual at all. More like paragraphs of a repetitive modernist novel with the odd passage of angst and paranoia. But not always so dark, especially if I've been reading a lot and things have really been opened up in interesting ways. I'd say I'm pretty self-consciously aware of thinking almost all the time, though perhaps it's not exactly 'infinite', ho ho...massive insomnia problems that have improved a bit in the past five years, but used to take up all my energy with endless cycles of dreary thoughts every bloody night. Only novels and poetry could distract a bit from it - I don't understand films and tv at all, nor most visual things, like whether someone is good-looking or not, tho comix I like a lot. It's all words, really, and thinking about words....not very up to date with the world....
 
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