Alpha Mind Blog

Nearly all animals have skills which must be exercised for the survival of the individual and the species. The purposive exercise of a skill is its use to achieve a direct, concrete end, the end achieved by the action carried to its fullest extent, such as a cat catching a mouse. But most skills or basic activities will also be carried out non-purposively, as when a cat pounces at a shadow or at nothing at all. It is probably safe to say that the activity is being done “just for practice.” Humans seem to engage in forms of thought unique to their species, and there is a strong tendency to think “just for practice.”

Yet mental maintenance is not “just for practice,” and the thought activities whose aim is mental maintenance may be done obsessively, as if the thinker is addicted. One reason for this kind of thinking is a recurring or constant need to self-image. When there is continual assault on the self-image, work must be done to reestablish it. The habitual daydreamer is one who is in one way or another not at home in the world. Perhaps there is a need or desire which can simply not be met (such as the never-fulfilled need for a mother’s love).

An adjustment will be made, such that the person will compromise, perhaps by compensating for the unmet need through other pleasures, or by creating a persona which does not have the need, or in other ways. Whether the adjustment is compensatory or denying, it must be integrated into the personality, that is, the sense of self must be constructed so that there is none or minimal dissonance between the adjustment and all other facets of personality. Where this is achieved, there may still be dissonance between the resulting self-sense and the requirements of high functioning in the social world. The result will be a continual need to maintain the self-sense, to repair it after instances of insult to it. (Insult may be entirely mental, as when a desire to fit into the social world creates a dissonance within the self, or may rise to the level of the practical, such as when someone whose self-sense is very attached to truth-telling, but whose job requires deception.)

There is a dual motivation for maintenance thought in this scheme. Walter Mitty daydreams first because he has a continually unmet need. Daydreamer becomes part of his self-sense, but since daydreaming is not regarded as useful in the social world, there is continual dissonance. To resolve it, Mitty must somehow, even if unconsciously, determine that the daydreams are important, not just to him but to the world. Each time a daydream involves heroism on Mitty’s part, it works on both levels: it gives Mitty a sense of mastery that he cannot achieve in the real, social world, but it also repairs his self-image, in that, unconsciously, Mitty believes (correctly?) that the mental exercise of heroism is required to keep alive within him the capacity for practical heroism, and that therefore even his daydreams may benefit the world some day, in some way. Thus he can resolve the dissonance between his sense of self, which includes daydreaming, and the requirements of social interaction.

Here is the difference between casual “practice” and addiction. When thought occurs “just for practice,” it is easily abandoned. The cat chasing a shadow and the dog chasing his tail can be drawn away from these activities far more easily than either of them in pursuit of actual prey. But Walter Mitty does not abandon his dreams easily. Fetched to earth from one of them, he will be haunted by it and will want to return to it as soon as he can.

Then there is that element of addiction that is simple escape. There may be an element within the mind which one chooses not to integrate into the self-sense (perhaps because sensing that it will never fit into the world—think of homosexuals before 1970.) Mental activity may take place precisely to escape from the necessity of admitting the unwelcome element.

We are accustomed to thinking of addiction only in terms of overt actions taken—drugs ingested, co-dependencies acted out, compulsive behaviors such as overeating, gambling, or overspending. For this reason, when we face the challenge of thinking clearly, flexibly, and effectively, alone or in groups, it is important to be aware that addiction which may not result in any such overt action may still direct, and mar, our thought processes.

While understanding our motives will contribute to self-control in thought, and thus to a better-controlled thought process, this does not imply that control is entirely a virtue. Those thoughts which we might call random, and those thought processes which have no discernable aim or goal, which I call reverie, are both important.

Random thought I define by two characteristics: it has no discernible aim or goal, and it is not bounded by the constraints we normally place on our goal-oriented thought. These constraints include those of formal logic, in which most people are trained in at least some rudiments. But the constraints are limited neither to formal logic nor to any logic of which we are aware. For example, when we are awake, those thoughts which are formulated in words will mostly be formulated according to the rules of syntax which we learned in early childhood, and which most of us aren’t even aware of knowing. But many of us have the experience of being awakened in the middle of dreaming, or of coming back to consciousness when we have been halfway to sleep, and knowing that we had been thinking a sentence that “didn’t make sense,” meaning that it violated our accepted rules of syntax. Similarly, in our sleep-dreams (more, usually, than in our day-dreams), scenes are played out that violate every good playwright’s sense of decent drama. Shifts of scene are sudden and nonsensical. Persons change their identities instantly, and there is often little of “plot,” that is, a sequence of actions which build from each other and hang together to tell a single story. Most often, the compete non-sequitur rules, and all that is sustained for any time is simply mood.

Reverie overlaps with random thought, but includes a great deal of thought that is bounded, sometimes quite firmly, by the rules we use to construct meaning. Thus it has in common with all random thought only the absence of aim or goal.

Random thought plays an irreplaceable role in creativity. All innovation-in art, science, social life, and business-is based on the mind’s ability to put together things that previously had been separate, frequently kept so by conscious or unconscious rules.

Reverie is often without aim or goal simply because there is no discernable means of connecting it with a goal. Young children have many dreams of what they will do when they grow up, and even those dreams which happen to coincide with what one will actually do are strictly reverie at those times in life when one is too young to conceive of what must actually take place in order for one to become a fireman, zookeeper, or President. Later, some of these dreams will actually direct the thinker towards action; that is, they will come to possess aim and goal, and the child will find a path toward a practiced identity and a career. This is not restricted to children. In these days of increased life expectancy, more and more people have fascinating second careers which could only be undertaken after completing the first. As with the child, during the times when there is no course of action that can move one directly toward the goal, the thinking effectively has no goal. But when the freedom and opportunity arrive, and the dreamed-of path is actually taken, then all thought of taking it possesses aim and goal. Also as with the child, there is a transition period, during which the opportunity of actualizing the dream is seen to approach, and the thinking will become, often gradually, more purposeful, and lead more toward action. The achievements of late life have been fed and formed by reverie.

Both childhood and late life are extreme examples. Nearly all achievement is the result of thinking that begins as reverie and then, quickly or slowly, becomes purposeful.

All human effort is aimed toward destruction, maintenance, or expansion of the self. The ultimate motivation for every effort, including thought, will be one of these aims. For purposes of this discussion, self-destructive urges, and the thoughts they motivate, are regarded as diseased, and will be dealt with only when discussing the impediments to effective thinking. For as long as our discussion is concerned with healthy thought processes, this leaves us only two over-motives to deal with: maintenance and expansion.

These are only over-motives. Each of these motives leads us to choose subordinate goals, and in an important sense, these subordinate goals may be said to be the motive for a particular action. However, it is often important to distinguish which of these over-motives is at work, that is, whether one’s own or another’s thought or overt action is motivated by maintenance or expansion.

The motivations for a thought may be hidden or clear, to the thinker or to others. However, there is no clear separation between the hidden and the clear, because there is very seldom a single motivation for anything we do. Thus, an action or thought may have some motives that are clear to the thinker, and others that are not, and because of this mixture, the motivation in sum is neither perfectly hidden nor perfectly clear.

We are better able to exercise self-control, both in outward actions and in thoughts, the better we understand our motivations. The more our motivations are hidden from ourselves but clear to others, the more we are subject to outside influences. These influences may range from those of which no one is conscious, such as the tacit assumptions underlying social mores, to those that are deliberately wielded, such as the motivating tactics of the best teachers and the worst charlatans.

Sniff…

When thought of any of our modes is undertaken for its own sake, its aim is usually given. This is another way of saying that our modes of thought are to a degree defined by their aims. Again, to use the example of a formal puzzle such as a game: regardless of its motivation, the aim of the thought process is simply the solving of the puzzle. But it is not entirely so simple, and we may benefit from looking a bit more closely at the aims of thought processes of each mode.

Random thought seems to have no aim. This may only mean there is no aim that we can discern; there may be “hidden work” going on. A part of what our minds do in sleep may be very analogous to the re-indexing of a computer database, a process which, in all but the most sophisticated databases, requires a temporary shutdown of normal operations. If this is so, then our saying so is another way of saying that some random thought is actually maintenance thought, but without the thinker’s awareness.

When maintenance activity is conscious, there is very often conscious choice of the aims. To use our example of rote rehearsal: this is usually undertaken when a conscious decision has been made that a particular subset of knowledge is valuable, and worth the effort to make its recall easy and swift. But just as the recall of simple facts or statements may be made easy by practice and hard by neglect, so a more complex process may be facilitated by rehearsal, such as chess playing or algebra. But such rehearsals will only be undertaken as a result of a conscious value decision.

Another aim of maintenance thinking is to establish or re-establish relationships between entities (very broadly defined) in the mind. This is a necessary aspect of maintaining one’s sense of self. Just as in the interpersonal realm, ritualization occurs to establish or reestablish relations between persons or classes of persons, so also intrapersonally, relations between “microselves” are maintained. For example, interpersonally, the bowing of Japanese or other cultures, or forms of address in language groups employing “formal” or “familiar” second-person forms, establish and maintain power relations. Just as power relations are part of a community’s sense of identity, power relations occur within the individual mind, and when they are not consistently maintained, self-identification problems can occur ranging from simple aimlessness and impulsiveness to more complex character and personality disorders.

For the other modes of thought, the aim of a particular mode is often dictated by another mode. In the example already given, explanatory thought often takes place to achieve a basis for puzzle-solving. Puzzle-solving in turn often serves the purposes of visioning, being aimed at helping a vision “find its place in the world.”

It is possible for any mode of thought to serve the aims of another mode. Puzzle-solving, for example, may be employed to learn new processes which will be used for maintenance, as when one works out a new mnemonic device by which to remember elements of history or anatomy.

The aim of a thinking process is not its motivation. If the puzzle to be solved is a crossword, the motive for solving it may be mental escape (to forget something else), mental maintenance (some people solve crosswords to maintain their recall of words), or high-stakes competition, in a formal contest. Whatever the motive, the thought process is still that of puzzle-solving, and its aim is to arrive at a correct answer to the puzzle. It is important to keep in mind the distinction between aim and motivation.

Aims themselves may be defined in various ways, but always, the aim of a thought is nearer in than its motivation, and in most thought processes, the thinker is more likely to be aware of the aim than of the motivation.

The aim of a thought process is frequently the service of another thought process. When a formal puzzle (that is, a game) requires logic, to solve it frequently calls on conscious explanatory processes. Many players of Sudoku, for example, may be heard muttering “therefore” aloud; they are explaining to themselves the applications of logical rules. This is an example of the explanatory mode called into the service of the puzzle-solving mode, and the best way to name the aim of the explanation is “the service of puzzle-solving.”

Andrew Cline on How to Write a Letter to the Editor.

I… Well… I just… Gosh… I have nothing to add!

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Yes, I am in awe of Matt Mullenweg. Not only has he created a superb blogging tool, but the dude can think, too.

Photo Matt » Meaningful Overnight Relationship

What I find most interesting about this post is that reporters should permit themselves to have the “patterns” Matt mentions and not do everything in their power to overcome them. Why do we get tired of reading magazines? Because they become predictable precisely by thinking in terms of the patterns that sell.

The interesting ones think about the patterns that have sold, and how to use them as hooks to shift our mental models. So, find a start-up story in which all the stock ingredients are there (garage, overnight success, desk made out of a discarded door, yadda), but where a key element is completely foreign, say, the entrepreneur is a woman of 60. Now you have a story.

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Individuals have different predilections in their thinking. These predilections may be defined in terms of the scheme I have just laid out, or in terms of some other scheme. Thus, to use my scheme, we may rightly say that so-and-so is “an explainer.” Such a person, provided the communications skills match the thought processes, is likely to be a good teacher. Similarly, we often identify a person as a visionary.

When thinking becomes an interpersonal activity, that is, when a group must think, it may be helpful or even essential that it include individual thinkers having a certain mix of predilections and skills. For example, a consumer products company may bring together its most visionary minds in order to conceive new products, but if explaining and puzzle-solving are too little present, such a group may conceive only of products which won’t work in the real world, or which the company is not well suited to produce or market.

If a person is too imbalanced in favor of a particular mode of thinking, he or she may be ill-suited to thinking with a team. If the imbalance extends to an inability to value the other modes of thought, then, as in the example just given, the visionary may resent the reality-testing supplied by explainers and puzzle-solvers. In business, it is more often the case that a company thrives for some period by understanding its environment very well, through explanatory thinking and by exploiting opportunities in that environment through puzzle-solving, but is lost when there has been no visionary thinking to predict or create environmental changes.

It is especially important that the leader of any thinking group be able to perceive and value balance in the modes of thinking.