Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2

Peering into the Mind: How People Think

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding how humans think

Staring into the brain while it works

Challenging the notion of rational scientific thinking

Some mysteries are best tackled by digging out and looking at the “known facts,” but not the issue of how people actually think. This one is best tackled (as philosophers have done for centuries) by asking questions.

For example, when you read something — like this paragraph — whose voice do you hear in your head? Is it your own voice, or is it my voice, reappearing through the words, or is it a bit of both? This leads to the supposed conclusion that thinking is a social activity — carried on collectively, not as “atomic” individuals. (By “not atomic,” I mean not as independent little building blocks.) Think of a crowd cheering at a match: The individuals there seem to feel and shout as one. But this social aspect of thinking can take place outside crowds, too, such as when reading. The neurologist Paul Broks identifies a peculiar thing about this: It seems to allow other people to access and “take over the language centers of your brain.” To paraphrase Sidgwick, “You think so because other ...