Thoughts about thoughts ...
The initial fervour subsided. I got distracted. The thought which was unraveling in my mind got lost. Lost touch. I have to direct my ... What? The words that come into my mind are executive, central executive, the edge of my awareness, my consciousness, my attention. As we can only direct our attention to a single thing at a time, one groove of sorts, a single pathway in the neural networks of our brains, a path that traverses many other thoughts laying lingering, juicy tags along the path pulling you away from your main task, the unraveling of the initial thought. Distracting you, leading you astray.
Thinking and thoughts is more than a furtive agitation of neural cells in the brain. They are the cornerstone of human existence and by them we make sense, and not only, of the world we live in. By them we solve problems we encounter in life, lay out strategies that govern our behaviour, constantly adjusting our ways of life, if we let them, in any scale imaginable no matter how small or large, in tune with the constantly changing conditions in our surroundings. Make change possible within ourselves, in our communities, in the world at large.
Our thoughts and thinking processes tools are words, which altogether make up the languages we use. Languages are neither spruced up ornaments, museum exhibits or art objects the instruments of elitist individuals ever ready to correct and assert their alleged superiority, lost in detail, slave to trivial procedure empty of meaning nor the oral performance, verbal diarrhea, of cunning lawyers, advertisers, public relationists, politicians and the like, all the time busy to twist things around mollycoddling the will of people, mere instruments for deceit.
Language is made out of words forged in each individual's mind to form a rich bed of firm concepts upon which the individual develops his/her thoughts.
Showing posts with label idea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label idea. Show all posts
Sunday, 24 August 2008
Friday, 31 August 2007
Handles-tags drag along thoughts from our minds
Trying to find a point, an edge or to use a word more modern, a tag to unravel the thoughts connected. It is what I have come across while I was reading about cognitive arrangements. Cognition describing the organization of knowledge structures in our minds. The concepts, ideas and thoughts that we have amassed and how we make use of them. I must have written something about them. All of these knowledge structures tangled up, chaotic arrangements I dare say, (I am still struggling to trace the word I am looking for), and by pulling on a specific feature you drag along the concept or concepts attached. All the concepts dragged they have specific or nonspecific connections with the feature that dragged them.
It is obvious from the above that once a concept is brought into our attention, specifically or non-specifically, it is scrutinized by our rational mechanisms for all its associated features and the feature responsible for dragging it. As a result, the concept is adapted to accommodate the new feature. A new arrangement is achieved, a new configuration depicting a new state of the world. That increases the arsenal of concepts held in storage in our brains and improves our capacity to assess the states the world daily presents to us, by being able to discern even more subtle differences between the states presented.
Oh fuck, I got the word I was looking for. Handle. Handles to grab on and drag along the whole concept. Handle being one of the features associated with any particular concept. Any feature in a concept, thought, notion or idea can act like a handle. Taking it further, it could even bring forth feelings, sensations, fears and body responses since all these are organised in the same manner with features tagging along chains of associated responses and can act as handles. So, similarly they are dragged along in our conscious mind whenever a specific or non-specific handle is grabbed on.
Now I come across, that very same mechanism of a handle in that del.icio.us website. The tags, like handles, drag along a host of websites that share this particular feature, the tag. The chain of websites dragged, specifically or non-specifically connected with the tag-feature, are presented in chaotic arrangements. And, in a similar manner, as it happens in our minds, we would expect that the feature-tag that dragged along all these new websites will bring out new arrangements, new configurations, re-modeling the world states we store in our minds, adapted into new knowledge structures, hopefully improved.
It is obvious from the above that once a concept is brought into our attention, specifically or non-specifically, it is scrutinized by our rational mechanisms for all its associated features and the feature responsible for dragging it. As a result, the concept is adapted to accommodate the new feature. A new arrangement is achieved, a new configuration depicting a new state of the world. That increases the arsenal of concepts held in storage in our brains and improves our capacity to assess the states the world daily presents to us, by being able to discern even more subtle differences between the states presented.
Oh fuck, I got the word I was looking for. Handle. Handles to grab on and drag along the whole concept. Handle being one of the features associated with any particular concept. Any feature in a concept, thought, notion or idea can act like a handle. Taking it further, it could even bring forth feelings, sensations, fears and body responses since all these are organised in the same manner with features tagging along chains of associated responses and can act as handles. So, similarly they are dragged along in our conscious mind whenever a specific or non-specific handle is grabbed on.
Now I come across, that very same mechanism of a handle in that del.icio.us website. The tags, like handles, drag along a host of websites that share this particular feature, the tag. The chain of websites dragged, specifically or non-specifically connected with the tag-feature, are presented in chaotic arrangements. And, in a similar manner, as it happens in our minds, we would expect that the feature-tag that dragged along all these new websites will bring out new arrangements, new configurations, re-modeling the world states we store in our minds, adapted into new knowledge structures, hopefully improved.
Labels:
attention,
concept,
conscious mind,
del.icio.us,
feature,
handle,
idea,
improved knowledge,
tags
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