Question

What is meant by thinking?

Answer 1

Thinking is a mental activity that uses various cognitive elements and processes that involves the manipulation of information, problem-solving, reasoning as well as decision-making.

The core elements of thinking are -

1. Mental representation -Mental representation is “the mental imagery of a thing that is not currently physically available to the senses.” Mental representation is a coded internal sensation.
2. Concepts - Concept is "an internal representation which the brain uses to denote a certain classes of things in the world". The concepts involve extraction of some ‘idea’ on the basis of similarities and differences among many sensations.
3. Schema - A schema is “an internal representation that organizes knowledge about related concepts and relationships among them". Schemata influence most of the cognitive processes.
4. Language - Language is a system of symbols. Mental representations, concepts and schemata are all better represented by language.