passes an untidy stack of books, and stops for a moment to straighten them out. But then she ‘gets’ a new idea, so she goes to her desk to type a note. She starts to type—but finds that the ‘T’ on her keyboard is stuck. She knows how to fix this, but worries that, then, she might forget that new idea—so, instead, she makes a handwritten note.
What led Joan to notice that pile of books? Why did that that idea ‘occur’ to her now, instead of at some other time? Let’s look more closely at these events.
Joan has not made much progress. Some mental ‘Critic’ must have noticed this and suggested that she ‘take a break.’
Discouraged, Joan sets those thoughts aside. When and how will she bring them back? That will depend on the extent to which she can later find records of them. Section §7-9 will ask about how we remember the contexts of our recent thoughts.
Joan is roaming without any goal. Or so it may seem—but most animals have instincts to maintain their ‘territories’ or nests. Joan usually walks right past that spot without giving it a second thought—but perhaps right now she is ‘making rounds’ because she is mainly controlled by Critics that aim to maintain the tidiness of her home.
She passes an untidy stack of books, and stops for a moment to straighten them out. Why doesn’t Joan stop now to read those books, instead of just trying to tidy them up? Perhaps this is because the Critics that are most active now represents those books as untidy objects (rather than as containers of knowledge)—so she’s more concerned with how they look than with the subjects that they are about.
But then she ‘gets’ a new idea. When people say, “It occurred to me,” this show how limited is the extent to which we can reflect on how we produce our ideas.
Joan goes to her desk to type a note. Joan knows that when she “gets” an idea, she cannot depend on remembering it—and so she puts her housekeeping on hold to make a more permanent record.
She finds that the ‘T’ on her keyboard is stuck. She knows how to fix this, but worries that then she might forget that new idea. She is using her self-reflective knowledge about the qualities of her short-term memories.
Perhaps most of the time, we mainly react to things that happen, without much sense of making decisions. However, our higher-level thinking is much affected by our wishes, fears, and larger-scale plans—as well as by other aspects of the context we’re in. This raises many questions about how we spend our mental time:
What schedules our large-scale plans?
What reminds us of things that we promised to do?
How do we choose among conflicting goals?
What decides when we should quit or persist?
Any good model of commonsense thinking should suggest some answers to questions like these. However, so long as everything goes well, your thoughts seem to proceed in a steady, smooth flow. Each minor obstacle makes only small changes in how you think, and if you ‘notice’ these at all, they merely appear as transient feelings or as fleeting ideas. However, when more serious obstacles persist and keep you from making progress, then, various Critics intervene to make larger changes in how you think.
There is a very fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness.”
—Dave Barry Most of the time your thinking proceeds in routine, uneventful streams—but sometimes you run into obstacles that interrupt your orderly progress. Then you’ll have to find something else to do, and this may lead to a spreading cascade changes in the way you think.
Changing the subject. Whatever you are doing now, there are always other things you could do, so whenever you get discouraged with one, you might want to switch to another.
Self-Determination. If you are tempted to abandon your task, you can renew your motivation by bribing yourself with imagined rewards, or with threats of the prospect of failure.
Self-Conscious Reflection. If that doesn’t work, you might start to imagine how you (or your imprimers) would feel if your performance conflicted with your ideals.
But when none of those methods turns out to help, one still can use several ‘last resorts.’
Self-Regression: When your situation seems to become so complex that you see no way to deal with it, you still can ask yourself, “How did I deal with such things in the past?” Then you may be able to ‘regress’ to some earlier version of yourself, from an age when such things seemed simpler to you.
Cry for Help! If you can’t find a way to do something yourself, you might attempt to exploit the resources of your friends. As infants, we were designed to do this, using signals that hijack more powerful minds.
Emotional thinking: A flash of impatience or anger can cut through what seems like a hopelessly tangled knot. Each such ‘emotional way to think’ is a different way to deal with things, and some can increase your persistence or courage, while others can help you simplify things.
In any case, after each such change, you may still want to pursue some similar goals, but now you’ll see them from new points of view— because each switch to a new Way to Think may initiate a large-scale cascade. Then, depending on how long those changes persist, you (or your friends) might recognize this as a change in your emotional state.
Various parts of our states of mind can continue for different scales of time. Some last for no more than the blink of an eye, but infatuations persist for days or weeks. However, when other ‘dispositions’ endure for substantial spans of a individual’s life, we see as aspects of that person’s personality,’ and we call these characteristics or traits.
For example, when solving a problem, some people tend to accept a solution that still has some deficiencies—so long as it seems to work well enough: you might describe such a person as realistic, pragmatic, or practical. Another person may tend to insist that every potential flaw must be fixed—and you might call such people fastidious—except when they make you uncomfortable, in which case you call them obsessive instead. Other such dispositions include being Cautious vs. Reckless, Inattentive vs. Vigilant, Unfriendly vs. Amicable, Reclusive vs. Sociable, Visionary vs. Down-to-Earth, or Courageous vs.
