Thinking
Thinking helps
Not so long ago, behaviorists believed that science would never be able to understand thinking. Accordingly, they treated cognition as a black box and focused instead on stimulus and response, on observable behavior. Everything else was just learning.
Well, the learning part isn't entirely wrong. But the “never figure it out” part is: we now know quite a bit about the processes between stimulus and response, between perception and thinking. Probably most about memory, although there are still gaps in our knowledge at the cellular level that are larger than any synapse. The fact that “thinking” also includes topics such as emotion and intuition is only surprising at first glance – both are involved in the decision-making process and are by no means the opposite of conscious thinking. And then there's consciousness. You'll find a few other surprises here as well.
