The Nature of Thinking

• Cognition is the process of knowing or acquiring knowledge.
• Attention, thinking, remembering, and reasoning are cognitive processes that facilitate acquiring knowledge.
• The cerebral cortex, the brain’s higher center, controls and regulates these cognitive processes.
• Concepts, facts, propositions, rules, and memories guide the human-specific cognitive processes.
• All cognitive activities are governed by thinking.

The Nature of Thinking

• It is a mental activity that occurs even when asleep
• It is a complex mental process involving manipulation of information.
• Thinking is a constructive process that helps in forming new representations of objects or events.
• Activities such as inferring, abstracting, reasoning, imagining, and judging are some involved
• A problem usually initiates it, going through multiple steps until finding a solution.
• Thinking relies on mental structures like concepts and reasoning.
• Concepts represent objects, activities, ideas, or living organisms and properties, abstractions, and relations.
• Concepts organize knowledge in systematic ways and are inferred from behavior.
• Humans can abstract the essential characteristics of perceived objects or events.
• Reasoning involves inference and is a key part of logical thinking and problem solving.
• Reasoning is goal-directed, drawing conclusions from sets of facts and using information following certain rules.
• It comes in two types: deductive and inductive.
• Deductive reasoning draws conclusions from initial assertions or premises.
• Inductive reasoning starts from available evidence to generate a conclusion about the likelihood of something.
• Scientific reasoning is usually inductive in nature.

Problem Solving

• It is a part of daily life and can range from simple to complex.
• Alternative solutions are sought in finding the right resources to solve the problem.
• Thinking becomes directed and focused and uses both internal and external resources to arrive at decisions.
• It is directed thinking focused toward dealing with a specific problem consisting of the problem, the goal, and the steps to reach the goal.
• Problem solving uses two methods: Means-end analysis and Algorithms.
• Means-end analysis follows a specific step-by-step procedure.
• 'Heuristics' allows the individual to be free to use any rules or ideas and is also called a rule of thumb.
• A mental set is a tendency to respond to a new problem the same way as an earlier one.
• Previous success leads to mental rigidity, hindering the generation of new ideas.
• Mental sets can affect mental activities, but we rely on past learning and experience to solve real-life problems.

Creativity & Its Role in Life

• It is particular kind of thinking that involves reaching out to the solution of a problem in a unique and novel way which hadn't been used or invented before.
• It is the mother of all inventions and discoveries in the world.
• Creative solutions are novel, original, and unique and the creative solutions/productions are sudden, spontaneous, from conscious and unconscious work
• The sudden appearance of new ideas is called insight.
• A creative thinker can be an artist, musician, writer, scientist, or sports person.
• Graham Wallas said that there five stages of creative thinking: preparation, incubation, illumination, evaluation, and revision.

5 Stages of Creative Thinking

• Preparation is the first stage in which the thinker formulates the problem
• Facts and needed materials are collected for the solution.
• Incubation is a state of no solution that involves complexities
• Negative effects fade, and fatigue from concern over the problem builds up.
• Illumination presents a potential solution to the problem being realized
• Illumination occurs with its “aha” experience when a sudden idea or solution appears.
• Evaluation verifies or tests the obtained solution to see if works
• Revision is needed when a solution isn’t satisfactory.

Talents and Characteristics of Creative People

• Generally talented
• Have specific abilities
• Have some personality traits such as being independent with judgements, dominating and impulsive

Decision Making

• Occurs on a day to day basis
• Faulty decisions will not achieve success
• It relates to the term "judgement"
• Decision-making involves selecting an alternative among a set of options.
• Judgment includes forming opinions, reaching conclusions, and making evaluations based on available data.
• Judgment is often automatic and doesn't need any prompting.
• Judgments evaluate information, while decisions require making choices.