Thought

“Thought” is one of the greatest mysteries that is instilling humanity’s present in each one, which makes it more and more curious.

 

By the deed we have a capacity, until then dated as unlimited, we can create several theories that imply our thinking when there are positive aspects and negative ones. There are several problems that our mind can imply with us, a milder example is: The difficulty of focusing on some activity. This problem is not very rare, thanks to technological advances, but if we go deeper, we will discover more overwhelming cases.Memory loss can cause several harms, but how to avoid it? Is there anything that can be done? Yes! Memory loss is something that recurs to the advancing age of people, each being has a pre-created amount of neurons, which are lost over time, however, there is the possibility of delaying this process. Activities that involve mental use, stimulates the use of neurons, and when stimulated they last longer.Thinking about this case, something very controversial is the intervention of the internet in human memory

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When we think about the internet, we cannot relate this to our memory capacity, we cannot think that the memory of the internet is the same as ours, since, with the ease of searching the internet, we are not stimulating our thinking to seek an answer to a particular subject, resulting in memorial fragility and weakening of information.

 

Basing on that, surge an experiment called Transactive memory, is a psychological hypothesis first proposed by Daniel Wegner in 1985 as a response to earlier theories of "group mind" such as groupthink. A transactive memory system is a mechanism through which groups collectively encode, store, and retrieve knowledge. Transactive memory was initially studied in couples and families where individuals had close relationships but was later extended to teams, larger groups, and organizations to explain how they develop a "group mind", a memory system that is more complex and potentially more effective than that of any of its individual constituents. A transactive memory system includes memory stored in each individual, the interactions between memory within the individuals, as well as the processes that update this memory.

 

Another yet mysterious ability is the human being's ability to perform several tasks at the same time, this is called: Human multitasking, is an apparent human ability to perform more than one task, or activity, at the same time. An example of multitasking is taking a phone call while driving a car. Multitasking can result in time wasted due to human context switching and apparently causing more errors due to insufficient attention. If one becomes proficient at two tasks, it is possible to rapidly shift attention between the tasks and perform the tasks well/proficiently.

 

In view of this, the gradual and arduous effort of thought can cause harm, because the brain cannot fully focus when multitasking, people take longer to complete tasks and are predisposed to error. When people attempt to complete many tasks at one time, “or [alternate] rapidly between them, errors go way up, and it takes far longer often double the time or more to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially,” states Meyer. This is largely because “the brain is compelled to restart and refocus”. A study by Meyer and David Kieras found that in the interim between each exchange, the brain makes no progress whatsoever. Therefore, multitasking people not only perform each task less suitably, but lose time in the process.

 

With technological advances, they brought tools to use in this process, we can quote that: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, is a specific technique for the use of magnetic resonance imaging capable of detecting variations in blood flow in response to neural activity. FMRI has been widely used in research projects and much less in clinical applications, even we can mention its use in police interrogatories, in which case the FMRI will be used to see the neural activity and the patient's tension, generally used to differentiate if it is saying true and false facts.

 

Talking about being non-humans, there are issues about Animal cognition, which encompasses the mental capacities of non-human animals. The study of animal conditioning and learning used in this field was developed from comparative psychology. The mind and behavior of non-human animals has captivated human imagination for centuries. Many writers, such as Descartes, have speculated about the presence or absence of the animal mind. These speculations led to many observations of animal behavior before modern science and testing were available. This ultimately resulted in the creation of multiple hypotheses about animal intelligence. One of Aesop's Fables was ‘’The Crow and the Pitcher’’, in which a crow drops pebbles into a vessel of water until he is able to drink. This was a relatively accurate reflection of the capability of corvids to understand water displacement. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder was the earliest to attest that said story reflects the behavior of real-life corvids.

 

 

 by Pedro Augusto Pereira de Góes