Properties of thinking.

In our everyday life, we practically do not take into account the role of innate and acquired instincts. We, of course, know that there are respiratory, cardiovascular, immune, digestive, musculoskeletal and other innate systems that function against our will. We don't care about them until their work is disrupted. But besides them, there are also innate instincts - survival, procreation, status, imitation, inclination and thinking. The first four instincts play a decisive role in the life of wild populations. They also influence humans, but thinking, a constantly functioning system, plays a decisive role in our lives. If constantly functioning systems such as the lungs or heart stop working, the person immediately dies. If the functioning of the immune system or thinking is disrupted, then the person will not die immediately, but he can turn into a person with dominant properties, trying to subjugate at least his immediate environment.

It would be very useful to know how thinking originated and improved. Here we will consider the properties of our thinking on the basis of simple everyday concepts.

Innate instincts perceive the surrounding reality using the senses - vision, hearing, touch, smell and other receptors. Thinking also receives these signals and somehow turns them into FEELINGS. We say that a person feels, perceives, understands, realizes, etc. In fact, these processes occur in a “black box” called THINKING. Consciousness, subconsciousness, long-term memory, etc., all of this is located in this black box, and the concepts of man and thinking are synonymous with this black box.

On the basis of these sensations, thinking forms a response of thinking (here the more common word is human), and if it achieves the goal, it formalizes it in the form of an acquired instinct - HABITS, the properties of which will be discussed in a separate article. Here we just note that every habit is accompanied by EMOTIONS that accompany a person’s response to external influences. Human influences, as a rule, and many external influences (hereinafter we will call all of these ENTITIES) are accompanied by emotions that help thinking evaluate the nature of the entity. If a person’s response does not achieve the goal, then thinking adjusts the created habit or makes additional ones. Thus, the work of thinking proceeds interactively until the desired habit and its emotional accompaniment are formed.

Thus, starting from childhood, thinking accumulates habits that allow a person to exist in his everyday life. As habits accumulate, they begin to influence thinking so that it forms only those habits that are in a certain harmony with previously created habits. In other words, thinking, i.e. a person falls into slavery of his own habits. This property of thinking can be both positive (for example, when developing mastery) and, under certain circumstances, negative (forming dominant habits).

Thinking is a constantly functioning system, since nature intended, with the help of this innate instinct, to increase the survival rate of at least one of its populations in the most difficult natural conditions. And we are coping with this task. We created a technogenic habitat, we penetrate into the secrets of the micro and macro worlds, but we turned out to be powerless in the face of entities with false expediencies. The fact is that for thinking, the main criterion for creating a habit is the frequency of exposure to the essence. Show business and the market take advantage of this by creating appropriate advertising for an “expedient” lifestyle. It is difficult for thinking to resist the pressure of such entities, and they become the norm for humans. They especially easily conquer a person in his free time from everyday worries. When a person suddenly becomes BORED, this means that thinking cannot decide whether it is dangerous for the person or not. The appearance of this emotion of boredom is caused by a habit that controls the appearance of such free time, forcing thinking to fill this time interval with some kind of activity. Every reader has his own experience of overcoming boredom.

Habits and thinking created in this way are not able to destroy them, and they, depending on their properties, can radically change a person’s life.