Nature of thinking

Thinking is a higher mental process in which we manipulate and analyse information, by abstracting, reasoning, imagining, problem solving, judging and decision-making. It is goal-directed: we think in order to reach some end, such as solving a puzzle or planning a trip.

Thinking cannot be seen directly. Like learning, it is inferred from what a person says and does: we judge that a friend has thought a plan through from the way they explain it.

Thinking has two building blocks:

• Mental images: a mental image is a mental representation of a sensory experience. Close your eyes and picture the house where you lived as a small child: the door, the colour of the walls. You can 'see' it without it being in front of you. We use images to think about places, objects and events.
• Concepts: a concept is a mental representation of a category, a group of objects, ideas or events that share common features, such as 'fruit', 'furniture' or 'vehicle'.

We think in categories almost all the time. Shown a strange object with wheels, a seat and handlebars that you have never seen before, you immediately place it under 'vehicle'. To do this, we pick out an object's features and match them with the features of a concept we already hold.

Concepts organise our knowledge. Because knowledge is stored in categories rather than as millions of separate facts, we can retrieve it more quickly and make sense of new things easily.

Culture and thinking. The way we think is also shaped by our culture. Research by Richard Nisbett and others found that people from Western (for example, American) cultures tend to think analytically: they focus on the main object and its features. People from East Asian cultures tend to think holistically: they attend to the whole scene, the background and the relationships between things. Shown a picture of an animal in a forest, one person may describe the animal first, another the forest around it.