Where does thinking come from?

For last week's lecture I made my ideal NZ flag, personal coat of arms, and a little logo for after uni as required.


This is my flag, which I coloured in with crayon. It's supposed to be a much more vivid black. For NZ, the international sports teams are almost always either black or white in their representation of colour. They're one of the most common colours associated with NZ. With the white I also went with how NZ is also called "Land of the Long White Cloud", which is why there's a thin white stripe in the middle and a more elongated flag.


My favourite was making the personal coat of arms. This was was done with several stencils I made of the design and acrylic paints. The shapes used there are based on the letters in my name, but made to look a lot less obvious. This works in combination to the lock shape in the middle, showing that I'm a very private person and I'm very cautious about who I let in to my personal life. The minimal use of red shows how I have little to no attachment to my place of birth, Hong Kong, China. I never got to know Hong Kong, which is why I'll be returning there in the Summer to visit a whole lot of relatives I don't know well.


Personally, I don't think the logo is very well done. For this one it's a very simplified eye, because I like to observe people and understand how they work and think. I have no clue what I'd like to do after uni, so this eye logo shows my interest in understanding how things, specifically people, work.


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Today's focus of the lecture was recreation involving math and art. Unfortunately, I felt uninspired and completely bored despite my love for playgrounds and other fun things like that.

However, when we got to talking about different types of thinking, that's when I got interested.

Where does thinking come from? What is thinking, and what is awareness? Is emotion a type of thinking process?

I think the origins of thinking is a mystery. Thus, I can't answer that question. You can say that it's cells in the brain, but they simply send messages across a network of cells and tell different parts of the brain to release different chemicals. In this sense, thinking is just a bunch of chemicals happening in your brain. But it feels like thinking is more than that. For a start, where do those messages in those cells come from and what makes the brain decide that these specific chemicals should be released? I'd want to know about that, mostly because I'm curious and because I want to be able to read minds, since I think that would be interesting and fun.

For me thinking is the process of formulating a thought, which then becomes an idea. Awareness is then processing little details that you don't normally notice on a daily basis. In class Andy talked about the Buddhist approach, how a greater awareness is sought after through meditation, where "thinking is not thinking". I don't meditate, but I have had several instances where I literally couldn't think. It's a really strange experience. Normally, when you try to not thinking about anything, you end up thinking about not thinking about anything. But when it happens completely by accident it's really strange. When it happened, I couldn't think or process anything at all. Even the sense of sight was ignored. Yes, I see everything in my familiar computer room, but nothing registered into a thought. There WAS no thought, or thinking happening. Everything was so strangely quiet, except there was a slight buzzing and humming in my ear. It wasn't until afterwards that I realised I wasn't breathing either. At first it's really scary, but after the first time it's a very calming experience that you learn to appreciate. I guess you could say that by not thinking it does make it easier to focus, think, and be more aware of your surroundings. After having those mind blanks I always feel lighter and I always forget about the usual things I worry about. It really clears up your head.

Now on to the big question. Is emotion a thinking process?

James mentioned how there's always been the association of emotion with the heart, as something separate from thinking in the brain. I think that depends on the purpose/reason for thinking, and it also changes from person to person. In Chinese, each character has a part of it that gives you a hint on what that word is to do with. For example, if the word has associations with water there's usually three dashes in the character to represent three drops of water. The characters for any word to do with thinking and emotion, all have the part of the symbol that means heart. A lot of Chinese phrases to do with thinking also emphasise using the heart to think and remember. So for this particular culture it appears that emotion is as much of a thinking process as any of the other types, while in another culture it may be completely different.

For me personally, it really depends on what I'm doing. If I were helping out a friend with his/her problems I would definitely incorporate emotion into my thinking process to understand how they feel about the situation in relation to what actually happened, and then apply logical problem solving to it in order to give them the best advice. But if I were carefully weighing out my options in a decision, I would choose to discard emotional considerations in order to choose the most logical, most beneficial choice because I think emotions can cloud logical judgement (not sure if I've just contradicted myself there).

Now applying emotion to something creative. When I write a story, I always use emotion to think about how to write a story. I want the characters to feel real, so emotion is very important to me in portraying characters and how they react to things in the plot.

For me, it's fair to say that emotion as a thinking process differs depending on the situation. For others, it would probably be a little different depending on the person.