Internal Consciousness: Thinking

Thinking is the structured use of mental reasoning, where we verbalize or talk to ourselves inside our head.

Our thinking is heavily influenced by what we hear from teachers, media, books or parents, and is used to create patterns of belief or logic that in turn guide our actions and behaviors. Thinking can be controlled, clear and deliberate, or it can be chaotic, impulsive and seem beyond our control. For many people, thinking is their most dominant internal sense of consciousness and may be one they struggle to ever turn off.

While studying consciousness, our objective is to increase the level of deliberateness of our thinking, and calm down chaotic, impulsive and unwanted thoughts. We recognize thinking is just one of our consciousness senses and develop the skill to direct our attention to thinking in order to clarify, organize and control our thoughts. We also develop the skill to direct our attention away from thinking if it becomes too dominant, or if we want to observe and perceive emotion, memory or imagination without thinking constantly consuming all our available mental energy. 

We have to be able to think in order to formulate words and put them in a specific order to communicate with others using language. We can also 'think to ourselves', where we have an inner communication or dialogue with ourselves using language, stories, beliefs and ideas that compares what we learn from others with what we identify as being our distinct pattern of thoughts. Over time, our repeated thoughts become fixed into beliefs. Beliefs can be described as thoughts that we have accepted as describing the world in a way we define as true for us. Important to note is that beliefs are personal. What is a 'true' belief for me, may not be true belief for you.

One of the core skills in consciousness is learning to distinguish, clearly, between thinking and emotion — two fundamentally different senses of consciousness. Most people never separate them; instead, our habitual narration about ourselves gets fused with what we believe we're feeling, even when that narration is negative and carries harsh self-judgments that don't actually serve us.

Emotion, felt in the present moment, arises from an entirely different part of the brain to thinking. Our personal growth requires both capacities: thinking, to organize our stories into a coherent timeline of our history, and the ability to simply feel an emotion without immediately layering it with meaning or past belief. Verbalizing our experience — speaking it aloud to someone else or writing it in a journal — engages the long-term, time-based thinking brain, and this can be genuinely useful. But when we notice our thinking or beliefs have become stuck and no longer serve us, an essential skill is knowing how to stop thinking altogether and drop into feeling the emotion fully, without translating it immediately into thought or trying to assign meaning to it.

Because of the close association of thinking with language, people that speak the same language often have similar ways of thinking, even when they may be from different countries. This partly explains the concept of cultural differences and is the source of much wonderful and surprisingly accurate culture humor.

People instinctively grasp that when we speak the same language, we are more likely to think in a similar way, despite different cultural backgrounds. In countries with large numbers of immigrants, you often find pressure for immigrants to learn the language of the majority, in part so that they will be more likely to think in a similar way in order to help their cultural assimilation. Thinking in a similar way helps create cultural cohesion and reduce conflict as groups integrate into the culture that is dominant. However, learning to take on diverse ways of thinking is critical for societies to be able to evolve and generate new social and business ideas. In countries with lots of diversity, the places (usually cities) with the most diversity are almost always more productive and prosperous places than the places with less diversity (usually rural areas). 

From a neuroscience perspective, what we call thinking occurs in many different parts of the brain. The prefrontal cortex (PFC)—particularly the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)—is primarily responsible for our logical, structured thought processes, including generating that internal spoken dialogue. This region is involved in working memory, executive function, and verbal reasoning, making it central to conscious, structured thinking.

Other key brain regions involved in thinking include Broca’s area (left frontal lobe), which is Critical for language production and internal speech, and Wernicke’s area (left temporal lobe), which is responsible for language comprehension. Basal ganglia & thalamus: Help regulate cognitive processes and internal speech flow.

It’s not necessary to understand the areas of the brain that are responsible for thinking in order to explore consciousness. The key concept to understand is that when we engage different senses, we are using different parts of our brain, and that when we direct our attention to different senses, we shift around within our brain where activity is occurring. 

In summary, thinking is an extraordinarily powerful and effective way of sorting through what we are experiencing, remembering and feeling, and coming up with conclusions, actions or desires as a result. However, thinking does tend to dominate many western societies to the exclusion of other senses. In all consciousness exercises at NeuroYou, we are learning to balance the way we use our different consciousness senses, and in doing so, we also end up with a more balanced brain. When our brain becomes more balanced, so does our life.

EXERCISE: Thinking 

Find a quiet, comfortable place to sit where you won’t be disturbed for at least ten minutes. 

Close your eyes. For the next few minutes, you will be directing all your attention to only your consciousness sense of thinking. If you find yourself using any other sense, gently direct your attention back to just thinking.

First, simply observe your thoughts as they arise, without trying to control them. Are they fast or slow? Clear or vague? Notice if they come as words, images, or abstract impressions. Do this for about 30 seconds.

Next, make the verbalization of your thoughts much clearer internally. You might say something like, ‘I’m thinking about what happened during the conversation with my boss last week”. “I’m thinking that this exercise is stupid and simplistic”. Practice verbalizing your thoughts very clearly and deliberately as a spoken internal dialogue, rather than just letting them come and go. If you don’t usually ‘hear’ your thoughts as internal dialogue, make sure to slow yourself down enough to verbalize them clearly, even if these feels awkward at first. Do this for several minutes, clearly verbalizing the dialogue of various different thoughts.

Next, see if you can identify the moment that you finish one thought and start a new one. Are you aware of whether you are in control of this process, or does one thought get interrupted by the next one? Between one thought finishing and another one beginning, is there a moment of silence where there is no thought at all? Do this for a minute or two. This is where verbalizing thoughts can really help clarify that you have finished one thought and moved to another. Once you have started to notice the point where you finish one thought and go onto the next, make that switch very intentional and deliberate.

Next, shift your focus to observing the tone of your thoughts. Are they neutral, critical, supportive, or questioning? Notice if any thoughts trigger emotions or body sensations, and if they do, do your thoughts switch to describing, judging or complaining about those sensations or emotions, or commenting on the state of your body. Do this for a minute or two.

Now, observe yourself and how you feel after doing this exercise. Do you feel different? Did you experience thinking in a different way than usual because you were being more deliberate? Make any notes in your journal.

Self Reflection: Thinking

• Does thinking dominate your internal world or conscious space?

• Do your thoughts ever run away uncontrollably, or repeat endlessly?

• Is the voice that speaks your thoughts clear, fast, slow, or something else?

• Do you rate your thinking skills are good or bad? If so, why?

• Have you ever had your ability to think clearly temporarily break down? What were the circumstances when that happened?

• When you are tired, what happens to your thinking?

• How clearly do you articulate your own thoughts? Are you deliberate about your thoughts, or are they just ‘there’?

• Do you take responsibility for your thoughts, or does are you easily influenced by the ideas of others? When you have a thought, are you aware if it is 'yours' or influenced by others?

• Do you ever have thoughts that clearly appear to have come from someone else?

• Do you regularly use caffeine, drugs, supplements or alcohol to modify your thinking abilities, such as speeding up your thinking, or not thinking at all? When you do, are they effective? Were you clear of what you were attempting to achieve?
  

Your PERSONAL Insights

Make notes in your journal about your relationship to your internal consciousness sense of thinking.