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- DictionaryThought/THôt/
noun
- 1. an idea or opinion produced by thinking, or occurring suddenly in the mind: "Maggie had a sudden thought"
- 2. the action or process of thinking: "Sophie sat deep in thought"
- [countable] something that you think of or remember. thought of doing something I couldn't bear the thought of waiting any longer. thought of something/somebody The very thought of it makes me feel sick.
- thoughts. [plural] a person’s mind and all the ideas that they have in it when they are thinking. This is the time of year when our thoughts turn to summer holidays.
- [uncountable] the act of thinking seriously and carefully about something synonym consideration. I've given the matter careful thought. We need to put some thought into how to solve this problem.
- [uncountable] the power or process of thinking. A good teacher encourages independence of thought. She was lost in thought (= concentrating so much on her thoughts that she was not aware of her surroundings).
a single act or product of thinking; idea or notion: to collect one's thoughts. the act or process of thinking; mental activity: Thought as well as action wearies us. Synonyms: cogitation, reflection, deliberation, rumination, meditation. the capacity or faculty of thinking, reasoning, imagining, etc.:
In their most common sense, the terms thought and thinking refer to conscious cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation. Their most paradigmatic forms are judging, reasoning, concept formation, problem solving, and deliberation.
THOUGHT meaning: 1. an idea or opinion: 2. the activity of thinking, or when you think about something carefully…. Learn more.
- Overview
- Elements of thought
thought, covert symbolic responses to stimuli that are either intrinsic (arising from within) or extrinsic (arising from the environment). Thought, or thinking, is considered to mediate between inner activity and external stimuli.
In everyday language, the word thinking covers several distinct psychological activities. It is sometimes a synonym for “tending to believe,” especially with less than full confidence (“I think that it will rain, but I am not sure”). At other times it denotes the degree of attentiveness (“I did it without thinking”) or whatever is in consciousness, especially if it refers to something outside the immediate environment (“It made me think of my grandmother”). Psychologists have concentrated on thinking as an intellectual exertion aimed at finding an answer to a question or the solution of a practical problem.
The psychology of thought processes concerns itself with activities similar to those usually attributed to the inventor, the mathematician, or the chess player, but psychologists have not settled on any single definition or characterization of thinking. For some it is a matter of modifying “cognitive structures” (i.e., perceptual representations of the world or parts of the world), while others regard it as internal problem-solving behaviour.
Yet another provisional conception of thinking applies the term to any sequence of covert symbolic responses (i.e., occurrences within the human organism that can serve to represent absent events). If such a sequence is aimed at the solution of a specific problem and fulfills the criteria for reasoning, it is called directed thinking. Reasoning is a process of piecing together the results of two or more distinct previous learning experiences to produce a new pattern of behaviour. Directed thinking contrasts with other symbolic sequences that have different functions, such as the simple recall (mnemonic thinking) of a chain of past events.
The prominent use of words in thinking (“silent speech”) encouraged the belief, especially among behaviourist and neobehaviourist psychologists, that to think is to string together linguistic elements subvocally. Early experiments revealed that thinking is commonly accompanied by electrical activity in the muscles of the thinker’s organs of articulation (e.g., in the throat). Through later work with electromyographic equipment, it became apparent that the muscular phenomena are not the actual vehicles of thinking; they merely facilitate the appropriate activities in the brain when an intellectual task is particularly exacting. The identification of thinking with speech was assailed by the Russian psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky and by the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, both of whom observed the origins of human reasoning in children’s general ability to assemble nonverbal acts into effective and flexible combinations. These theorists insisted that thinking and speaking arise independently, although they acknowledged the profound interdependence of these functions.
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Following different approaches, three scholars—the 19th-century Russian physiologist Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov; the American founder of behaviourism, John B. Watson; and Piaget—independently arrived at the conclusion that the activities that serve as elements of thinking are internalized or “fractional” versions of motor responses. In other words, the elements are considered to be attenuated or curtailed variants of neuromuscular processes that, if they were not subjected to partial inhibition, would give rise to visible bodily movements.
Sensitive instruments can indeed detect faint activity in various parts of the body other than the organs of speech—e.g., in a person’s limbs when movement is thought of or imagined without actually taking place. Recent studies show the existence of a gastric “brain,” a set of neural networks in the stomach. Such findings have prompted theories to the effect that people think with the whole body and not only with the brain, or that, in the words of the American psychologist B.F. Skinner, “thought is simply behaviour—verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt.”
The logical outcome of these and similar statements was the peripheralist view. Evident in the work of Watson and the American psychologist Clark L. Hull, it held that thinking depends on events in the musculature: these events, known as proprioceptive impulses (i.e., impulses arising in response to physical position, posture, equilibrium, or internal condition), influence subsequent events in the central nervous system, which ultimately interact with external stimuli in guiding further action. There is, however, evidence that thinking is not prevented by administering drugs that suppress all muscular activity. Furthermore, it has been pointed out by researchers such as the American psychologist Karl S. Lashley that thinking, like other more-or-less skilled activities, often proceeds so quickly that there is not enough time for impulses to be transmitted from the central nervous system to a peripheral organ and back again between consecutive steps. So the centralist view—that thinking consists of events confined to the brain (though often accompanied by widespread activity in the rest of the body)—gained ground later in the 20th century. Nevertheless, each of these neural events can be regarded both as a response (to an external stimulus or to an earlier neurally mediated thought or combination of thoughts) and as a stimulus (evoking a subsequent thought or a motor response).
thought. From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English thought1 /θɔːt $ θɒːt/ the past tense and past participle of think1 Related topics: Philosophy thought2 S1 W1 noun 1 something you think about [ countable] something that you think of, remember, or realize SYN idea It’s an interesting thought.
1. : something that is thought: such as. a. : an individual act or product of thinking. b. : a developed intention or plan. had no thought of leaving home. c. : something (such as an opinion or belief) in the mind.
