7.1 What selects the subjects we think about?

What selects what we’ll think about next, from among all our various interests—and how long will we persist with each? Let’s consider a typical, everyday incident:

Joan needs to write a project report, but has not made much progress on it. Discouraged, she sets those thoughts aside and finds herself roaming about her house with no particular goal. She passes an untidy stack of books, and stops for a moment to straighten them out. But then she ‘gets’ a new idea, so she goes to her desk to type a note. She starts to type—but finds that the ‘T’ on her keyboard is stuck. She knows how to fix this, but worries that, then, she might forget that new idea—so, instead, she makes a handwritten note.

What led Joan to notice that pile of books? Why did that that idea ‘occur’ to her now, instead of at some other time? Let’s look more closely at these events.

Joan has not made much progress. Some mental ‘Critic’ must have noticed this and suggested that she ‘take a break.’

Discouraged, Joan sets those thoughts aside. When and how will she bring them back? That will depend on the extent to which she can later find records of them. Section §7-9 will ask about how we remember the contexts of our recent thoughts.

Joan is roaming without any goal. Or so it may seem—but most animals have instincts to maintain their ‘territories’ or nests. Joan usually walks right past that spot without giving it a second thought—but perhaps right now she is ‘making rounds’ because she is mainly controlled by Critics that aim to maintain the tidiness of her home.

She passes an untidy stack of books, and stops for a moment to straighten them out. Why doesn’t Joan stop now to read those books, instead of just trying to tidy them up? Perhaps this is because the Critics that are most active now represents those books as untidy objects (rather than as containers of knowledge)—so she’s more concerned with how they look than with the subjects that they are about.

But then she ‘gets’ a new idea. When people say, “It occurred to me,” this show how limited is the extent to which we can reflect on how we produce our ideas.

Joan goes to her desk to type a note. Joan knows that when she “gets” an idea, she cannot depend on remembering it—and so she puts her housekeeping on hold to make a more permanent record.

She finds that the ‘T’ on her keyboard is stuck. She knows how to fix this, but worries that then she might forget that new idea. She is using her self-reflective knowledge about the qualities of her short-term memories.

Perhaps most of the time, we mainly react to things that happen, without much sense of making decisions. However, our higher-level thinking is much affected by our wishes, fears, and larger-scale plans—as well as by other aspects of the context we’re in. This raises many questions about how we spend our mental time:

What schedules our large-scale plans? What reminds us of things that we promised to do? How do we choose among conflicting goals? What decides when we should quit or persist?

Any good model of commonsense thinking should suggest some answers to questions like these. However, so long as everything goes well, your thoughts seem to proceed in a steady, smooth flow. Each minor obstacle makes only small changes in how you think, and if you ‘notice’ these at all, they merely appear as transient feelings or as fleeting ideas. However, when more serious obstacles persist and keep you from making progress, then, various Critics intervene to make larger changes in how you think.