Cognitive Styles 23What is mental „life‟? In order to answer this question, we have to look
at how memories work. It appears that as far as the brain is concerned,
thinking and remembering are very closely related. When I try to
remember what I ate for breakfast, I do not reach into my mental filing
cabinet and pull out the image labeled „breakfast.‟ Rather, my mind uses
thinking to reconstruct what happened: “Let‟s see, I was sitting here, and I
opened that, and then...oh, now I remember.” The further I have to dig, the
more difficult it becomes to rebuild the past.A
The reverse is also true: Not only is thinking used to rebuild memories,
but memories lead to thinking. I suggest that it is this combination which
produces mental „life.‟ B A habit, for example, results whenever I repeat
something enough times. The repetition fills my mind with memories, and
these memories develop a life of their own: A habit wants to be fed, it
wants to operate, it wants to live. Anyone who has tried to break a habit
knows what it means for memories to become „alive.‟
We have talked about nature and nurture. There is also a third aspect to
human thought. If nature ruled me, then I would be a robot, driven by
instinct. On the other hand, if nurture determined everything, then I would
be a creature of my environment. The human mind also has the third
element of choice. We are not total robots, and our thoughts are not all
determined by the world around us. It is true that the choices which we can
make may be limited, but it does seem that they are real choices.
Does man have a free will? I would like to answer this question and
end this section with an illustration. I suggest that for the average person,
the situation of personal choice is somewhat like watching television.
Nurture fills the mind with sounds and pictures, like images and noises
from a television set. Just as we have no direct control over what we see
and hear on the tube, so we often have little say in what we observe and
experience on our way through life. Nature, in contrast, separates the flow
of sensory input which we experience into distinct channels. Choice is like
changing the channel. We can decide which channel to watch, but we
cannot mix channels or alter the content of a certain channel.
A This is not the whole picture. The Contributor and Facilitator persons
often do retrieve memories like files from a filing cabinet. However, I
suggest that this is because their subconscious rooms are retrieving the
mental fragments, putting them back together, and then handing the
completed reconstructions to conscious thought.
B The reader who is familiar with computer science will notice that what I
am describing is consistent with the idea of the mind being organized as a
series of neural networks.