For those who are still in school, this should be easy. Others can visit a used-book store and pick up a couple of good, recent college-level psychology texts. Engineers read about engineering, musicians read about music, atheletes about sports, etc.: anyone who decides to become something of a thinker should read about thinking.
All of us, except the severely handicapped, do a certain amount of thinking "by ear," in much the same sense that millions acquire a bit of musical knowledge or expertise without formal instruction. The latter may be a matter of having innate tendencies and/or it may be the result of exposure to environmental musical influences. But just as the formally instructed and much-practiced musician will be better - all other factors being equal-than someone who has not had such learning opportunities, so will we be better thinkers if we continue our studies on the subject.
What do you suppose is the most important part of your body? You might think the heart is, since its beating shows that we are alive. Or the lungs. Some might say the eyes, because seeing is so necessary. Some might even say the feet, since walking is so essential. And it would be difficult to get along without the hands. All of these obviously are important. But the most important is the brain.
It is the part of the body that makes the other parts work. It's something like a big switchboard from which orders go out to the rest of the human machine.
Years ago there was an actor in the movies named Manton Moreland. I remember a scene in which he thought he was seeing a ghost. He naturally wanted to run away, so he said, "Feet, get moving'." It made everyone laugh, but actually the brain sends out messages of that sort all day long, although it does not have to transmit actual words to the various parts of the body.
To help it decide what the body ought to do, the brain takes in messages from parts of the anatomy. The senses - of sight, touch, hearing, smell, taste - gather this information for the brain.
When a light is turned on, electric current flows through a thin wire untl it gets to a light bulb. It makes the light bulb shine. There are very tiny wires, nerves, that run from the brain to all parts of the body and back again. The central switchboard, the brain - which weighs about three pounds - has about ten billion nerve cells, all of which are constantly receiving and sending out messages by means of electrical impulses that travel from two to two hundred miles an hour.
The brain, which because it rests comfortably inside the skull is well protected, is not really just one large organ, but has separate sections that take care of different kinds of tasks.
One section is the medulla. It is the part of the brain directly above the spinal cord. It controls such reflexive functions as breathing, swallowing, sneezing, and coughing. You don't often decide to do any of these things, although the will can exert a degree of influence on them.
Just above the medulla is the cerebellum. It, too, is connected to the brain stem, or spinal cord. The cerebellum mostly takes care of information coming from the muscles, and helps send messages back to the muscles so that we can move abound, walk, jump, run, climb, throw things, do the bugaloo, and so forth.
Above the cerebellum - but inside the brain - is a section called the thalamus. The thalamus has a pleasant job: it receives all those interesting messages from the eyes, ears, nose, and skin. When we say that we are hearing Barbra Streisand, seeing a sunset, smelling a rose, or feeling the cool water when we go swimming, it's the thalamus that actually enjoys all these lovely sensations. The thalamus also is connected with the state of being awake or asleep.
One of the most interesting parts of the brain lies just above the thalamus. It's called the limbic system. It's the place where emotions come from. Feeling happy, angry, sad, romantic, all involve the limbic system. If you didn't have a limbic system, you wouldn't ever feel anger, no matter what was done to you. In the case of such unpleasant emotions you might think that wouldn't be such a bad idea. Unfortunately you wouldn't feel the nice emotions either.
A fourth part of the brain - the cortex or cerebral cortex - is the one we are most interested in right now. The brain-functions we've been talking about are much the same for animals. Dogs, cats, monkeys, and giraffes can all see and hear and smell and run and jump and play and be frightened or have a good time. But the cortex is something special to human beings. It's just a thin, gray covering that fits over the top of the brain. It's the part we think with, decide with, and remember with (aided by the hippocampus, which is connected to the limbic system).
The cortex is a fantastically complicated computer with billions of cells capable of storing and sorting out a tremendous amount of information. The electrical activity in the cerebral cortex uses up a great deal of energy. That is why we sometimes feel tired after doing a lot of hard thinking or intellectual work, just as we feel tired after doing strenuous muscular work. Another amazing thing about the cortex is that different parts of it take care of different activities of the body. One part, for example, controls the ability to speak; another has to do with thinking about things one has experienced in the past.
Obviously, in a book about thinking, we cannot devote a great deal of space to an explanation of brain function. Nevertheless, a few observations are in order. The brain has two separate halves. At first this might seem a fact no more noteworthy than that the nose has two separate nostrils or the face two separate eyes. But while left eyes and right eyes - and left nostrils and right nostrils - do very much the same thing, there are startling differences between what the two halves of the brain do.
(The theological implications of this, by the way, are intriguing. Perhaps church scholars are already considering how present knowledge of the brain affects traditional assumptions about individual identity, the soul, free will, etc.)
What are the differences between the two hemispheres? Well, it has been known for quite a long time that the left hemisphere governs movement on the right side of the body and that the right half of the brain controls movement on the left side. But that is perhaps the least interesting fact about the hemispheric divisions. Far more intriguing is the discovery that in the brains of most people, logical thinking is somehow controlled by the left half. This half of the brain takes in countless millions of bits of sensory input and "files" them in an orderly way. As regards information received in the form of verbal communication - the speech or writing of others - it is the left brain that largely controls the process.
The right half of the brain, by way of contrast, perhaps has had longer evolutionary experience because it is concerned with visual images, which it interprets and organizes at remarkable speed. Emotions, too, seem to be primarily associated with the right hemisphere. (See: limbic system). This theory comes from the discovery that stroke victims aillicted on the right sides of their brains often calmly accept their fate, whereas those who suffer strokes on the left hemisphere are much more markedly saddened.
There are cases - some involving surgery, others accidents - where the two halves of the brain have been physically separately so that the usual degree of intercommunication between them does not occur. The results sound at first like science fiction. They are based on observed fact.
There is a group of patients whose cerebral hemispheres were surgically disconnected in an effort to control their epileptic seizures, which had been intractable to medical (pharmacological) treatment. In order to evaluate the specific capabilities of each hemisphere, the researchers developed special equipment with which they could show certain pictures to one half of the brain at a time.
In one study, a picture of a nude woman was flashed to the right hemisphere of one of these patients. Because the patient's left (speaking) hemisphere had been disconnected from the right (almost mute) hemisphere, her left hemisphere had no knowledge of what her right hemisphere had seen. She could not verbally acknowledge seeing the picture because the right hemisphere has virtually no speech capability, but her emotional reaction showed that her right hemisphere did perceive the nude.
Again, it is perfectly reasonable to ask how simply increasing one's knowledge of the brain - its construction, development, and function - will, in itself, increase the intelligence. The answer is that it will not, except to the degree that acquiring a good deal of knowledge about any important subject will, in one way, increase intelligence. All other things being equal a person who knows a lot about, for instance, history, science, or philosophy, will be perceived as more intelligent than someone who knows little or nothing about such fields.
But even though a study of brain tissue is obviously separate from a study of the methods of reason, I suggest that if we are going to make the attempt to become smarter, it is consistent with that ideal for us to familiarize ourselves with the organ of the body created, either by God or Nature, for the organization of intelligence itself.
The brain, in any event, is the only thing in the universe that can regard itself. Stones cannot consider stones, elbows cannot consider elbows, flowers can consider neither themselves nor each other. But the brain can observe itself. Not only do human relationships make possible an incredible pooling of knowledge, but something like this felicitous process takes place within the brain itself, so that even if one lived in isolation, one part of the brain could inform another. The brain not only perceives but - wonder of wonders - remembers. But there is third level of magic to this incredible organ in that it perceives relationships.
One can learn to be a soldier without being taught the intricacies of the rifle. But all the armies of the world give instruction, nevertheless, on the construction and function of the weapon. One can learn to drive an automobile without having any knowledge whatever about the noisy part of it that lies under the hood, but the person who knows something of the mechanical details by means of which the vehicle moves will be a better driver than a twelve-year-old who might have been taught about nothing more than the ignition key, steering wheel, accelerator, and brake.
To sum up: We all want to think better. What we will think with is the brain. But for the brain to do its work, it must be fed, or - to use a word from the world of computers - programmed. It must receive, and sort out, information.
The first sort of mental activity you engaged in, even before you had been expelled from the womb, involved receiving information. As explained earlier, an incredibly intricate system of nerves exists purely for this purpose. At first - in the womb - your information came from your skin; the data received was quite simple. You were able to sense the ideas of wetness and temperature. Eventually, as ears and eyes formed, you were able to hear and see. Certain portions of the nose prepared you to smell.
For all the rest of your life - unless you become physically handicapped - you never stop taking in information, not even when asleep.
Even if you had been genetically programmed to be the most intelligent genius of all time you would, in fact, never become any more than a subhuman vegetable if your information-receiving mechanism did not function.
Even those unusual abilities and sensitivities that are sometimes referred to as "God-given" - your conscience, for example - could not possibly have come into operation unless you had received information about how things felt, smelled, looked, tasted, and sounded.
Let us again take up the question: What does the brain do with the astronomical amount of information it receives? It does an almost miraculous thing. It stores it.
We have no way of knowing if it stores every single bit of it, although it may well do so.
We do know that the mind consciously forgets more than 99 percent of the data it receives, probably for the reason that it is generally busy concentrating on matters at hand. Even when we try very hard to recall a particular acquired fact or impression, we may not be able to do so, though the information is definitely in one of our mental filing cabinets and may, in fact, pop up into consciousness at a later time when we are not looking for it.
Now that we're been introduced to our brains, so to speak, we should resolve to do what we can - it will, alas, be all too little - to ccntrol the sort of raw data that is fed into our great, mysterious, moist computers. We should read better books; listen to better music; see better films, plays, and television shows.
And by no means accept only this sketchy introductory information about the brain. Good bookstores and libraries can supply the wealth of information that thousands of scholars and scientists have labored for centuries to unearth.