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Chapter 2
Thoughts Generated by the Mind
All of our behavior results from the thoughts that preceded it. So the thing to work on is not your behavior but the thing that caused your behavior, your thoughts.
- Dr. Wayne Dyer
There are many different ways by which cognitive scientists try to understand and explain mind functioning. Underlying these different approaches is the assumption that any mind activity involves the transformation of information through a series of processes – procedures and operations – that draw upon existing mental patterns or knowledge representations.
The analogy is often made between the human mind and the computer, one of the many possible metaphors and the most commonly used for it. They even say that the mind is a super-computer – greater, better, and more efficient than any computer there is. Just as any computer can run many different programs, the human can perform many different behaviors, as well. Both the computer and the human mind store their files and programs in their memory until they are needed. In computers, these programs are those that let you write documents such as letters, reports, or books like this, surf the internet, play music or videos, and many more. By analogy, programs being stored in the human mind are those that tell us how to cook, play tennis, wash dishes, sing and dance, and a lot more, too.
Computers generate thousands and thousands of information through processing the raw data the user inputs. The human mind is not at all different from this. For a clearer view, let’s take for example the process by which a search engine in the internet