How much control can we get over our thinking?

In today's post I want to talk about the kinds of influence that we can have over our thoughts. This is by no means a conclusive look at this subject, but merely a first glance intended to clear up very obvious dilemmas, as well as to see how far can be gotten by just thinking some issues out.

What I'm concerned with here is the extent to which we are able to influence the kinds of thinking that we do as human beings. This subject came to interest me after car ride that I took last week. During the car ride, I had what I considered to be a really interesting thought. The content of the thought itself is not important here, suffice it to say that the thought was interesting, and I was excited that my mind was working in a way that led to the thought emerging in my mind. Reacting to this nice surprise, I began to wonder if my positive reaction to the thought might in any way lead to more thoughts of that type in the future. How nice it would be, I thought, that by appreciating a style of thinking, one could guide ones self toward more of that type of thiking, or influence the future probability of it.

Since that day, I've thought about this a good deal, and have made some important progress in understanding it.

First of all, finding that what one is thinking about is interesting does encourage us to think the same thought again. The result of this is that it becomes easier overtime to think about a particular idea, and, I would wager, to think about ideas that are similar in structure to that idea. This is just a matter of classical conditioning: Actions/thoughts lead to either positive negative reactions, and these reactions influence the future probability that we will execute a particular thought/action.

As soon as I began thinking about this, a new issue came to dominate my mind. Although a positive reaction to a certain thought may lead us to rethink that thought in the future (thereby strengthening the connections resposible for that and similar thoughts), a reaction to the processes that led to a thought ("oh that was so clever!) would not be able to influence the future occurrence of those processes. In the example of my thinking in the car, I was excited not just by how interesting I thought the idea I had was, but also by the fact that it was a really creative idea: it was a spontaneously emerging idea that was grounded in concepts I had been thinking about. The question is: By reacting positively to the fact that the idea was creative, could I support the emergence of more creative thoughts in the future?

Operant conditioning accounts for how a positive reaction to one idea can lead to rethinking it and similar ideas more easily. But I'm not sure that it could help us to think more (e.g.) creative thoughts if that's what we want to do. The conditioning mechanisms above worked because the idea itself led to an affective reaction, and therefore, the idea itself was strengthened. The creativity of the idea did not lead to the positive reaction, though it can be held accountable for why the idea was interpreted as creative.

Therefore creativity can not be linked to the affective reaction, it remains untouched by the conditioning process. Broken down, this is what this looks like: A creative process leads an idea to pop into a persons head>>they interpret the idea as the outcome of a creative idea generating process>>>This is something they value, and consequently they are happy to have had the idea>>>They have good feelings about the situation and the idea.

This sequence shows that, although a person can value creativity, as well as interpret ideas as being creative, there is no direct link between the actual creative processes themselves and the positive feedback-Unless the creative processes are reactivated every time the (originally) creative idea is re-thought-which doesn't make logical sense.