I was sitting in a local coffee shop thinking about some of the recent posts I have written what relate to metacognition (i.e. thinking about thinking). In the midst of my navel gazing the thought came to me “is there a sensation of thinking?” If there is a sensation of thinking, where does it reside?
I’ve heard that the ancient Egyptians thought that the brain was a useless organ (hence the ‘scrambled eggs’ method of clearing this organ out of the body for mummification, far unlike how the other organs were treated…), the ancient Chinese believed that thought resided in the stomach… I’ve seen these sorts of point in books over and over. The interesting thing about this is that these two points are usually put forth as if it were a quaint, antique notion, and that we all know different.
I’ve never heard of anyone actually taking the next step…
To me, this would seem to be a worthwhile topic for a though experiment. I should preface this by saying that I do ‘sense’ that the location of my thinking is somewhere in my skull. I have considered that since my primary sensory organs seem to focus upon this vague spot, my ‘feeling’ that my thought emanate from this area may only be caused by such things as: my speaking (through bone conduction) resonates in my head (to some small degree…), I hear in stereo, and the area where these sensations seem to focus in between the ears… I imagine you can see the thrust of this argument, that what ‘thinking feels like’ may be completely unrelated to what thinking may actually be, and that I am only rationalizing some deeply ingrained societal attitudes…
This might be true… But this may hold for both of these positions…
There is obviously any number of related questions, such as: if this arbitrary place where we feel cognition occurs is truly arbitrary, then why can’t we change the place where we feel our thoughts emanate? For instance, is it possible through assiduous practice to move the set of one’s thoughts to another part of the body…? If this is possible, then would it be possible to place this arbitrary residence somewhere beyond our physical corpus?
OK, there is another equally obvious question… does this topic have any real importance, is there any aspect of this topic which has some potential utility in our lives… I’m afraid that I don’t even know how to answer that question…
To me, this topic is interesting in the fact that it could change one’s point of view, in a manner similar to how some photographers try to present images of what we think are mundane object in other contexts, if 0only to jar how we perceive things…
