Anatomy of a Thought: Neurons, Networks and the Construction of Meaning
(University of La Verne)
Most theory and research on cognition has implicitly focused on positivist approaches to perception, memory and information processing. The goal is to understand a baseline model for how all humans think. This “thinking” takes the form of perceiving, remembering and processing information from external sources. Post-modernism suggests that each thought is unique to the individual who experiences it, and that information is perceived, remembered and processed differently by each individual. This paper addresses not what is done with external stimuli, but how a thought is internally generated to create meaning that is both like the thoughts of others, and yet uniquely different. Data from interviews with mainstream Europeans on the meaning of their own ethnicity is used to explore how network theory, connectionism and neural anatomy and physiology might be merged into a model of how thoughts are generated in the mind of an individual.