Cognition

Deciphering Reality of Symbols and Images

Cognition is the invisible (re-)construction of reality as perceived by our five senses. It takes place in the mind, which operates almost imperceptibly in thought processes and which helps people to decipher the real world.

Cognition is the process of making sense of sensory inputs, of remembering events and procedures, of making generalizations, analogies, and explanations, and of developing means of communication.

The cognitive mental status examinationOpens in new window is designed in such a way that these functions may be divided into their simplest elements (attention, languageOpens in new window, memoryOpens in new window, praxis, recognition (or gnosis), and the “higher cortical functions” or complex cognition) both for the purposes of scientific inquiry and clinical evaluation.

Cognition is to some extent culturally conditioned, so that people from different cultures decipher reality differently. The human mind is informed by social experience, so that reality for one person may be at variance with reality as perceived by another who has had different experiences.

We acquire a ‘world view’ and decipher the complex reality around us by attaching meanings to symbols and by relating these symbols, one might say by operating with ‘images’ (Boulding, 1997/1956).

Thinking with symbols is not a purely private, individual matter.

What the human mind constructs as an image of reality is influenced by social, cultural experience, so that different people and people from different civilizations may well perceive the world in different ways.

Upbringing and cultural experiences influence a person’s cognition, as does language, since some thought processes make use of linguistic symbols. This sometimes complicates communication between members of different cultures, because certain ‘images of the mind’ are not shared and need to be explicated before they are understood (Redding, 1993, pp. 72-77).

A problem in this context is what neuroscience calls cognitive bias.

Information that can be easily integrated into one’s prior knowledge tends to be more readily accepted than information that challenges preconceived ideas. This makes what is objective and rational less clear-cut than most would assume.

Because they create meaningful symbols and relate them in their minds, humans are able to interact with the world in ways that go beyond reflexive behavior (such as the response of the pupil of the eye to bright light), conditioned reflexes (such as our mouths salivating when we see delicious food) and instrumental behavior (such as the use of a club to propel a golf ball).

Thus, we can distinguish between the following types of behavior (moving from primitive to more highly developed forms):

1. reflexive (example: contraction of a muscle when pain is inflicted);
2. conditioned-reflexive (example: a shudder when you think of being beheaded);
3. instrumental (example: use of knife and fork to eat);
4. symbolizing (the creation, combination and digestion of symbols, example: developing an architectural design and using it to construct a building).

The human mind is able to attach non-intrinsic, abstract meanings to signals and turn these into symbols, which often represent meanings that have nothing to do with the original signal. Thus, early systems of writing depicted real objects, but the letters, characters and other symbols acquired abstract meaning to convey words or part of words.

Symbols frequently depend on a complex context to be read correctly (for example, a red light may indicate the need to stop the car, or it may signal a red-light district). It is this capacity to work with abstract symbols that forms the mental gulf that divides the lowest savage from the highest ape, as the renowned British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor put it (Tylor, 1883; Kasper 2011b).

Symboling constitutes the largest part of the knowledge and information we acquire. It then influences the more primitive types of behavior (reflexive and instrumental behavior).

Much learning takes the form of internalizing concepts that are first consciously acquired as symbols and then, through repetition, turned into conditioned reflexes. Thus, we first absorb a chain of symbols to learn how a car is steered. Then, we practice— again and again —until the various actions become almost automatic, conditioned reflexes.

SkillsOpens in new window and much specific knowledge are acquired in such a way to become implicit knowledge. In similar processes of internalization, we acquire moral standards which one might call ethical skills. They are most effectively learnt by repeat practice (observing adults in the family for example).

As a result, we are normally honest, not because we carefully analyze a specific situation whether we can get away unpunished with dishonesty, but rather in a conditioned-reflexive way. Such reflexive behavior speeds up decision processes and enhances the effectiveness of human interaction.