A Theory of Thinking and Interpersonal Communication

ABSTRACT

This article explores the psychology behind thinking and communicating, subsequently proposing a pragmatic model for improving these processes. It begins from the consideration that we all operate very limited cognitive “machines”: in an average lifetime, the human brain can theoretically store up to 0.0000084% (8.4×10⁻⁸) and consciously process some 0.0000000000512% (5.12×10⁻¹³) of the (digital) information that was ever created, captured or replicated by humans. Such a dismally low ratio between human cognitive capacities on the one side, and the total amount of existing information on the other means that thinking and communicating—especially on “difficult” topics such as warfare, politics or religion—usually involves unilateral or hypolateral thinking. This is defined as people’s general tendency to ignore most of the existing information on any topic; to specialize only on information immediately available and; to use cognitive strategies and other cognitive meta-mechanisms to simplify thinking processes. On the basis of these considerations, the article proposes: (1) a logical proof of why most of our “objective” knowledge is in fact built from emotions and intentions, rather than from rationality and ontological proofs—suggesting that our “inner world” is the ultimate driver of the “outer world” as we perceive it; and (2) a model of hyperlateral or omnilateral thinking, whereby we consciously follow a technique to become aware of the existence of a multitude of perspectives on any one topic, a necessary precondition for meaningful thinking and communication to happen.

KEYWORDS:

• interpersonal communication
• cognitive limits
• cognitive strategies
• unilateral/hypolateral thinking
• hyperlateral/omnilateral thinking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Luft and Ingham, “The Johari Window,” 246. The framework is composed of four quadrants representing four areas of understanding: (1) Open area: anything you know about yourself and are willing to share with others; (2) Blind area: anything you do not know about yourself, but that others have become aware of; (3) Hidden area: anything you know about yourself and are not willing to share with others; (4) Unknown area: any aspect unknown to you or anyone else.

^2. An order of magnitude is a factor of ten. Thus, four orders of magnitude correspond to a factor of 10,000, or 10⁴.

^3. A byte is considered the smallest meaningful storage of information. Each byte contains 8 bits, which is the smallest unit of information. As a bit can only convey 2 possible states (either 0 or 1), a set of 8 bits = 1 byte can convey up to 256 combinations, meaning that it can convey a number up to 256 maximum. For a general introduction to bits and bytes, see https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs101/bits-bytes.html.

^4. Reinsel, Gantz, and Rydning, “Data Age 2025.” These estimates are a collaboration between Seagate and IDC, two private companies dealing, respectively, with mass data storage and market intelligence and advisory services.

^5. “If a tree falls in a forest” and similar reflections have long questioned whether objects of sense have an ontological existence of their own, or whether they exist only when they are perceived. These questions have gained prominence with quantum physics, where empirical findings from experiments such as the “double slit experiment” suggest that the act of observing reality affects the outcome of reality itself, even in the natural sciences. Hence the “observer effect” in physics, the phenomenon in which the act of observation alters the behaviour of particles being observed, questions the possibility of clearly separating observer and observed (Baclawski, “The Observer Effect”).

^6. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can already be used to generate written, spoken or visual digital content, which by definition contributes to the Global Datasphere. However, AI algorithms do not have the ability to create original content or ideas, a development that has at times been defined as “Technological singularity,” a stage from which we are still far away.

^7. Szilard, “Über die Entropieverminderung,” 840–56.

^8. Lloyd, “Computational Capacity of the Universe,” 237901.

^9. Vopson, “Estimation of the Information Contained,” 105317.

^10. Wu, Dufford, Mackie, Egan, and Fan, “The Capacity of Cognitive Control,” 1.

^11. The estimate has been calculated under the assumption of conscious thinking for about 14 hours a day, 365 days a year, for an average OECD lifetime of 80 years.

^12. Reber et al., “What Is the Memory Capacity of the Human Brain”; Goldman, “New Imaging Method”; Bartol, “Nanoconnectomic Upper Bound.” The highest estimates of synapses in the brain go up to 1000 trillion, which, assuming 4.7 bits of information per synapsis, would take the total to 0.58 PB.

^13. “Attention is the means by which we actively process a limited amount of information from the total amount of information available through our senses, our stored memories and our other cognitive processes, and is seen as including both conscious and unconscious processes. … Consciousness includes both the feeling and the content of awareness, some of which may be under the focus of attention, therefore attention and consciousness form two partially overlapping sets” (Sternberg, Cognitive Psychology, 62).

^14. Ibid., 63–64. “Priming” occurs when recognition of certain stimuli is affected by prior presentation of the same or similar stimuli, even at an unconscious level. “Tip-of-the-tongue” refers to the phenomenon in which people try to remember something that is known to be stored in memory but that cannot be easily retrieved.

According to Kentridge, “Blindsight” refers to the phenomenon of having traces of visual perceptual ability in blind areas, often shown by patients who, despite lesions in areas of the visual cortex, still maintain the capacity of perceiving objects, correctly guessing the location and orientation of such objects.

^15. “Habituation” involves our becoming accustomed to a stimulus so that we gradually pay less and less attention to it. “Sensory adaptation” is a lessening of attention to a stimulus that is not subject to conscious control.

^16. Sternberg, Cognitive Psychology, 111: “Perception is the set of processes by which we recognize, organize and make sense of the sensations we receive from environmental stimuli.”

^17. The columns of the Parthenon (438 BC) were built to slightly bulge in the middle to compensate for the visual tendency to perceive straight parallel lines as curving inwards (Sternberg, Cognitive Psychology, 114). The basic tenets of Buddhism (which first appeared in the fifth century BC) postulate that our fabrications of perceptions (a conclusion or assumption formed from false, misrepresented, or incomplete information) are the result of “ignorance and … confusion, all deluded thinking, all stress and suffering.” These are: i. confusing permanence with regard to impermanence; ii. confusing pleasant with regard to stressful; iii. confusing Self with regard to Not-Self; iv. confusing attractive with regard to unattractive. (“Anguttara Nikaya 4.49—Vipallasa Sutta”).

^18. Sternberg, Cognitive Psychology, 157: “Memory is the sum of the means by which we retain and draw on our past experiences to use that information in the present.”

^19. Kahana, Foundation of Human Memory, chaps. 1–3.

^20. Since information storing mostly happens with information that has previously been processed, the information processing capacity also likely acts as a bottleneck for memory capacity.

^21. A set of 6 bottles of water of 2 litres each gives 12 litres; divided by 0.0000000000512% gives 23.43 trillion litres of water; corresponding to 23.43 billion cubic meters of water; corresponding to 18.64 million acre-feet of water. Lake Mead’s maximum designed capacity is 27.6 million acre-feet of water (author’s calculations).

^22. In their review of the concept of “heuristic,” Hjeij and Vilks find its precursors in the writings of Pappus (4th century) and Al-Khawarizmi (9th century), and in a mechanical device called Zairja, used by Arab astrologers (10th century). In our times, behavioural psychologists such as Ivan Pavlov and B. F. Skinner developed the theory of “reinforcement learning,” which is based on automatisms and their limits in cognitive processes. In the 1950s, Herbert Simon defined “bounded rationality” as the idea that “people must make decisions with limited time, mental resources, and information.” Another theory from the 1950s was Leonard Savage’s theory of “subjective expected utility” (SEU) which spells out the ideally rational decision that would be applicable only in what he called a “small world.” Following the work of Tversky and Kahneman in the 1970s, the topic has become especially popular, with the Scopus database finding 20 published articles with the word “heuristic” in their title in 1970, and no less than 3783 in 2021. (Hjeij and Vilks, “A Brief History of Heuristics”).

^23. Kahneman, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (speech); and Thinking, Fast and Slow.

^24. Sternberg, Cognitive Psychology; Kahneman, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” In “The Influence of Emotions on Beliefs,” Frijda, Manstead, and Bem explain that such “shortcomings” are embedded in the cognitive processes themselves, to an extent that they can be defined as such only when measured against a benchmark of effortful reasoning based on absolute rational principles, a rare occurrence in nature. The standard in human thinking remains instead one of limited rationality, to the extent that “many of the biases of judgements, in individuals as well as in social groups, could be explained by the operation of general cognitive strategies and principles.”

^25. Kahneman, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (speech).

^26. Mattson “Superior Pattern Processing,” 265, 1.

^27. Konovalov and Krajbich, “Neurocomputational Dynamics,” 1282–93.

^28. De Bono, Lateral Thinking, 10.

^29. A large part of the total population of information we can access in a lifetime—especially in the first two decades of life—is inevitably determined by life variables and constraints that pre-exist any cognitive process, capacity or strategy, including the country and place we are born in, our original ethnic group, culture, religion, socio-economic standing etc. However, a substantial part of such information can also be influenced via our agency in adulthood.

^30. Cited in Frijda, Manstead, and Bem, “The Influence of Emotions on Beliefs,” 2.

^31. Cited in Juslin, “From Everyday Emotions to Aesthetic Emotions,” 256.

^32. Kay, Obliquity, preface.

^33. Wason, “On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses,” 129–40; Zajonc, “Feeling and Thinking,” 151–75. The “confirmation bias” describes the underlying tendency to notice, focus on, and give greater credence to evidence that fits our existing beliefs. The “affect heuristic” describes how we often rely on our emotions, rather than on concrete information, when making decisions.

^34. The following definitions are taken from The Decision Lab’s “List of Cognitive Biases and Heuristics”: “Belief perseverance” describes how we continue to hold onto established beliefs even when faced with clear, contradictory evidence. “Cognitive dissonance” describes the tendency to avoid having conflicting beliefs and attitudes because it makes us feel uncomfortable. The “look elsewhere effect” describes how, when scientists analyze the results of their experiments, results that are apparently statistically significant might actually have arisen by chance. This might be because researchers ignored a statistically insignificant result that they found previously, choosing to “look elsewhere” or “torture the data”—continuing to search for a significant finding instead of accepting their initial results. The “sunk cost fallacy” describes our tendency to follow through on an endeavor if we have already invested time, effort, or money into it, whether or not the current costs outweigh the benefits. For a description and discussion of more than 100 among the most commonly tested cognitive biases, see The Decision Lab, “List of Cognitive Biases and Heuristics.”

^35. A variable is a quality or a quantity whose future outcomes are uncertain. An outcome is a possible feature or value of a variable. An event is a specified combination of outcomes.

^36. In this model, the possible set of outcomes (= total number of events, i.e. total number of 4 unique outcome combinations of the type of, for example, I1Aα) is therefore given by 20 outcomes for the variable “subject” x 20 outcomes for the variable “object” x 20 outcomes for the variable “epistemology” x 20 outcomes for the variable “norm” = 160,000 events. Adding a fifth variable with another 20 outcomes, as discussed later in the article, would take the total number of events to 160,000 x 20 = 3,200,000.

^37. Turnbull, The Mountain People; Freud, Totem and Taboo.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simone Raudino

Simone Raudino received his Honours degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of South Africa (UNISA) in 2012 and PhD in International Political Economy from the University of Hong Kong in 2014. He is co-founder of the non-profit organization Bridging Gaps, which promotes intercultural, inter-faith and inter-ethnic dialogue, a visiting professor at the Kyiv School of Economics, and a lecturer at HEC Paris. His publications include Development Aid and Sustainable Economic Growth in Africa: The Limits of Western and Chinese Engagements (Palgrave, 2016); and Beyond the Death of God: Religion in 21st Century International Politics, co-edited with Patricia Sohn (University of Michigan Press, 2022).