Thought generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination. Because thought underlies almost all human actions and interactions, understanding its physical and metaphysical origins, processes, and effects has been a longstanding goal of many academic disciplines including, among others, biology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology.
Thinking allows beings to make sense of or model the world in different ways, and to represent or interpret it in ways that are significant to them, or which accord with their needs, attachments, objectives, plans, commitments, ends and desires.
Read more about Thought: Etymology and Usage, Philosophy, Biology, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Sociology
Other articles related to "thought":
... Despite their similarity, psychological and sociological researchers tend to differ in their goals, approaches, methods, and terminology ... They also favor separate academic journals and professional societies ...
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... Freedom of thought (also called the freedom of conscience or ideas) is the freedom of an individual to hold or consider a fact, viewpoint, or thought, independent ...
... After exploring ultra-aggressive fantasies of hate, envy, and greed in very young, very ill children, Melanie Klein proposed a model of the human psyche that linked significant oscillations of state, with whether the postulated Eros or Thanatos instincts were in the fore ... She named the state of the psyche, when the sustaining principle of life is in domination, the depressive position ...
... He had specially prepared himself, as he thought, for teaching imaginative men, and political men, and legal men, and scientific men who bear the world in hand and he did not attempt to win their ... great aim was to revive the antique style of thought and sentiment which had hardened into these formulas, and by this means to supplant the new influences ... at variance with the main current of the thought of his time, the failure of the commission he had undertaken was sooner or later inevitable and shortly after the opening of his new church in ...
Famous quotes containing the word thought:
“The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a fair, plump, perennial waxen complexion, which indicates that all the ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and behavior.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.”
—Hermann Broch (1886–1951)