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
Famous quotes containing the word thought:
“I thought about all of us women and how we spend half our lives rebelling against our mothers and the next half rebelling against our daughters.”
—Lois Wyse (20th century)
“Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution—such call I good books.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Even in the pink crib
the somehow deficient,
the somehow maimed,
are thought to have
a special pipeline to the mystical....”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)