Suggested reading order for Mental Construction pages from fundamentals to conclusions. Mental Construction posts develop additional aspects of these ideas.
- How We Think with Neurons. Mental Construction develops the answer that biological characteristics of the brain’s neurons shape our thoughts and their associations.
- External to Internal. Sensory data steps into our mental worldview
- Partial and Personal Experience. Importance of our particular events to our worldview and to our understanding
- Genetic Factors. Common human construction yet unique, idiosyncratic features
- Learned Knowledge and Uncertainty. All knowledge is not created equal
- Neural Connections. Regularities in the brain’s cortex
- Neurons. Dendrite, axons, and signaling
- Neural Threshold. All-or-None. The Almost Gate
- Maps in the Brain. Sensory organization. Critical learning periods.
- Semantic Maps. Internal worldview, 3 Imperatives
- Brain Building. Human minds, built layer-by-layer. Preconscious and conscious
- Brain Through the Ages. Physical structures, behavioral growth from single cells to primates
- Development to the Adult Mind. Language, culture, and critical periods
- Classic Stages of Individual Development. Maslow, Kohlberg, Erikson
- Cognition. Pyramid and functions
- Sources of thought. Sensations, similarities, associations, and deductions
- Concept Elevator. Concepts stop at brain building stages
- Neural Cascade. Quantifying increasing abstraction
- Reasoning. Induction and deduction
- Induction Operation. Neural properties lead to abstraction, similarity, and association
- Deduction from the Neural Brain. Standing on the shoulders of giants
- Creativity. Handling demands with incomplete information and perhaps more quickly than we desire. We all have creativity. The magnitude depends on neural threshold.
- Decision-Making. Cogitation starts with physical desires and fears, merged into emotions and capped by cortical parallel processing, fast and slow.