What Are Ideas?
By: Jim Mason
Tags: Cognition, Psychology, Philosophy Of Mind, Ideas, Language

Where do they live and how do they grow?

Photo by Rohan Makhecha on Unsplash

Like all forms of life, we humans are amazingly complicated beings. We are made up of trillions of cells, which are composed of even larger numbers of molecules, all of which cooperate to keep us alive. Yet during our lifetimes we move and act as individual units at our level of awareness. We can only be at one place, and only perform a few deliberate, conscious activities at a time. Our nervous system, consisting of our brains, our spinal cords, and the peripheral nerves that branch to and from the muscles and sensory organs of our bodies, are what enable us to behave as coordinated living things.

Although our brains consist of many different types of cells all working together, including neurons, astrocytes, microglia, oligodendrocytes, and others, it is enough for this essay to lump the types together and simply call them nerve cells. (We could call them brain cells, except that many of them are situated outside or extend outside our brains, from our perceptual organs, in our spinal cords, and to our muscles.)

Nerve cells are amazing forms of life. They can be active or fairly dormant for long periods of time. They connect to sensory cells, muscle cells, and other nerve cells in ways that their actions can stimulate or inhibit, and can be stimulated by or inhibited by, the actions of the other cells to which they are connected. They can form nerve networks in which actions can spread, and those networks can include cycles that enable the actions of nerve cells to repeat or reverberate. Very crude analogies of nerve networks are networks of roads through which traffic can flow, or networks of branches in a tree, although tree branches don’t include cycles. The internet is another, modern analogy of our nerve networks.

When nerve cells are active, sending signals to other cells, they require more energy than when they are dormant. That energy is provided by oxygen and other chemicals delivered to them by blood flow and by other cells specialized to support the activity of nerve cells. The activations of nerve cells and networks can be measured directly by tiny probes inserted into them, or they can be measured indirectly in large numbers by brain imaging systems that detect their energy metabolism. In order not to introduce new jargon, and because I think its common meaning is most appropriate, I propose that our common idea of the word “idea” can be understood more specifically as a network of nerve cells that can activate and support each other’s activation. Ideas literally live as networks of nerve cells in our brains and nervous systems.

Photo by Natasha Connell on Unsplash

We can classify ideas into three basic kinds: perceptual ideas, which are activated by our sensory organs, action ideas, which activate our organs of action (mainly our muscles), and internal ideas, which connect perceptual ideas to action ideas directly or indirectly. When perceptual ideas are active, we usually call them “sensations” or “perceptions”. When action ideas are activated, we usually call them “plans” or “intentions”; when the actions are carried out by our muscles, we call them “acts”. Finally, when internal ideas are activated, we usually call them “thoughts”. Generally, we can refer to all kinds of activated ideas as “thoughts”. Thoughts of any of the three kinds can be subconscious or conscious. (More about that later.)

As we develop from conception through birth, the nerve cells and nerve networks in our brains develop according to information contained in our genetic material — our DNA. We are born “pre-wired” with sensory cells, nerve cells and nerve networks to serve as our senses and our beginning perceptual ideas. We are born with muscle cells and with other nerve cells and nerve networks to serve as our beginning action ideas and abilities to act on them. There are some built-in internal ideas, too. We humans are pretty helpless at birth — more so than many other animals — but we do have some very useful built-in ideas from which more elaborate ideas can be developed.

For example, one of our most useful built-in ideas is the perceptual idea of a face. It’s important to understand that the idea of a face is separate from the word “face”. The word is a separate idea that speakers of English develop later on in life and that becomes part of our larger idea of face. The most primitive, built-in idea of face is an infant’s ability to interpret some configurations of more primitive visual ideas — circles or spots, and edge boundaries or lines — as faces. Think of the familiar “happy face” drawing as a visual representation of our primitive idea of a face. From “happy faces” and similar drawings, we can guess that, in order of importance to our primitive face idea are circles or spots for two eyes, a line for a mouth, and optionally, or more weakly, dots or a line for a nose. The eye ideas are most important, but the mouth idea is important, too. (Think of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat face.) The primitive idea for a face is extremely important to an infant as a way to recognize a person, an idea which itself is probably present in a rudimentary way in the infant brain.

Two other vital, built-in ideas in infants are the action ideas of the sucking reflex and the grasping reflex. Those are the basic ideas a baby needs for accessing and taking in its first food. The face idea, the grasping reflex idea, and the sucking reflex idea are joined in the infant by a developing idea of nurturer or parent person or, more specifically, mother, which is also connected to primitive built-in ideas of warmth, softness, comfort and the like. Unpleasant ideas of hunger, cold, and distress are also normally built into us at birth.

Other important build-in ideas are the action ideas of directing the gaze of our eyes and focusing them. They begin as fairly simple nerve networks that become more elaborate and accurate as they incorporate other nerve cells and connections, as a result of repeated experience with controlling our vision. Similarly, our primitive action ideas for controlling the movements of our arms and hands and our legs and feet are fairly simple at birth but become more refined through practice.

So, too, our internal ideas of person, and parent or nurturer grow larger and more elaborate with experience, and we develop ideas of ourselves in a similar way from basic, primitive ideas.

Beginning with our built-in idea networks, ideas grow by combining tens, hundreds, thousands of idea networks to create new idea networks until we have developed billions of overlapping idea networks in our nervous systems. The sheer numbers of nerve cells and connections in our brains give us the potential to create and grow astronomical numbers of ideas.

A crude way to illustrate the ways in which nerve networks overlap is by use of Venn diagrams, which you may have learned about in mathematics. Yet those fail to capture the full complexities and subtleties of how nerve networks can overlap and interact. A better analogy is to think of trillions of tree roots overlapping and interacting in a forest, or the network shown in this picture.

Creating new ideas or modifying old ones is what we think of as learning. Connections between nerve cells can become stronger through repeated activity, either more strongly activational or more strongly inhibitory of the nerve cells to which they connect. Or connections between nerve cells can become weaker from lack of use. Entirely new connections between nerve cells can grow, and some can disappear. Many nerve cells die and new nerve cells are born. By all of those means, the connections between existing ideas (nerve cell networks) change, resulting in modified nerve cell networks, which constitute new or modified ideas.

Learning can be guided by teachers who try to activate ideas in us that they know we are likely to combine into new ideas, or learning can occur spontaneously in us as different but overlapping idea networks become activated in our brains and develop new connections of activation or inhibition among their nerve cells.

But, still, there are limits to the ideas we can have — limits that depend on the limitations of our senses, the capabilities of our muscles and skeletons, and the ideas our brains are born with.

Other animals share our ability to grow ideas as networks of nerve cells, but the ideas they can have differ from ours because of differences in their senses and their muscular-skeletal systems. Dogs have such complex olfactory systems (senses of smell) that they no doubt have olfactory ideas that we can’t even imagine. Similarly, bats have wings and echolocation systems and must have corresponding ideas that we find it difficult or impossible to imagine.

Other people also have different potentials for ideas than we do, because of differences in their senses and/or muscular systems at birth. Color blindness is a well-known example of a common sensory deficit. Similarly, some of us have various deficits of hearing, smell, or touch that limit our abilities to have some ideas. Less well known are unusual sensory abilities that many of us lack but that some people have, such as perfect pitch, unusual abilities to detect smells of various kinds, and even synesthesias — for example, abilities to “see” or “smell” sounds — that are due to unusual nerve connections in their brains. There is even some evidence from synesthesia that people with color blindness due to defects in the retinas of their eyes can have perceptual ideas for colors in their brains which they can experience from sound-color synesthesia but which they are unable to experience through their eyes.

On the action side, some people are born with unusual body structures and unusual abilities or disabilities to control the actions of their muscles. They can have correspondingly different action ideas than other people do.

The basic idea nerve networks that we are born with seem to me to constitute and, when active, produce what some philosophers call the “qualia” of experience — the indescribable essence of the color blue, the pure sound of a chime, the taste of sugar, the feeling of sadness, or the experience of running. Despite claims that such qualia transcend explanation in terms of nerve cell activity, we know from differences in people’s brains that we can each experience such qualia in different ways, differences that correspond to differences in our sensory organs and nerve networks in our brains and those extending to our muscles. Your idea and experience of the color green may not be the same as mine, especially if you are color blind. Similarly, animals like dogs that can smell and hear things that we cannot smell or hear must have “qualia” for those extra smells and sounds that we don’t have and can’t imagine.

Also, it’s interesting that, while we experience visual qualia for frequencies of electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum but not outside that part of the spectrum, we do experience feelings of warmth or heat when our skin is exposed to infrared radiation that we can’t see. Sensory cells in our skin that detect warmth are responsible for those sensations. The qualia for colors and heat that are invoked in us by exposure to electromagnetic radiation definitely emerge from activations of nerve networks in us; they don’t exist abstractly somewhere else.

Our internal ideas, including those that connect sensory ideas to action ideas, can become incredibly elaborate and complicated as our brains develop through experience. Many of our ideas are vague or “fuzzy”, because our nerve networks overlap in complicated ways, and the activation of our nerve networks is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. Some parts of a network are usually activated more weakly than others.

Think of your idea of grandmother as an example. If you have known one or both of your actual grandmothers, your specific ideas of them will be related to your general idea of a grandmother. But based on ideas obtained from elsewhere by observing other people’s grandmothers and learning about grandmothers, your general idea of grandmother may overlap with ideas of old, possibly gray-haired, and biological parent of your biological parent, whether or not your own grandmothers have those specific properties. So some of the parts of the general grandmother idea are optional, while others are essential. In particular, the idea networks woman and mother-of-a-parent (not necessarily a biological-parent) are essential, mutually supportive parts of the idea of grandmother, while the idea man is mutually inhibitory to it. For speakers and readers of English, the word “grandmother” is also an important part of the general idea of grandmother, even if you call your own grandmothers by other names.

How idea networks are activated in our brains

I’m now going to present an extended example of how ideas become activated in our brains, so that you can experience that activation first-hand and think about it. Because this is a text document, my example will start with an idea from written English.

If I write a C, and you understand a language like English that uses the Roman alphabet, some of your visual perceptual ideas are activated by seeing C. Those activate, in turn and at a low level, many other idea networks in your brain, most prominently the idea of the letter c itself, along with the ideas letter, black and capitalized. For readers of English the idea of the letter c, in turn, activates the ideas third and alphabet. For some people it may also activate the idea middling grade in school.

If I next add the letter O to make the sequence CO, the ideas activated in you change. Some, such as middling grade in school are inhibited, while others such as abbreviation and possibly company are activated. Continuing with the addition of the letters L and another O to see COLO, the idea company is suppressed and the ideas word and possibly color, colony, and others may be weakly activated.

Continuation with the letter R to make the visual pattern COLOR strongly activates word and color and inhibits colony and others. The word color, in turn, activates many non-language ideas, including the colors of the visible spectrum, and combined with the colors of the perceived printed letters, it re-enforces the activation of the idea black.

However, further continuation with an A to make COLORA inhibits the idea color and partly inhibits the idea black. In some people, especially those living in the United States, it may activate the ideas Colorado, state, and possibly river which are strengthened by continuation with the letters D and then O.

If I now begin anew with the letters ORE, which activate the word-idea ore, that can combine with the idea Colorado to activate the idea silver, if you know enough of the history of Colorado. But if I continue that sequence with a G, making OREG, the ideas ore and silver are inhibited, and for those familiar with United States geography, the idea Oregon may become activated through the ideas western and state that have been activated by the idea Colorado. Other people, less familiar with US geography, might activate the idea oregano from OREG instead of Oregon especially if you are a cook or an Italian.

Notice that activations of ideas are often bi-directional. The word “Colorado” invokes the idea Colorado, which can invoke ideas such as state, western, United States, and mountains. In the other direction, the ideas state, western, United States, and mountains can invoke the idea Colorado but also others such as Nevada and Utah. Again for those who know US geography, activation of the idea Pike’s Peak can inhibit Nevada and Utah and re-enforce Colorado.

Then, as a further step in the reverse direction, the idea Colorado normally invokes the spoken and written words for it, but not necessarily the spelling of the written word. That requires a sequence of activations of letters which may or may not be correct.

Sometimes the idea Colorado may not be immediately and fully successful in activating the word for it. That causes the familiar “tip-of-my-tongue” experience. In that case ideas related to the word may be activated, such as name of a state and multi-syllabic, and the actual word may be activated by the process of going through the alphabet: Does it start with an a? No. Does it start with a b? No. Does it start with a c? Yes! That can be enough to activate the word idea, though not necessarily its fully correct spelling idea.

Notice how the example in this section illustrates the importance of sequence in the activation of ideas in our brains. We recognize the word idea Colorado from the letters in the word and their sequence. The same letters in another sequence, such as ODORACOL, don’t easily activate the word idea.

This section also shows the importance of timing in the activation of ideas. I have deliberately slowed things down for the foregoing example. If we read the word “Colorado” at normal speed, the ideas letter, C, middling grade in school, and color don’t have time to be activated and become self-sustaining. We tend to activate the word idea Colorado rapidly from the visual shape of the printed word as a whole. In fact, that enables us to activate that idea, at least temporarily, even if the word is slightly misspelled as “Colorabo”.

Ideas versus beliefs

Beliefs are ideas to which we attribute an idea of truth as opposed to falsity. Actually, the idea of truth can be a matter of degree, not just a binary distinction. But what does truth mean to most of us? There can be more than one kind of truth and more than one kind of belief.

A belief may be an idea that has, from our experience, become a useful one for making decisions that lead us to successful acts. If we benefit from those acts, we can say that the idea has truth from usefulness or practical truth.

Or a belief may be an idea that invokes built-in, basic ideas of comfort, pleasure, and well-being. In that case it has emotional truth, whether or not it also leads to overt acts.

The belief, sometimes active in dreams, that we can fly alone like birds has an emotional truth but is not a very useful belief in our waking lives. Many other beliefs — that we are bound to win a lottery, inherit great wealth, or achieve great power — may also have more emotional truth than practical truth. Acting repeatedly on beliefs of future winnings from gambling can result in harmful gambling obsessions and compulsions — a case in which emotional truth dominates an absence of practical truth.

Beliefs that involve either kind of truth are probably more frequently and more extensively active in our brains, than ideas which are not our own beliefs are active in us. It takes extra effort to activate ideas in us that are not beliefs of ours.

The ability to understand beliefs held by other people as different from our own beliefs provides the basis for the act of lying, which involves communicating with the intention to create and/or activate in other people ideas which are not beliefs of our own, in the hope that those people will adopt those ideas as beliefs of their own. Ideas that motivate us to lie should be distinguished from delusional beliefs, which may have emotional truth for the believer, but which may not only lack practical truth but may actually lead to potentially harmful acts. People who communicate delusional beliefs are not necessarily lying, but their ideas can still be harmful to other people if those people adopt them as beliefs of their own.

Ideas and decision making

Some of our action idea networks automatically activate our muscular action systems. We call those “reflexes”. Others require a choice of whether to act or not, or a choice between two or more incompatible action ideas regarding which action idea to act upon. That is, they involve decisions that are made somehow by the nerve networks in our brains.

Action decisions are ultimately the result of the relative strengths of two or more simultaneously activated action ideas. The strongest one determines the act. The relative strengths of their activations may simply be due to the numbers of nerve cells and the numbers and strengths of the interconnections in each network. Or the successfully activated action idea network may be the one which is most strongly activated and least strongly inhibited by other active idea networks in our brains at the time of the decision. We like to believe that we exercise free will when we make decisions, but it’s not that simple. Decisions ultimately result from interactions of many idea networks in our nervous systems, not all of which are under our conscious control.

Communication of ideas through demonstration, art, and language

Communication of ideas requires both the sender and the receiver to have enough similarities in their existing ideas that actions taken by the sender will activate perceptual ideas in the receiver, which will in turn activate similar internal and possibly action ideas in the receiver. Any kind of action that can activate a perceptual idea may suffice. Sometimes we can communicate ideas by gesturing or by demonstrating how to do things. Our human works of visual and sculptural art, music, and dance can also communicate ideas by activating them in people who observe the work, as can diagrams and three-dimensional models of various kinds that we can construct.

Human language is just a very special and uniquely important case of communication of ideas. At its base, our language ability involves a number of specific action ideas and perceptual ideas. Our vocal apparatus in our throats and mouths enables us to make a variety of sounds easily and quickly, ranging from harmonious sounds to more noisy sounds to sudden changes that produce sound boundaries. Our sense of hearing enables us to perceive sounds produced by our vocal apparatus as what we call “vowels” (from harmonious sounds), “fricative” and “sibilant” consonants (from noisy sounds like the ones that make “f” and “s”), and other consonant sounds such as “plosives” like “p”, “t”, and “d” (from sudden changes in sound boundaries). From birth we learn to distinguish the sounds that are used significantly in the languages of people around us, and we learn to recognize repeated combinations of those significant sounds as what we later learn to call “words”, “phrases”, and “sentences”. For brevity let us call all multi-word utterances “phrases” We learn not only to recognize words and phrases but also how to perform actions that produce the sounds that we have learned will activate those words and phrases in other people.

We also have a secondary possibility, using our hands and arms and our visual system, to communicate with other people by sign language. It gives us the same rapid ability to learn and exchange words and phrases that spoken language provides. Finally, we have developed written languages by inventing and learning systems for making marks on various semi-permanent materials that can be perceived by our visual systems and can activate word and phrase idea networks in our brains.

In our first few years as infants we learn hundreds of internal word and phrase ideas, usually through spoken language that become the bases of our native languages. Most important, we learn to overlap word and phrase ideas with other ideas in our brains. It works both ways: a word can trigger associated ideas, and an idea can trigger associated words and phrases. Word and phrase ideas can also activate other word and phrase ideas, providing sequential activations that become the basis of grammar. Learning grammar (informally in spoken language, more formally in written language) enables us to create new and complicated language experiences — like this essay and the sentences and paragraphs in it — that have never been created in the same way before.

Our language ability, as we develop it, becomes a powerful tool for activating specific ideas in other people’s brains and for enabling other people to activate specific ideas in our own brains. That allows us humans to coordinate our thinking — our activation of ideas in each other — in ways that surpass the abilities of other animals.

That’s not to say that other animals lack language abilities entirely. Many other animals can communicate by making and hearing sounds and, in doing so, activating idea networks in each other’s brains. We humans just have a much greater ability in that way than other animals do. Individuals from our closest relative species — chimpanzees for example — have been taught to use gestural sign languages in the same ways we do.

We have co-evolved with dogs by forming hybrid supra-organisms — cooperating groups of people and dogs. Such supra-organisms combine the superiority of dogs’ senses of smell and hearing and their superiority in running and biting with our human superiority in vocal and manual dexterity and in our brain capacity to form idea networks. In the past that combination gave human-dog supra-organisms survival advantages over human groups and dog packs alone.

We share with dogs, as mammals, many perceptual and internal ideas. I’m convinced that if and when we can give dogs artificial voices that they can manipulate easily, as we do, and if we can motivate and teach them to uses their artificial voices, we will be able to converse with dogs and cooperate with them in surprisingly new and effective ways. As most dog owners know already, dogs can learn to recognize the sounds and meanings of a considerable number of our words and phrases, including “walk”, “out”, “sit”, “good boy/girl”, “treat”, “ball”, “toy”, “bed”, and names of people and other dogs that a particular dog knows. Also, many dogs try to talk to us, and they can make many of the vowel sounds that we do, but they aren’t able to make most of the sounds that we use as consonants in our human languages. Imagine a dog being able to tell you about some of the things it can identify by its superior senses of smell and hearing!

Ideas versus communications

What is the difference between ideas and the instruments of language or other communications that we use to convey ideas to other people? Utterances in spoken language are fleeting and ephemeral (except when recorded for replay), but expressions in written language are semi-permanent. Can they — this essay for example — be considered to be ideas all by themselves?

Spoken or written expressions in language are not, by themselves, self-activating. To convey ideas in a meaningful way, as intended by the person who expresses them, expressions in language must be interpreted by another person or persons who understands the same language, at least in a similar way. Otherwise they are just structures which can cause perceptual events that may be experienced in many different ways by different people or may be dismissed as incomprehensible or meaningless. Consequently, most communications by language or works of art are not, themselves, ideas, but our perceptual experiences of them can activate existing ideas and can lead to the creation of new ideas in our nervous systems.

However, specific expressions of language, art, or music can be memorized to become true ideas in the brains of people who learn them — ideas that we can re-activate and can communicate about. From that observation and others we can see that new ideas are created as one-time experiences in our nervous systems, but they can be consolidated and grow stronger as a result of repeated activation of them. For example, a poem is not an idea on first hearing or reading, though it activates ideas then. But with enough repetition the poem itself can become an idea in the brains of its hearers and readers.

In fact, that’s how we learn our languages. We learn the basic sounds and written forms of our first languages when we are young, but throughout our lives we can continue to learn new word ideas and phrase ideas. First we experience a new word as an unfamiliar combination of the basic sound ideas (phonemes) and letter ideas or character ideas of our native language. Then, with focus on that experience and repetition of it, we consolidate the nerve network which that experience activated into a new communication idea that activates other idea networks in us that constitute its meaning. After that, we can recognize the new communication idea and even begin to use it as an action idea of our own.

Conscious and subconscious ideas

We humans have limited organs for action, mostly operated through our muscles. We can only eat a limited amount of food at a time. We can only focus our vision in one direction at a time. We can only make vocal sounds one at a time. We can only walk in one direction at a time. We can perform a few acts at the same time — such as, for most of us, walking and chewing gum, or at least walking and talking.

Our brains have so many idea networks of the perceptual and internal kind which could be active at the same time, that if many of them were to trigger action ideas at the same time, we would be overwhelmed with them and find ourselves unable to choose between competing muscle acts. (Actually that can happen. We “freeze”.) In order to control our limited action capabilities effectively, our brains have mechanisms for controlling what we call our “consciousness”.

Parts of our brains control the ways in which our active perceptual ideas and our active internal ideas can activate our action ideas. They can also control how our active internal ideas can activate other internal ideas. Some of those control mechanisms are in the evolutionarily older parts of our brains, which act widely on other areas of our brains, for example by putting us to sleep, which inhibits many of our muscle-action ideas. Other control networks are in our frontal lobes, which act in more specific ways to enhance or inhibit other networks in our nervous systems..

We know that consciousness is a specific internal mechanism in our brains because of the ways it can be turned on or off by chemical intervention, by physical intervention or injury, or by normal processes like sleep. We all know how our consciousness is altered when we sleep. There are periods of deep, dreamless sleep when many of our idea networks are inactive and we experience no consciousness. The same occurs under general chemical anaesthesia.

During other periods of sleep, when we dream, many of our perceptual idea networks and action idea networks are inactive, but our internal idea networks, including ones that are connected from our primary perceptual ideas and to our action ideas, remain active. We dream that we are seeing and hearing things and that we are moving and talking, but without the actual corresponding inputs from our senses and without the actual movements of our muscles. Our conscious control networks are still partly active then, though the activations of ideas seem more random than in waking life. But our inability to act and to receive feedback from our senses that would confirm the success of our conscious intentions (action ideas) results in the frustration that we often experience in dreams — when we try to do things, but they don’t work.

Physical interventions in our brains, whether intentional through surgery or by electromagnetic stimulation or through accidental injury, can also affect our consciousness. We can lose the ability to activate some of our idea networks because they are damaged or because connections to them from other idea networks are disrupted. Some of those losses can be permanent, as happens with serious brain injuries, strokes, or various kinds of degenerative dementia.

Other kinds of chemical interventions with psychoactive drugs can affect our consciousness by increasing the numbers of idea networks that are active at the same time. Through them we can achieve feelings of heightened sensations or activation of so many internal thoughts at once that are overwhelmed by feelings of “cosmic consciousness” and left temporarily unable to act.

Even without physical or chemical intervention, we can learn to control our consciousness by techniques we call “meditation”. Similarly, by using techniques we call “hypnosis”, we can learn to “turn off” or ignore perceptual ideas of pain or unpleasant internal thoughts by using our mechanisms of consciousness to inhibit those nerve networks. Hypnosis techniques that we allow other people to use on us can sometimes control our consciousness and can even affect our subconscious idea networks.

So how do our mechanisms of consciousness work? The parts of our brains that control our consciousness, in the absence to external chemical or physical intervention, act as a selection mechanism that we often think of as “focusing”, by analogy with the way our visual systems work. In fact our visual systems are more than just an analogy for consciousness; they are also a prime example of how our consciousness mechanism works.

To experience how our visual consciousness works, take the following guided tour with me, keeping your eyes open at the same time so you can read more of this paragraph. Think of a house or other building where you have spent a lot of time in your life, but which you are not in right now. Maybe it’s the house or apartment where you grew up. Imagine walking around the building, then up to the entrance and inside the building, “seeing” it from many different views as you walk around inside. You should be able to shift the focus of your consciousness around as you take this tour — from focusing on each of the many “views” of the familiar building you are imagining, to focusing on what your open eyes are actually looking at. Notice that you are more-or-less conscious of all of those thoughts at the same time, but you are most conscious of — that is, focused on — one of them at a time. Take some time to continue with the imagined tour of the building you have chosen, and resume reading here when you feel finished with the tour.

How did your tour go? If you are like me, you will be surprised at the amount of detail about the building that you gradually remember as you mentally “walk” around and through it, focusing your attention on various things. You may even have shifted your focus temporarily to an idea of the building as a whole, or to the words you name it with or refer to it by, or to the people you knew when you lived there..

As the foregoing example illustrates, our consciousness mechanism involves a continual process of activating some of our idea networks and inhibiting others. We experience that process as our “stream of consciousness”. The successive activations are usually related; idea networks that become active can then activate or inhibit other networks to which they are connected.

We can even have more than one stream of consciousness going at the same time. I don’t know about you, but I have noticed that I can have a musical “ear worm” playing in the background while I am thinking about other things, and from time to time I can switch my full conscious attention to it. I can also be carrying on internal speech, perhaps reciting a memorized poem, while I think about wordless things. Sometime a perceptual idea can suddenly become active — a pain in my foot as I step on a sharp object — and temporarily interrupt the other streams of consciousness, but those streams can soon resume focus as before if the sensation of pain subsides. (After the interruption, we may ask ourselves, “Where was I?”)

Stronger active networks can dominate the activities of weaker networks and thus take fpcus our stream of consciousness for periods of time. That can enable us to focus our consciousness to perform specific tasks. If you followed carefully the foregoing tour of a familiar building, and the previous section of this essay titled “How idea networks are activated in our brains”, you will have experienced the dominance and shift in control of ideas in your brain. Those experiences show that consciousness, even when we are awake, is a matter of more or less rather than all or nothing.

And even when idea networks in our brains are inhibited by stronger networks that are dominating our stream of consciousness or are suppressing them during sleep, they can remain active to some extent and can interact with each other subconsciously. Most of us have had experiences of having solved problems or having gained new insights subconsciously while we sleep. When we face a difficult decision, we often say we will “sleep on it”, and we find it easier to make the decision when we wake up. Or we may try to remember a name, and be unable to think of it, only to have it “pop up” later, while we are thinking of other things. In that case, subconscious idea networks have been activated, which activated others, that ultimately activated the name idea.

The development of special controlling idea networks occurs in parts of our brains as they develop. They are rudimentary in infants and continue to develop through childhood, puberty, and early adulthood, at least. Studies of brain development and brain injury have located some of our main consciousness-controlling nerve networks in the frontal lobes of our brains.

The parts of our brains that enable us to focus our conscious awareness of the ideas that are active in other parts of our brains are what we think of as ourselves — the kernel of the idea that we refer to in English as “I”. That idea is active during most of our waking lives and even in our dreams, though it is deactivated during deep sleep or under general anaesthetia. As we grow from infancy our idea of myself becomes larger and more elaborate by incorporating many other ideas that we believe about ourselves.

It’s interesting that even the idea of myself is surprisingly incomplete and inaccurate. It doesn’t incorporate a very detailed idea of what the back of my head looks like. My wife has a better idea of that than I do. And my ideas of my face and the sound of my voice are different from those ideas held by other people. I know my face best visually as its mirror image, and my voice sounds a bit deeper when I’m speaking than it does when I hear it played back from a recording. And those are just some superficial inaccuracies in my idea of myself. There must be other, more important ones related to my ideas of my own behavior. There are probably similar inaccuracies in your idea of yourself.

Ideas and memory

The idea nerve networks in our brains are, themselves, components of our long-term memory. A clear example of that is your memory of the familiar building that you toured a bit earlier in this essay. As we saw, ideas in our long-term memory are quite intricate and interrelated, and we can activate and explore them in many different ways. Some long-term memory networks are not so detailed, and we may mistakenly fill in missing parts with false memories. Not all of our idea nerve networks are memories of actual past events. Some are entirely imaginative creations of our own, from combinations of other idea nerve networks, but once created, they do become long-term memories of ours.

There is another kind of long-term memory that is called “episodic memory”. It is memory for specific sequences of events (episodes) in our lives. The continuing events in our lives activate, beginning through our perceptual ideas, corresponding idea networks throughout our brains. The ideas so activated constitute our short-term memory, and while they are active, connections between the nerve cells involved in them are strengthened. Furthermore, our brains have specialized nerve networks, many in our hypocampus, that are connected with many other parts of our brains and that are able to re-activate (remember or recall) parts of ideas that were previously active as short-term memories. Those specialized networks constitute our episodic memory systems.

As an example of how your episodic memory system works, recall how you took a mental visual tour of a familiar building when you read part of this essay earlier. You may even remember how you chose the building that you “visited” and how you moved around it and inside it. Notice that recalling your tour is initially different from taking the tour in the first place, but it can easily change to taking a new, different tour of the same remembered building. Now you have built even more episodic memories, one of “visiting” the building in the first instance, and new ones of “remembering” the first tour and “revisiting” the building. It’s amazing how complicated such short-term and episodic memories can be, and they do seem to follow a definite sequence in time.

You can probably also remember specific episodes — sequences of events — that took place in that building in the past. Think of one and then notice how you can explore your idea of that event by re-imagining it repeatedly forward in time, the same way you explored the remembered building itself.

From cases in which people have lost the ability to recall short-term memories at later times, and from knowledge of what parts of the brain are involved in such losses, we know that our episodic memory systems have key components that operate in specific areas in our brains.

Are there ideas other than those in biological nerve networks?

Do structures similar to the nerve networks in the brains of ourselves and other animals exist elsewhere in nature — ones that have the characteristics of semi-permanency, spreading activation and inhibition, possible dormancy, ability to combine and change, and importance in decision-making and actions? I can’t think of ways that individual plants have idea systems the way animal nervous systems do, but maybe botanists know of some. What about nerve-like networks in more complex systems?

We know that animals of migratory species — flocks of birds and herds of animals — have action ideas that are activated in them at about the same time and that cause them to move together. But it isn’t clear that they can be considered to have group ideas that transcend the ideas in their individual brains.

Plant supra-organisms, such as forests, have semi-permanent communication systems through root networks and airborne chemical signals that enable individual trees to coordinate their activities. Those may enable forests to have ideas of climate conditions or environmental threats that transcend their individual trees.

Human supra-organisms may also be thought of as having idea systems that transcend the ideas in the nerve networks of individual brains. Many human organizations maintain semi-permanent structures for record keeping, communication, and decision-making. Those systems have some properties similar to the idea networks in our brains.

Idea-like behavior often occurs through the communication systems of human organizations. Circulation of communications (in language, photographs, videos, and in art, including music) among people for example through the internet, can result in many people activating and modifying similar ideas in their brains more-or-less simultaneously. Such communications and the ideas they activate are called “memes”. They can give rise to fads and other social manias, such as wide interests among people in collecting specific things or engaging in similar activities. Manias about witches and witchcraft are an example, as are active political or religious ideologies that inspire many people to behave in similar ways, including supporting or opposing group activities such as wars.

Do computers and their programs have mechanisms similar to natural idea networks? So far such mechanisms in computers and programs are fairly rudimentary. Computer programs involve data structures and associated decision-making algorithms, but they have usually been very unlike biological nerve networks. Recently, some computer programs have been developed that are modeled on the perception-idea nerve networks of biological organisms. Those have become very successful at such tasks as predicting weather patterns, recognizing components of spoken and written languages, and recognizing human faces. So those computer systems might be said to have ideas that correspond to the patterns they can recognize. Further development of machines with associative networks similar to those in our human nerve networks should enable them to develop and modify ideas more and more in ways like we do.

We may be able, in the near future, to be augment our brains with artificial senses and memories, and with high-speed connections to external computing devices. That will enable hybrid natural/artificial beings, sometimes called “cyborgs” that exceed and transcend our natural human capacities for ideas.

So far, the maintenance and activation of information and communication systems in human organizations have relied ultimately on ideas in individual human brains and on decisions and actions by individual humans. But recently algorithms — automatic information-processing and decision-making systems involving computers — have begun to replace people in our organizational roles. So it is possible to contemplate hybrid human-computer supra-organisms in which computer systems will play increasingly important roles and in which hybrid idea networks might be developed that transcend individual human brains and even individual cyborg brains.

One can also argue that the “World Wide Web” of the internet is developing trans-human idea-like behavior, as an ever growing and changing network of connections between active web sites that can influence the behavior of other web sites and of the people interacting with them.

Can ideas come directly from outside our brains?

As far as I know now, new ideas — changes in nerve cell networks in our nervous systems are created only as a result of activation of existing ideas, either because of activation of our perceptual ideas by our sensory organs, including those involved in receiving communications from elsewhere, or because of random activities of nerve cells. Even nerve cells that are dormant but still alive can become active without much external stimulation.

However, some people believe in extra-sensory perception or what might be called more accurately extra-sensory communication. There are several different ideas of extra-sensory communication, some more plausible than others. One kind is by direct electrical stimulation of the brain during brain surgery. Another way is by electrical or magnetic stimulation of brain areas through the skull. Still another possibility is that we have sensory organs that have not been discovered yet, perhaps using as yet undiscovered physical phenomena. Still another possibility is that there are physical phenomena that can stimulate brain activity directly from afar, bypassing our senses.

Indeed, some people believe that ideas are received by our brains from outside sources in a manner that is analogous to the way radio and television sets receive transmissions from outside sources. But that seems to me an unnecessary hypothesis, because the immense complexity of the nerve networks in our brains allows for the more likely possibility that new ideas are created by random interactions between already existing ideas, and the fact that similar thoughts active in different people can interact in similar ways to activate and even create new ideas. (We say “Great minds think alike.”) I know of no systematic, repeatable evidence for possibilities of distant extra-sensory communication, or that they could have specific, directed effects on certain nerve cell idea networks in our brains rather than others.

Another possible idea of extra-sensory communication is that it could involve communication beyond the possible laws of physics altogether. Then it would better be termed “metaphysical communication”, which would leave it in the realm of permanently inexplicable phenomena. Either way, whether ideas can be received directly in our brains by unknown physical means or by metaphysical means, there is still a question of the source. Where would those ideas come from, and how would they “exist” in that source?

Whether one chooses to believe in metaphysical communication or not seems to be a matter of personal taste. That difference in taste seems to be related to differences in curiosity. People like me with a scientifically curious personality try to explain things by experiencing and examining many special cases and drawing general conclusions from them — a “bottom up” approach — while people with a metaphysical taste seem to prefer starting with a few abstract internal ideas (beliefs) they consider fundamentally valid and elaborating them by applying them to particular experiences. Either way, beliefs or lacks of belief in ideas of extra-sensory communication may have more emotional truth than practical truth.

For those of us with curiosity, the ability to explore our existence by asking questions and enlarging our experience provides more pleasure than if we were to stop asking questions and just accept mysterious ideas. We enjoy creating new ideas by combining existing ideas, rather than just repeatedly activating old ideas. That’s what active learning is all about.

What are the most basic ideas that we humans are usually born with?

Some of the basic idea networks infants are normally born with have been mentioned earlier. They include the face perception idea, the sucking and grasping action ideas, probably basic internal ideas of parent or nurturer, and also even a rudimentary idea of self.

I won’t attempt a full listing here of the other basic idea networks we usually have at birth, but I will list enough to suggest the overall picture. Many of these basic networks have been identified by using fine electrical probes within living brains, either of animals or of people undergoing brain surgery. Others are more speculative but plausible.

On the action idea side, it has been known for a long time that the part of our brain called our “motor cortex” is organized as a kind of map of our bodies, with nerve cells and small networks in small areas of the map that correspond to parts of our bodies that we can move with our muscles. That map is probably fairly crude at birth but becomes more refined through learning how to move.

On the perception idea side, we are born with specific nerve networks that represent the qualia of our senses — shades, boundaries, colors and locations in our visual systems, tone combinations and other combinations of sound frequencies and temporal sequences in our hearing systems, the five basic tastes our tongues can detect (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory or umami), our temperature sensations (hot, warm, cool, and cold), touch sensations (light to heavy pressure and small area to larger area touch), and varieties of pain (sharp or dull) from various senses. Related to pain ideas are more general ideas of unpleasantness, which are activated by some perception ideas (sour, bitter, hot, cold, raspy-sounding, etc.) and contrasted with those — that is, mutually inhibitory with them — are various built-in pleasantness or pleasure ideas (from mild to extreme) that are associated with various other perceptual ideas (sweet, salty, savory, warm, cool, melodious and harmonious-sounding, and so on)

Our built-in internal idea networks seem to include a generalized two-dimensional spatial representation related to our visual perceptual ideas and a generalized time sequence idea related initially to our built-in auditory perceptual ideas and ultimately to our episodic memory mechanisms. There may also be a basic built-in a generalized three-dimensional space idea connected to our binocular stereoscopic vision networks and our proprioceptive ideas of the locations of our limbs, although all of those basic networks must grow and change rapidly as a newborn infant grows into a crawling baby, a toddler, and a running child.

Our built-in internal ideas also seem to include an idea of discrete objects — things like our fingers that can be clearly distinguished from one another. That constitutes the basis of numbers (not to be confused with numerals, which are communication ideas that we learn later). We can recognize small numbers (1 through 7 or 8) of objects in our visual field without enumerating them directly. Even some other animals, including some kinds of birds, exhibit that ability. Combined with our time sequence idea, our discrete object idea provides the basis for the idea of counting that we are usually taught when we are very young. It is then that we learn names for numbers in our native language, and still later that we learn written numerals and even later that we learn positional notation for communicating numbers greater than nine.

Defects or unusual aspects of the usual built-in ideas or of the usual connections between them seem to account for various behavioral differences, including abnormalities, that people can have. For example, some people may be born with stronger internal pleasantness ideas and connections to those ideas, while other people may be born with stronger unpleasantness ideas and connections to those, accounting for people’s inherent differences in what we call “disposition”. And defects in the perceptual face idea or faults in the usual connection of face and smile with a built-in pleasantness idea might account for some kinds of autistic behavior.

Conclusion

By writing this essay I hope I have enabled you to elaborate your own ideas of ideas in ways that are similar to mine and to those of neuroscientists and other cognitive scientists. Those beliefs have both emotional truth and practical truth for people like us.

And by understanding ideas as I have described them in this essay, I think we can all gain better understanding of ourselves as animals, and more specifically as social animals. That understanding can enable us to act more cooperatively and harmoniously among ourselves and with other forms of life that share our planet with us.