Why are some verbal-like thoughts amenable to consciousness?
Benny Shanon Contact: Benny SHANON (b.shanon@mscc.huji.ac.il) Department of Psychology The Hebrew University Mount Scopus Jerusalem, Israel The relationship between consciousness, thought processes and language is examined on the basis of the analysis of thought sequences, that is – trains of verbal-like expressions that spontaneously pass through people’s heads. A large corpus of such sequences was collected and subject to various structural analyses. In this presentation, I consider the possible functional advantages of the conscious experience of thought sequences. I propose that such an experience affords mentation with a quality of rawness analogous to that associated with perception. This entails three functional benefits. First, rawness allows for non-fixedness in terms of prior codification, and thus affords fluidity in the progression of thinking and hence potential cognitive novelty. Second, rawness provides a medium that makes the thinking process akin to action in the real
