cognition

or is it biopsychological?

The psychological self arises from the interactions between the neocortex and the older allocortex. The constant interplay between these two systems creates what we perceive as behaviour.

Humans are thinking machines, among other things. We think, we learn how to think, we are asked to think (or not). Some would go as far as saying we think therefore we are.

Why think?

What is thought?

Among my saddest moments are those when I realize that people who are dear to me have succumbed to negative habits, beyond redemption. I feel it as yet another victory of the dark unconscious over consciousness.

What is a habit? It's a tendency to react in a specific way to a specific set of circumstances - but that actively discards all other possible ways to react. In that sense, it's like an alien living inside our mind. When I get home from work, tired and tense, I will reach frantically for that first cigarette because I know that it will make me calmer. I'm possessed.

A habit starts as a behavioral trait that occurs only occasionally, and that can be debated consciously, both internally inside the subject himself, and between the subject and his peers. It makes me think of the famous movie line:

10. The main intellectual activity of your childhood consisted of making lists, from airplane models to French words of Arabic origin.
9. Your parents took you in their Trivial Pursuit team, encouraging you to memorize all the cards.
8. Your high school teachers gave you books that you keep rediscovering every decade.
7. Now that you've grown up, your innocent list-making has turned into an addiction for collections: music, books, films, whatever can be acquired into a hierarchy of categories.
6. With the advent of the Internet, your addiction has taken a turn for the worse. You've now become a multimedia pirate but you're spending unreasonable amounts of money on bandwidth and disk space.