Thinking is primarily a kind of activity that relies on a system of concepts, has a focus on solving certain problems, submits to goals, given the conditions in which a particular task is carried out.
Thinking disorders differ from any other disorders in complexity and tremendous variety. The study of thinking in most cases comes down to the analysis of written and oral speech, since the thought process is very closely connected with speech. The adequacy of special tests and human behavior in a given situation are also assessed.
All disorders of thinking can be divided into three large groups:
1. Violations associated with the operational side of thinking (disorders of the generalization process);
2. Violations associated with the dynamics of thinking (disorders of the logical train of thought);
3. Violations of the motivational component (disorder of purposeful thinking).
Thinking Disorders: Operating System Disorders
The level of the generalization process is distorted or reduced. In the judgments of the patient, direct ideas about phenomena and processes may prevail. Operating with generalizing signs can be replaced by the establishment of a purely personal, concrete attitude to objects. Such a patient, when performing a test task, will not be able to choose those that are the most generalizing and essential from the proposed signs. The level of generalization is so reduced that, for example, he does not understand the difference between a crow and a dog, between a plate and a table.
In the case of a distortion of the generalization process, judgments will reflect only the random side of the phenomenon. When performing a test task, the patient can identify particular properties and signs that do not reflect either the semantic relations between the phenomena or the content between them. In most cases, similar thinking disorders are noted in patients with schizophrenia, but sometimes they can occur with other diseases.
Thinking disorders: impaired thinking dynamics
In people subsequently suffering from severe traumatic brain injury, as well as in patients with epilepsy, mental disorders associated with the dynamics of mental processes are often detected. In psychiatry, these disorders are termed “viscosity”. The patient cannot change the course of his judgment and switch to any other type of activity. Moreover, such a patient is characterized by a slowdown in all intellectual processes.
With manic-depressive psychosis, people experience another disturbance in the dynamics of thinking - lability. This type of disturbance is characterized by the instability of all intellectual processes. The patient cannot consistently reason for a long time, despite the fact that he has not reduced the level of generalization. With all this, any association that has arisen, the representation is reflected in his speech. There is a violation of the logic of reasoning, which manifests itself in the form of certain leaps of ideas - a person constantly jumps to another thought.
In schizophrenics, a slowdown or acceleration of thinking is often combined with a sense of the imposition of thought from the outside or vice versa, a violent withdrawal of thoughts.
Thinking disorders: disturbances in the motivational component
These are violations associated with the regulatory function of thinking and criticality, which include:
1. The fragmentation of thinking is a violation of the connections between different judgments, concepts, as a result of which, with a preserved grammatical structure, speech loses its meaning.
2. Resonance - empty reasoning, not supported by real facts.
3. Pathological circumstance - a slow transition from one thought to another, getting stuck on unimportant details and a complete loss of the ultimate goal of the whole conversation.
With such violations, a person's objectivity is lost, which is why his own idea of the world appears in the form of supervaluable ideas, obsessive thoughts and various types of nonsense.