Each person lives according to an individual scenario of reflection of reality. One can see the desert, the other - an island of flowers in the sand, for some the sun shines, but for others it does not seem bright enough. The fact that each person sees the same situation differently depends on an important mental process - thinking. We analyze, evaluate, compare, perform mathematical actions thanks to him.
Many experts are engaged in studying the characteristics of thinking, most often they are psychologists and psychiatrists. In the plane of psychology, there are many different tests that have validity and reliability. Diagnosis of thinking is carried out to determine violations, as well as search for methods of development of thinking. Based on psychiatric knowledge, pathological processes of thinking can be determined. After this, medical assistance is organized for people who have observed pathological work of this mental process. What disturbances of thinking can be observed?
What is the norm of the mental process reflecting reality?
To this day, many experts argue about how to correctly define a complex mental process - thinking. But so far there has not been a complete and meaningful thesis that would illuminate all the work that it carries out in our minds. This mental process is part of the intellect along with others (memory, imagination, attention and perception). Thinking transforms all the information received from the outside, translating it into the plane of the subjective perception of the human environment. A person can express a subjective model of reality with the help of language, speech, this distinguishes him from other living beings. It is through speech that man is called the highest intelligent individual.
Perceiving various situations, with the help of speech a person expresses his conclusions, shows the logic of his judgments. Thinking processes normally must meet several criteria.
- A person must adequately perceive and process all the information that comes to him from the outside.
- A person’s assessment must be within the framework of empirical evidence accepted in society.
- There is a formal logic, which to a greater extent reflects the norms and laws of the whole society. Conclusions about a situation should be based on this logic.
- Thinking processes must proceed in accordance with the laws of system regulation.
- Thinking should not be primitive, it is complexly organized, therefore, it normally reflects most of the concepts of the generally accepted structure of the world.
These criteria do not fit all people under the general rules of existence. No one has canceled a person’s personality. We are talking about the majority as the norm. An elementary example: many people think that eating after 9 p.m. is harmful, so everyone eating dinner later is not in the normal range. But in general, this is not considered a deviation. So with thinking. Some incompatibilities with the generally accepted structure of the world formal logic can be, unless it is a gross violation of thinking.
Diagnostic Methods
In order to determine the logic, flexibility, depth, criticality of thinking, how developed are its types, there are many ways to study this mental process. Doctors have more practice examining at the organic level, the diagnosis of thinking disorders is carried out using conventional medical equipment. They look through the devices, look for pathological foci, have an MRI, an encephalogram, and so on. Psychologists use test materials in their work. Diagnosis of thinking in psychology can also be carried out using planned observation and a natural or laboratory experiment. The most common tests to determine the characteristics of mental activity: the method of “Exclusion of concepts”, Bennett test, the study of rigidity of thinking and so on. To determine the violation of thinking in children, you can use "Divide into groups", "Circle the contour", "Find the differences", "Labyrinth" and others.
Causes of Violations
The causes of violations of a complex mental process that reflects reality in our minds can be many. Even at present, experts have not come to a consensus on some pathological disorders in human thinking. They arise due to organic damage, psychosis, neurosis, depression. Consider the reasons for the main deviations.
- Cognitive impairment. They make low quality mental operations. These disorders can occur at different levels of the organization of the human body. At the cellular level, they prevent the patient from adequately perceiving the surrounding reality, followed by incorrect decisions about what is happening. These are pathologies such as Alzheimer's disease (dementia due to organic lesions of the vessels of the brain), schizophrenia. When the temporal lobes of the brain are damaged, memory and thinking are disturbed, which does not allow a person to carry out the usual activities, organize and classify objects. With poor eyesight, a person receives distorted information, so his judgments and conclusions may be inappropriate for life.
- Pathologies of forms of thinking originate from psychoses. At the same time, a person is not able to order information on the basis of the generally accepted logic of things, therefore he makes unrealistic conclusions. There is a rupture of thoughts, the absence of any connections between them, as well as the perception of information according to external criteria, there is no associative connection between situations or objects.
- Disorders of the content of thoughts. Due to the weakness of the perception system (in particular, the transformation of external stimuli), a "bias" in the emphasis arises from real events to events that the subject has identified as having great value for him.
- Lack of systemic regulation. Man’s thinking is arranged in such a way that in a problem situation he seeks a way out based on previous experience and processing information in a given period of time. Normally, system regulation helps a person abstract from the surrounding discomfort, look at the problem from the side, ask himself questions and look for constructive answers at the same time, create a general plan of action. With a lack of regulation, a person cannot quickly and efficiently find a way out of this situation. Such disturbances in thinking can be due to emotional overload, injuries, brain tumors, toxic lesions, inflammation in the forehead.
Types of pathological thinking
There are quite a few pathologies of mental activity, since this process is multifaceted. There is a classification of violations that combines all the properties and varieties of the mental process that reflects reality. Types of impaired thinking are as follows:
- Pathology of the dynamics of thinking.
- Violations of the motivational part of the thought process.
- Operational impairment.
Pathology of the operating side of the mental process
These violations affect the process of generalizing concepts. Because of this, the logical connections between them in human judgments suffer, direct judgments, ideas about objects and various situations come out in the first place. Patients cannot choose from the many signs and properties of the object the most suitable for its most accurate characteristics. Most often, such pathological processes have people with oligophrenia, epilepsy, encephalitis.
Violations of this kind may also be characterized by a distortion of the generalization process. In this case, the sick person does not take into account the properties of the subject, which are essentially interconnected. Only random characteristics are selected; there is no connection between objects and phenomena based on a generally accepted cultural level. Such a violation of thinking is observed with schizophrenia and psychopathy.
Violations affecting the dynamics of thinking
The diverse pace of mental activity, consistency and spontaneity characterize the dynamics of a process that subjectively reflects reality. There are several signs that indicate a violation of the dynamic side of thinking.
- Slipping. With a normal and consistent discussion of something, without losing generalization, patients begin to talk about completely different things. They can slip onto another topic without completing the previous one, thinking of inappropriate associations or rhymes. At the same time, perceiving such reservations as the norm. Because of this process, the normal and logical train of thought is disrupted.
- Responsiveness. The process by which the patient responds to all external stimuli. At first, he can reason critically and adequately, but then perceive all absolutely irritants as addressed to him, consider improvised objects to be animated, which necessarily need help or his participation. Such people may lose their orientation in space and time.
- Inconsistency. A sick person is distinguished by inconsistent judgments. At the same time, all the basic properties of thinking are preserved. A person can inconsistently express logical judgments, analyze and generalize. Such a pathology is very common in people with vascular diseases, brain injuries, MDP, and this is also a violation of thinking in schizophrenia, but they make up about 14% of the total number of diseases.
- Inertia. With preserved functions and properties of the thought process, the pace of action and judgment is noticeably slowed down. Switching to another action, goals, acting out of habit for a person is extremely difficult. Often inertness occurs in people with epilepsy, MDS, epileptoid psychopathy, and can also accompany depressive, apathetic, asthenic conditions.
- Acceleration. Too quickly emerging ideas, judgments that even affect the voice (it can hoarse due to the constant speech flow). With this pathology, increased emotionality arises: when a person tells something, he gestures too much, is distracted, picks up and expresses low-quality ideas and associative connections.
What does personality disorder mean?
For people with deviations in the personal component of thinking, the following disorders of thinking are characteristic.
- Diversity Any value, judgment, conclusion can be "located" in different planes of thinking. With a safe analysis, generalization and comparison in humans, a task can proceed in directions that are not interconnected. For example, knowing that you need to take care of food, a woman can buy the most delicious dishes for the cat, and not for her children. That is, the task and knowledge are adequate, the attitude to the goal and the task are pathological.
- Resonance. The thinking of a person with such a pathology is aimed at "solving global problems." In another way, this violation is called fruitless reasoning. That is, a person can spend his eloquence, instruct, express himself intricately without any special reason.
- Ornateness. When a person explains something, he spends a lot of words and emotions for this. Thus, in his speech there are unnecessary reasoning that complicate the process of communication.
- Amorphous. In other words, this is a violation of logical thinking. In this case, a person gets confused in the concepts and logical connections between them. Outsiders cannot understand what he is talking about. This also includes fragmentation, in which there is no connection between the individual phrases.
Content thinking - what is it?
The content of thinking is its essence, that is, the work of the main properties: comparison, synthesis, analysis, generalization, concretization, concepts, judgments, conclusions. In addition, the concept of content includes ways of knowing the world - induction and deduction. To the internal structure of this mental process, experts also add views: abstract, visual-effective and imaginative thinking.
A separate class of disorders in which human thinking goes the path of degradation is the pathology of its content. At the same time, its properties are preserved in some way, but inadequate judgments, logical connections and aspirations come to the fore in the mind. Pathologies of this class include impaired thinking and imagination.
Human obesity
These violations are otherwise called obsessions. Such thoughts arise involuntarily, constantly occupy a person’s attention. They may contradict his value system, may not correspond to his life. Because of them, a person is exhausted emotionally, but can not do anything with them. Obsessive thoughts, ideas are perceived by a person as their own, but due to the fact that for the most part they are aggressive, obscene, meaningless, a person suffers from their attack. They can occur due to traumatic situations or organic damage to the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglion, cingulate gyrus.
Overvalued emotional ideas
These seemingly harmless judgments, but they were singled out as a separate pathological process - a violation of thinking. Psychology and psychiatry deal with this problem side by side, since overvalued ideas can be corrected by psychological methods in the early stages. A person with such a pathology has preserved properties of thinking, but at the same time one or a set of ideas that prompts action does not give him rest. It occupies a dominant place among all thoughts in his mind, exhausting a person emotionally and getting stuck in the brain for a long time.
Delirium as a disorder of the thought process
It is a gross violation of the thought process, since a person has conclusions and ideas that do not correspond to his values, reality, generally accepted laws of logic. The patient considers them correct, and it is impossible to convince him otherwise.