ABSTRACT
I turned to textbooks of cognitive psychology for help. The most useful (some others don’t define “thinking”, or barely mention it) was Eysenck and Keane’s (2005) Cognitive Psychology: A Student’s Handbook, which says that the “our ability to reflect in a complex way on our lives, to plan and solve problems that arise on a daily basis, is the bedrock of thinking behaviour” (p. 429). While stopping short of a formal definition, it is a very good outline of when we think. They go on to say that “clearly thinking must involve conscious awareness; however, we tend to be conscious of the products of thinking rather than the processes themselves”.
