ABSTRACT
Theodore Kuhn’s description of how paradigmatic shifts occur in science accurately predicted what is happening these days in neurology. After describing habits of mind, like anthropomorphizing the brain by describing it as having within it a “little person,” a homunculus, to account for the source of thought or behavior, or “knowing” psychological variables without being able to define them—like consciousness, emotion, personality and so on. Psychological terms do not have generally agreed upon definitions. Using the linear/nonlinear and sensory/nonsensory formatting systems described in Chapter 1, the author describes a fourfold way of organizing ways of thinking. They are sensory/linear as in commonsense, sensory/nonlinear as in poetry (the ekphrastic principle), nonsensory/linear as in some psychological terms like emotion and self and finally the nonlinear/nonsensory as in dreams, Sufi tales, and Zen koans. These are all speculative and will probably change with the next paradigmatic shift. This classification calls for a theory of the mind with the ability to think.
