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Blog Post, by Dr Jim Byrne, 7th March 2024
If you Perfink you do something called Thinking, May I recommend that you Perfink again!?
There never was something called “pure thinking”. “Pure thought” is an impossibility for a human being.
The concepts of “thought” and “thinking” are useful fictions, but they do not describe the actual functioning of the human body-brain-mind in a physical and social environment.
Long before you could “think”, in any reasonable sense of that term, you were a sea of emotions. From your birth to about the age of seven years, your emotions dominated your life. And you learned the precise form of expression of your emotions in your mothers’ arms and at her knee.
We begin with body based “feelings” called “affects”
Before you had any developed emotions, in the first weeks of life, you had something called “affects”. These are states of physical and mental arousal on two dimensions:
– You were either negatively aroused, as when you’d been sleeping in a wet nappy (diaper) for some time; or…
– You were positively aroused, as when you had been fed (from your mother’s breast, or from a bottle), and you “felt good all over” (so to speak)!
– And your positive and negative affects could be either higher or lower, depending on the experiences coming in through your senses.
Your mother shaped your emotions
When your genetically determined emotions began to emerge, they would have evoked a controlling or shaping response from your mother (or main carer) which would have altered your pattern of emoting (over a period of time, as a result of reinforcing responses from her).
Your so-called thinking probably began with the recalling of images, and relating those images to feelings and expectations.
So even at that primitive stage of evolution of your mental activity – your ‘mentalizing’ – you were really juggling images, expectations and perceptions.
Languaging sounds like “thinking”
Your next stage of development was probably semantic reasoning – as you heard more and more words, and began to fit them to images and to experiences of your sense of touch. But semantic reasoning – although it sounds like ‘thinking’ – is really a form of perceiving-feeling-reasoning.
The more you learned language – words and grammatical rules – the more you could engage in speech; and your “internalized speech” – from your mother and others – and also you own – became what we then called your “capacity to think”.
But you were not really ‘thinking’. You were perceiving-feeling-thinking, or what Von Glassersfeld (1989) called “perfinking”!
“Perfinking” may be a clumsy word, but it’s descriptively accurate!
So we are “perfinking” beings; and our perfinking is conditioned by our social experience – starting with mother, then father, siblings, other relatives, neighbours, the radio and TV, and later, written materials of all sorts.
We perceive-feel-think, all in one grasp of the mind. (Oh-oooh! Spotted it just in time! This concept, “the mind”, is another useful fiction. Have you ever “seen” your mind? Has anybody ever “extracted” a mind? Held a mind? Pointed directly at something called “a mind”? No, no, no. The ‘mind’ is a useful fictional concept. It is a way of pointing at the mentalizing activity of the body-brain in interaction with “something” else!)
So! To restate the previous statement: We perceive-feel-think, all in one grasp of our mental activity. And our “mental activity” includes all kinds of body-based hormonal changes. So:
We perceive-feel-think, all in one grasp of our body-brain-based mental activity – or “mentalizing”.
And now (1st Feb 2024) that I have fixed the preceding statement, the next statement becomes redundant:
So the next trap for the unwary is to conclude: “OK; OK! So we perceive, and think, and feel, all in one grasp of the “the mind”. But we are still mental activists; it all goes on in our heads, no matter what you call it”.
“The body keeps the score!”
But it does not all go on in our heads.
If you stopped sleeping for your usual eight or so hours per night, and reduced that to five or six hours, your perceptions of the world, and your feelings about the world, would change.
You would most likely become much angrier, and that would affect how you perceive other human faces. People who are significantly sleep-deprived cannot read human faces as accurately as people who are well rested.
You cannot “think” yourself into knowing which emotion a person is displaying on their face. You have to “perfink that”. And the state of your whole body, rested or not rested, exercised or sedentary, participates in that “perfinking” process.
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Some of the ideas above are explored in depth in the following books:
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The body-mind is affected by diet, exercise, sleep and so on
If you stopped eating a healthy diet, and tried to subsist on junk food – which an increasing proportion of the world population is now doing – your personality would change.
You might develop symptoms which are classified as ADHD. Or even psychosis.
Or you might become depressed and/or anxious.
And those physical-emotional states – driven partly by lack of adequate nutrition – the lack of specific nutrients (amino acids, vitamins, minerals, etc.) – and partly by enforced changes in your gut microbiota (or intestinal flora and fauna) – are not susceptible to being controlled by your thinking.
Seeing a CBT/REBT therapist will not help when the body is malnourished through lack of sleep, or inadequate diet, or through sedentary lifestyle. Neither will seeing a psychodynamic counsellor; nor a mainstream psychologist.
Manage your body to fix your mind, and vice versa
Unless you know how to manage your diet, exercise, sleep, breathing, relaxation – (and your expectations of life and other people; and your skills at communicating with others) – you will not be able to perceive-feel-think clearly or effectively.
I will say that again:
Unless you know how to manage
- your diet, exercise, sleep, breathing, relaxation,
- (and your expectations of life and other people;
- and your skills at communicating with others),
you will not be able to perceive-feel-think clearly or effectively.
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These issues, to do with the links between “the body” and subsequent “emotional states” are explored in the following books:
A Major Critique of REBT: Revealing the many errors in the foundations of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy
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How to control Your anger, anxiety and depression: Using nutrition and physical activity
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Relax Your Way to a Better Life: Using Dr Jacobson’s Progressive Muscle Relaxation technique for physical and mental health
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Postscript: Thinking is a useful fiction:
Let’s take a look at this claim of mine, that thinking is a useful fiction.
I have been studying “thinking skills” for forty years or more.
One of my favourite strategies for “thinking straight” (or “perfinking effectively”), in problem solving contexts, is Dr Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats.
De Bono argued that there are six aspects to “thinking”, and he asserted that the reason most people do not “think” effectively is because they attempt to do all six processes at the same time, and end up doing none of them well.
His solution was to create six coloured hats, and to allocate one of the “functions of effective thinking” to each of them. So, for examples:
The White Hat is for collecting information; Green is for creating a new idea; Black is for making the final judgement or conclusion; and so on.
But the point to note is this:
In describing his system of “thinking”, he has labelled his Hats as “attention directors”.
Each hat directs your attention to a different aspect of “the world of decision making”.
So, if I imagine putting on my White Hat, I must now restrict myself to the function of paying attention to “the relevant information”. For examples, I might ask myself the following questions:
– What information do I have about the problem under consideration?
– Do I have enough information to proceed to the next stage?
– What information might be missing; or what information should I look for?
And so on. (And doesn’t that sound like I’m “thinking”?!)
It does!
But, guess what?
In order to answer any of my three questions above, I have to be able to “evaluate information”!
And, as Antonio Damasio illustrated, in his book, Descartes Error, I cannot evaluate anything unless my “thinking” is grounded in “my emotions”.
If I do not know how to emote reasonably, I will not be able to “think” reasonably!
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I am an emotional being, first and last.
I am an embodied being, and everything I do with and to my “body” affects my “brain-mind” and its “mentalizing functions”.
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Counselling psychology and psychotherapy needs to come of age!
It is highly unlikely that very much help can be accorded to anybody by focusing on the “thinking” of clients/patients, or on their “brain chemicals”. There will never be a “drug” – nor a “Socratic Question” – that can substitute for a balanced diet; a good night’s sleep; a good work/life balance; good relationships based on emotionally intelligent human interactions; clean air and healthy lungs; healty guts and microbiota; and so on. (And, of course, greater social equality would also make a huge difference. [This argument was laid out convincingly in the book,The Inner Level: How more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity and improve everyone’s wellbeing. 2019. By Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Penguin Books).
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Copyright (c) Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling
(I am indebted to Renata Taylor-Byrne, my wonderful wife and business partner, who has done most of the research and writing on diet, exercise, sleep and relaxation for our publications. She is currently researching the role of micronutrients in good mental and physical health and emotional well-being).
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You might want to read the second page about the Holistic SOR model.
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For more information, please contact:
or
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Or take a look at our main page About the E-CENT Institute.
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The Institute for Emotive-Cognitive Embodied Narrative Therapy (E-CENT) 