This Saturday, I spent the whole afternoon reading “Perception” from Atkinson’s and Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology, by Edward E. Smith et al. I discovered a topic, “Abstraction” that was new to me and as I continued, I learned it was new to me as a terminology, but it was something I am actually doing quite consciously every day.
By definition, Abstraction is a process of reducing the vast amount of information via senses into manageable categories, as the book defines.
Book blurbs, gist of a conversation, reviews on an event, all are abstraction in process!
Abstraction and Academics
With what would a student’s mind like mine would relate abstraction with but academics.
Abstraction is the year-long friend and eleventh hour mate for every academic mind, I suppose. Keeping in view the definition, as a student this is the practice that every should be adopted during the lecture and while independent studies, rather than trying to memorize or pen down content word by word.
Adopting Abstraction is a short-cut strategy that takes less memory and mental efforts. Read, listen, summarize, and memorize! Stop learning long paragraphs.
What Comes Before Abstraction?
Abstraction is Not the only process that goes on in our brains. This mysterious muscle has a lot going on in it.
Abstraction is a process that is set much later. In the first place, we need to shift our attention toward something we aim to learn or understand. This is called Pre-attention and later it shifts into the Attentive process.
Attention is always linked to the links you build among different aspects of a single stimulus. For example, memorizing the spelling of “assassination.” One might memorize it as, two “ass” with an “a” then “iNation”.
Amazing and iconic.
Well, that’s routine for our brains. It relates and links by default and especially, when it has got the idea of what’s what, then it goes for abstraction to compress the huge data into a small size file, in the simplest words it can. So, the hard and smart work works side by side in the brain’s world.
ABSTRACTION~ ROOM FOR RESEARCH
I love to write PsYChOLOgY sAtUrDay posts as it drives me to read, learn, and share something new at my end with some new thoughtful threads for the scholars and researchers in my audience.
While I researched for this blog, I came across two great research that linked:
The ideas are relatable and the papers open windows to a more clearer view of abstraction in action. And as I read them and reflected on this topic, some ideas generated in my mind like questions:
a. Does every cortex of the brain has an abstract memory of the sensory data it receives all day.
b. Is it not that explanation is a misnomer and it is basically the abstract thoughts and relative links that our mind generates that we speak in the language we know?
Quite a food for thought, for me. Do comment if you find a research that somewhat targets to answer this questions and you can also sahre your thoughts on Abstraction in the comments below.
Coming up next in PsycHOlOGY satUrDaY
Abstraction vs Abstraction~ Identical Twins but Different Concepts.
Merry Christmas,
YM