XI. Read the text and then translate it in writing.

Amnesia takes two forms: anterograde, an inability to recall events that occur after a trauma, and retrograde, an inability to recall events that occured before a trauma. It appears that the neurotransmitter acetylcholine is involved. Alzheimer's patients show a loss of this neurotransmitter. Amnesia may have specific effects. In other words, it may influence our factual knowledge, but our procedural knowledge. A person may remember how to drive a car, but not where he or she is going.

Unit 13

Thinking As a Process of Cognition

Цель – формирование представлений студентов омышлении как процессе познания, использование знания иностранного языка в профессиональной деятельности и профессиональной коммуникации.

Key words

Text

Man's whole life consists in solving acute and urgent tasks and prob­lems. The emergence of such problems and unexpected difficulties is elo­quent proof that surrounding world contains many unknown, strange and hidden things and phenomena. They constantly exercise man's mind and challenge him to penetrate deeper and deeper into the mysteries of nature, and discover ever new processes, properties and relations between people and things. Thinking is born of man's need to understand new, unknown properties of objects he constantly meets with in the course of his life. His old store of knowledge proves insufficient. The Universe is infinite, just as the process of its cognition. Thinking is always oriented towards the new, the unknown. While thinking, every individual makes discoveries, be they ever so small and only for himself.

Inseparable from speech, thinking is socially-conditioned mental process of search for and discovery of the essentially new. Being capable of mediated and generalized reflection of reality with the help of analysis and synthesis, thought derives from practical activity and, evolving from sensuous knowledge, extends for beyond its bounds.

Cognitive activity starting from sensations and perceptions passes on to thinking. Even the most sophisticated thinking is never divorced from sensuous knowledge, i.e. from sensations, perceptions and representations. Through sen­sations and perceptions, thinking is directly linked to the outer world and is its reflection. The correctness (adequacy) of this reflection is continually checked by practice, during practical transformation of nature and society.

The process of thinking based on sensations, perceptions and representa­tions oversteps the limits of sensuous knowledge, i.e. the individual begins to cognize such phenomena of the outer world, their properties and relations which arc not given him in perceptions directly and therefore are not directly observ­able. For instance, one of the most complex problems of contemporary physics is the development of a theory of elementary particles. These particles, however cannot be observed even with the help of the most powerful modern micro­scope. In other words, they do not lend themselves to direct observation, they can only be contemplated mentally.

Thinking is interrelated not only with sensuous knowledge, but also with language, speech. This is where we have one of the basic distinctions between the human and animal psyche. The elementary, primitive thinking of animals is only concerned with immediately perceivable objects, those directly before the eyes of the animal.

Special observations during psychological experiments show that some pupils and even adults find it difficult to solve a problem without thinking aloud. And individual explaining something to other people and formulating his ideas makes them clearer to himself. The formulation of thoughts in the speech pro­cess is crucial for their formation. An important role in this process also belongs to the so-called inner speech: solving a problem, the individual confers, as it were, only with himself, thinking not out loud, but silently.

EXERCISES