The Difference Between Concrete Vs Abstract Thinking



Sequential thinking is processing information in orderly prescribed manner. It involves a step-by-step progression where the first step needs to be completed before then second step occurs. Concrete thinking refers to the process of comprehending and applying factual knowledge. It involves only those things which are visible and obvious allowing any individual to observe and understand. Abstract thinking goes beyond all the visible and present things to find hidden meanings and underlying purpose. Participants stood with either a light or heavy clipboard cradled in their arm, filling out surveys.

A physical object is considered concrete if it is a particular individual that occupies a particular place and time. However, in the secondary sense of the term 'abstraction', this physical object can carry materially abstracting processes. For example, record-keeping aids throughout the Fertile Crescent included calculi (clay spheres, cones, etc.) which represented counts of items, probably livestock or grains, sealed in containers. According to Schmandt-Besserat 1981, these clay containers contained tokens, the total of which were the count of objects being transferred.

Students in math classes may work on such problems, more so as they age and master math basics. Concrete thinkers may also misunderstand or misinterpret certain styles of communication. For example, sarcasm and jokes may be confusing, since these rely on understanding and applying abstract ideas or plays on words.

In other cases the compartments were filled, for a total clipboard package of 2.29 pounds. With that kind of thinking someday he is likely to plant his abstract in a concrete runway. I’ll bet you more than 5 dollars that the person who submitted this article sees himself as an abstract thinker. $5 bucks the person who submitted the article sees his/her self as an abstract thinker. A very one sided argument there is more too thinking concretely than that friend. Concrete thinking refers to the thinking on the surface whereas abstract thinking is related to Covid-19 thinking in depth.

An analytical thinker can unpack a concept and separate it into different parts, and then look at each part individually while linking it back to the main concept. Analyzing people and concepts can be quite a useful skill, as you can often see what others miss. Thinking is not purely binary; abstract and concrete are just two of the main types of thinking. There are other types of thinkers as well, with many of them being an offshoot of abstract thinking.

While rote memorization is helpful, educators increasingly frown upon such strategies. The ability to understand the relationships between verbal and non-verbal ideas is also a part of the abstract reasoning. For example, using statistics to predict the outcome of an election is an example of abstract reasoning applied to a real-world problem.

On the other hand, abstract thinkers have a very specific concept of things.” I believe the reverse is true. The concrete thinker sees a person, the abstract thinker sees a species, Homo sapiens sapiens. While abstract thinking is based on ideas, concrete thinking is based on what the person sees as well as the facts. Development of skills in answering these “why” questions will require a base of other earlier skills in thinking.

Later still, abstraction was manifest in more purely formal terms, such as color, freedom from objective context, and a reduction of form to basic geometric designs. That difference accounts for the ontological usefulness of the word "abstract". The word applies to properties and relations to mark the fact that, if they exist, they do not exist in space or time, but that instances of them can exist, potentially in many different places and times. Machine learning and human brain scans have revealed the regions of the brain behind how we form abstract concepts, like justice, ethics, and consciousness, researchers report. The researchers trained monkeys to identify whether hundreds of different pictures were the same or different. By recording signals from brain cells in the prefrontal cortex of monkeys as they perform cognitive tasks, scientists explore which circuits hold information "in mind," a skill necessary for information processing and thinking.

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