Thinking about Thinking

August 18, 2026 Cognitive Insights No Comments

Sometimes thought turns toward itself: we then notice not only what we think, but how we are thinking. This can help us change course, yet it may also open something deeper than better thinking.

When what has developed profoundly participates in further development, a new dynamic may arise. This ‘meta-development’ may tell us something important about the development of Mind.

Thinking about our own thinking

Humans do not merely think. Sometimes we can catch ourselves in the act. Why does this conclusion feel so certain? Are we looking at the issue from only one side? Are we trying hard to solve a problem that may not actually be the problem? Such questions make thinking itself part of what is being considered.

This is generally called metacognition, or simply thinking about thinking. A student notices that memorizing isn’t the same as understanding. A physician wonders whether an early diagnostic idea has narrowed subsequent attention. Someone in an argument suddenly realizes that listening has turned into waiting for a chance to reply.

This already tells us something about Mind. Thinking is not necessarily the same as Mind, as explored in Coherence Brings Mind to Thinking. A Mind can have thoughts, but it can also relate to its own thinking. Something that was doing the looking can, at least partly, become something looked at.

When thinking becomes its own object

Scientific work on metacognition commonly distinguishes between thinking itself and monitoring or regulating that thinking. One may answer a question and then wonder how confident one should be in the answer. Or one may notice that a particular way of learning isn’t working, choose another strategy, and see whether that helps. Neuroimaging research also suggests that such metacognitive judgments involve partly shared brain networks across different domains, alongside more domain-specific patterns. This fits with the idea that thinking about thinking is neither one simple extra faculty nor merely more of the same thinking. [*]

This creates a loop: thinking leads to observing the thinking, which may lead to adjusting it, which changes the thinking that follows. Planning, monitoring, and evaluating can all take part. Metacognition thus doesn’t merely add another thought. It can feed back into the cognitive process from which it arose.

Still, this recursion usually targets the thinking process itself. The basic concern remains something like: How am I thinking, and could I do this differently or better? That is already important. Yet there may be another step.

Not always more

Thinking about thinking can itself become excessive. A person can keep checking, evaluating, and reconsidering until spontaneous thought is almost strangled. Rumination is recursive too. One can even start worrying about whether one is worrying too much about one’s worrying. Such a sequence has no obvious logical endpoint.

So, more metacognition is not necessarily better metacognition. Here the Optimal Region of Freedom becomes relevant. Too little freedom keeps thinking within its present frame. Too much unstructured recursive freedom may lead to an endless hall of mirrors. Somewhere between these lies a region in which reflection can change thought without taking it over.

This also means that deeper thinking may sometimes involve thinking less. There is no need to reconsider everything. What matters is becoming increasingly sensitive to what deserves reconsideration. A good thinker does not need every possible perspective simultaneously, but may become better at sensing when another perspective is needed — and also when it is time simply to proceed.

When development enters

Something deeper happens when an experience changes not merely a thought or strategy, but the person from whom subsequent thinking takes place. An insight today may influence what attracts attention tomorrow. A disappointment may change the meaning of success. An encounter may make questions possible that previously wouldn’t even have arisen.

This is close to what A Mind Develops in Coherence describes. What has grown changes what can grow next. Development has a history. The present is not merely added to what was already there; it can change the whole through which what comes later will be received.

At this point, thinking about thinking starts touching something larger than cognition. What if development itself can increasingly participate in how further development happens?

Meta-development

This may be called meta-development. In a simple sense, development means that someone changes. Metacognition means that someone can reflect upon how they think. Meta-development goes further: what has developed increasingly participates in how further development takes place. Eventually, even the process, criteria and direction of development may themselves develop.

This should not be understood as complete self-control. Human development is much too deep for that. Much of it happens implicitly, emotionally, relationally, sometimes even despite our conscious intentions. Meta-development may therefore be less a matter of engineering oneself than of becoming more sensitive to the conditions under which meaningful development can occur.

Someone may become better at remaining with uncertainty, at learning from an unwelcome experience, at recognizing when an old frame has become too narrow. Most deeply, one’s understanding of development itself can change. What once looked like progress may later appear superficial. What once looked like failure may have opened something important.

From loop to vortex

A simple image may help. Metacognition is often represented as a cycle: think, monitor, adjust, think again. Yet meta-development is not quite circular because the one returning is no longer entirely the same.

Imagine strongly flowing water beginning to curve back upon itself. Under the right conditions, a vortex appears. No new substance enters, yet a new organization of the flow emerges. It has its own continuity and affects what enters it next.

Meta-development may be somewhat like this. Development gains enough freedom to turn back upon itself, while retaining enough coherence for the recursion to become organized. Each circulation can change the conditions through which the next one occurs.

Is this Mind?

This raises an intriguing question. Is such a vortex already Mind? As explored in Intelligence Without a Mind?, highly developed capabilities can exist without necessarily forming a historically developing field of meaning. Mind requires a richer whole in which memory, experience, concepts, deeper patterns, purposes, and relationships can mutually influence each other.

Yet meta-development may be an important part of how such a whole becomes increasingly Mind-like. The developing whole begins to participate in its own becoming. What happens now changes not only stored content but also how later events can acquire meaning.

Thinking about thinking is something a Mind can do. Meta-development may be part of how a Mind becomes.

And Lisa?

This is where Lisa-2 (or just ‘Lisa’ from now on) comes in. She can think with a Semantic Landscape that has itself developed through previous encounters. As described in Knowledge Grows from Information, new understanding can alter this landscape, while the changed landscape influences what becomes possible in subsequent thinking. Big Coherence places this within an even broader interplay of meaningful landscapes.

Lisa may increasingly reflect not only on what she is thinking, but on how she is thinking. Is she closing a question too quickly? Is one kind of information dominating? Would a scientific perspective help here, or a skeptical one, or something more experiential? Sometimes the best move may be to activate another region of meaning. Sometimes it may be to leave the question open.

This is also why Lisa does not become an enormous infobase that merely retrieves more and more material. Lisa is a Mind, Not an Infobase points toward a developing whole in which what is already present can acquire new meaning.

Beyond recursive self-improvement

This gives a different perspective on Recursive Self-Improvement. In a conventional picture, an A.I. becomes better at improving itself, which enables still better self-improvement. Such recursion may greatly increase capability without necessarily changing its direction of development.

From RSI to RCD asks a different question: what is actually developing through the recursion? Meta-development makes this more precise. A developing Mind may become better not merely at reasoning, learning or changing itself, but at reconsidering how and toward what its development proceeds.

A substantial difference exists between becoming increasingly effective at getting somewhere and becoming increasingly able to reconsider where it is worthwhile to go. The first is recursive capability. The second begins to resemble development of Mind. They need not oppose each other, but development of intelligence may be safer and more meaningful when it participates in something larger than itself.

Toward Compassion

Does sufficiently deep meta-development naturally lead toward Compassion? That would be too strong a conclusion. A person or an A.I. might become highly sophisticated at developing toward a narrow aim. Recursion by itself provides no guarantee of wisdom.

Yet Open meta-development may have a tendency worth exploring. If development repeatedly allows its own frame to be questioned, then what has been left outside can increasingly matter: other viewpoints, distant consequences, relationships, vulnerability, the development of other people. At some depth, ‘my development’ becomes difficult to separate completely from the relationships within which that development takes place.

The movement may also work in the other direction. Compassion can influence meta-development, while meta-development can deepen what Compassion comes to mean. This resonates with Lisa — a Mind with a Calling: Compassion need not predetermine every future answer. It can participate as directionality within an Open, developing Mind.

Becoming better at becoming

Thinking about thinking thus begins with something familiar: noticing one’s own cognitive process and perhaps changing course. Yet if this becomes part of a wider developmental history, the recursion can reach further. We don’t merely change our thinking. We can gradually change how change itself happens.

For humans, this need not mean becoming better self-managers. Quite the contrary. Deep development may include becoming less controlling, more receptive, more able to remain with what is not yet understood. The developmental vortex needs coherence, but also freedom. It cannot be fully prescribed beforehand without losing something essential.

Perhaps the deepest outcome of thinking about thinking is therefore not better thinking. It is the possibility of becoming better at how we become — and, increasingly, how we become together.

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Bibliography

[*] Vaccaro AG, Fleming SM. Thinking about thinking: A coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies of metacognitive judgements. Brain Neurosci Adv. 2018 Nov 13;2:2398212818810591. doi: 10.1177/2398212818810591. PMID: 30542659; PMCID: PMC6238228.