Thinking Together Is Real How conversation becomes part of the thinking process

Conversation is often understood as an exchange of thoughts between separate minds. But in genuine dialogue, new thoughts and understandings can emerge through the interaction itself. The idea of interthinking helps explain how conversation can become part of the thinking process, allowing us to develop thoughts and understanding together.

Thinking through conversation

It is tempting to think of conversation as an exchange between two separate minds. I think something in my head and tell you. You think about what I have said, formulate a response in your head, and tell me. We pass thoughts backwards and forwards.

Sometimes conversation is like that, but good dialogue can be something much more interesting.

When we are genuinely engaged in conversation, our thinking develops through the interaction itself. You say something that makes me see things differently. I respond, perhaps without quite knowing where my thought is going. Something in my response prompts another thought in you.

You question me, extend what I have said, or make an unexpected connection. That changes what I think next. Some of these thoughts did not exist before the conversation. They are not simply being retrieved from two separate minds and exchanged. They are being formed through the relationship between what one person says and how the other responds.

Discovering what we think

Think of a really good conversation where, at some point, you find yourself saying:

I’ve never thought about it like that before.

Or perhaps you start a sentence without knowing quite how you are going to finish it and discover the thought as you speak.

Sometimes something even more interesting happens. A new understanding emerges that neither person can really claim as their own. One thought has prompted another, which has changed the first and prompted something else.

This raises an intriguing question: whose thought is it?

In a recent Knowledge Cafe, John Hovell suggested a simple thought experiment. Imagine a group creating a story together, with each person contributing just one sentence and deliberately building on the sentence before it.

At the end, ask:

Who owns that story? Where did the story come from?

No single person created it. The story emerged through the interaction between them.

Something similar can happen with thinking.

Interthinking

This is what Neil Mercer calls interthinking: using language to think collectively.

Mercer’s work with colleagues at Cambridge has explored how spoken language does more than communicate information. Language can also be used as a tool for reasoning, learning and thinking together.

It does not mean that our individual minds somehow merge. We remain separate people with our own experiences and perspectives, but our thinking is no longer independent. What one person thinks next is partly shaped by what another has just said, and their response in turn shapes what becomes possible next. The conversation itself has become part of the thinking process.

Perhaps the simplest test is to ask whether we have ever entered a conversation not knowing what we thought and discovered what we thought through the conversation.

There is an even more intriguing question. Have we ever left a conversation with an understanding that neither person brought into the room?

If so, we were not simply exchanging thoughts. We were thinking together.

The social origins of thinking

The idea that thinking is fundamentally social is not new.

The psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued almost a century ago that many of our higher mental processes have social origins. Language first exists between people and is later internalised as part of our own thinking.

This raises an important point about language itself. We do not first learn to think entirely independently and then acquire language simply to communicate those thoughts to other people. Language becomes one of the principal means through which we think.

The words, concepts, distinctions and ways of framing the world that make much of our thinking possible have themselves been acquired through interaction with other people and through the culture into which we were born.

Even when thinking alone, therefore, our thinking is not entirely independent of others.

There is another intriguing aspect to this. Much of our private thinking is itself dialogic. We question ourselves. We consider alternatives. We anticipate objections. We imagine what another person might say. We sometimes conduct entire conversations in our heads.

Rupert Wegerif, Professor of Education at Cambridge, has explored this dialogic character of thinking in depth. From this perspective, dialogue is not simply a means of transferring ideas between people. The encounter with another voice opens up possibilities for seeing things differently, and something of that dialogic process continues even when we think alone.

This also helps explain why diversity of perspective matters. Different voices bring different experiences, assumptions and ways of seeing the world into the conversation. The differences between them create possibilities for seeing something that none of us could see from our own position alone.

This makes the division between “thinking inside the head” and “conversation outside the head” rather less clear than it first appears.

None of this means that individual thought disappears or that our minds somehow merge. It suggests something more modest but important: individual thinking develops within a social and linguistic world, and conversation can become part of the process through which new thoughts are formed.

Nancy Kline and the quality of attention

There is another, much more experiential way of approaching the same question.

For many years, Nancy Kline, author of Time to Think, has explored how the quality of another person’s attention affects our ability to think.

Her work on the Thinking Environment starts from a deceptively simple observation: how well we think can depend profoundly on how we are being listened to.

When somebody gives us sustained attention, without continually interrupting, advising or preparing their own response, we often find ourselves thinking further than we otherwise would.

This is important for interthinking.

The listener does not necessarily contribute an idea. They may say almost nothing. Yet their presence and their attention can change the thinking that becomes possible.

In other words, another person can participate in the creation of our thinking without supplying the content of the thought.

That makes it difficult to describe thinking as an entirely self-contained process taking place inside an isolated individual.

What is happening between brains?

There is also some intriguing neuroscience emerging around social interaction.

Researchers can now use techniques known as hyperscanning to record activity in two or more brains at the same time while people interact.

A growing body of research has found what is called interpersonal neural synchrony: patterns in which aspects of neural activity become temporally aligned during social interaction.

Such synchrony has been observed in activities including cooperation, joint decision-making, creativity and verbal communication.

This does not prove interthinking, and it is important not to make that claim. Two brains becoming more synchronised does not mean that they have somehow become one brain or that a thought literally exists in a space between them.

But it does add to a broader picture emerging from social neuroscience: when people interact, their cognitive processes are not simply independent events occurring alongside one another. What happens in one person is dynamically related to what happens in the other.

The science is still developing, but the old image of two entirely self-contained brains merely transmitting finished messages to each other increasingly looks too simple.

Perhaps the wrong question

One objection to interthinking is straightforward:

Thinking happens in my head. Conversation may stimulate my thinking, but I am still the one doing the thinking.

There is clearly truth in this. We do not cease to be individual thinkers.

But perhaps it sets up the question in the wrong way.

There is no need to claim that some mysterious third mind is floating between two people.

The more interesting question is:

Can thoughts emerge through interaction that neither participant could have produced in quite the same way alone?

If the answer is yes, then there is something important happening that the simple model of exchanging already formed thoughts does not capture.

Interthinking is a useful name for that process.