What is Abstraction?

We have five senses through which we perceive the world we live in. For example, our eyes let us see what is in front of us that is reflecting light and our ears let our brain know that there is some sound playing  around us. These sense organs send nerve signals to our brain which are just mild electric pulses. The brain is now all on its own to make sense of all the signals coming to it from all these senses apart from various other body organs.

For example, what if you see the symbols written below:

3

***

+++

!!!

$$$

%%%

THREE

three

What our eyes send our brain are various different signals when we see each of these symbols but our brain is the one who gives a meaning to each of them. When you saw the symbols above you would have though(Its like the brain talking to itself! :D), okay that's a

'three'

'three stars'

'three pluses'

'three bangs'

'three dollar signs'

'three percentages'

'three in capitals'

'three in smalls'

Think about how many signals keep bombarding our brain in a usual day and the more amazing fact is that it is capable of dealing with all of them. The above example only talked about the signals sent by the eyes. In fact every part of the body keeps sending huge amount of such signals to our brain.

Now imagine if you had been in place of where your brain was to do task it does and listen and reply to each of the body part. What would you do?

So how do our brains manage to not just do, but master this impossible looking task. Our brain understood long ago that it cannot pay attention to every detail of what each organ sends it so it had come up with this very cool trick.

The trick to get obsessed with finding patterns!!

Patterns are structures or regularity in what is there.

Consider the above example and after seeing the symbols brain decided to interpret them as an entity. It doesn't try to memorize how the alphabets were, never tried bothering it they were bold, how were the symbols curved etc. It just interpreted the above symbols as entities, eg. 'plus', 'star', 'dollar sign'. And now it tries to find patterns and this is what it keeps with it for long time.

The pattern as you would have noticed by now is that there are 3 of each of the entities and this is what is an important information to the brain and it remembers this.

This process which we talked about here, happens in our brain automatically without you even noticing it sometimes. This is what we call Abstraction.