Some persisting cognitive issues underlie much of my seemingly heterogeneous work. One abiding interest has been selective perception, or what variables determine which aspects of a complex stimulus get selectively noticed (McGuire, 1984a; McGuire & McGuire, 1988a; chapter 8 in this volume). Another abiding interest, described in this chapter, is the structure and functioning of thought systems: how a person's thoughts are linked to one another, so that when a change is induced in one thought, there tend to be remote ramifications on un-mentioned but related thoughts in the system. The first quarter of this chapter describes my initial work on thought systems (McGuire, 1960a, 1960b, 1960c, 1968c, 1968d, 1968e), which was done in the mid-1950s during my last graduate student year at Yale University and the following postdoctoral year at the University of Minnesota. The remainder of the chapter describes the yield of my return to the topic, with some shifts in theory and method, around 1990 (McGuire, 1989a, 1990, 199Id; McGuire & McGuire, 1991c).

MY 1955 CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THOUGHT SYSTEMS

Origins of My Approach

One of the seven basic themes in science fiction involves means becoming ends. Archetypically, a cosmic disaster threatens Earth as we know it, astronomical observations and theory having revealed that the sun will explode into a supernova within a few decades. A disillusioned, reclusive master scientist has a general cosmogonical theory that indicates how such stellar cataclysms can be reversed, but implementing this reversal requires approaching to within a few thousand miles of the sun's chromosphere, where the heat is so intense that all known materials would vaporize.