Reflective thinking is a NOT a school subject, as critical thinking is in the UK. Reflective thinking is an emphasis on teaching to think as opposed to learning lexical knowledge. Reflective thinking is not about logic, especially not about formal logic. But it is a very useful and enlightening study. It is meant to be a multidisciplinary or complex subject, and a course in multidisciplinary studies, a theory as well as practice related to cognition, computing and language. The difficulty in writing about reflective thinking or thinking at all lies in the speed of thinking and the tendency of thoughts to flow, hence blocking the effort for self-inspection, or introspection with any tangible result to record the process apart from saying or writing a part of the ongoing stream of consciousness. (After these introductory lines some lectures on the subject broken down into a number of subpages are to follow soon.)

One possible solution to observing and grasping ideas in their transient status may be to set up a theory of thinking in terms of data and operations on those data. Everybody understands a computer model and how a PC works, so a useful metafor or a different paradigm could be a description of cognitive operations - regardless of their physical realization in the brain, which is another approach to the problem. But since I am not interested in devising new medication or drugs for manipulating the processes in the brain, or to alter consciousness, I do not find neurocognitive research particularly useful for the moment. Later it may well happen that the theoretical model and the empirical research converge and will be offering mutually beneficial insights and a suitable terminology.

It is a fact that the entries on thought, thinking and the related pages are a mess in Wikipedia, and reflect the lack of a suitable model for the description of what goes on