It’s Not What You Know, It’s How You
Think
Understanding our pattern-seeking mind is the
first step toward real wisdom
Late historians Will and Ariel Durant spent four
decades of their lives studying, compiling, and writing the history of Western
civilization. The product of their efforts, The Complete Story of Civilization, went on to span several million words across
more than 8,800 pages divided into 11 books.
After finishing the last one, they took on an
arguably more daunting task: to summarize all they had learned into 100 pages
in The Lessons of History. It’s an incomplete and generalizing attempt, no doubt, but it is also
one of the most densely packed sources of modern wisdom available to us.
How we think affects
everything from our ability to solve problems to how we understand meaning,
value, and purpose.
There
are many trends and patterns to be found in the past, and the Durants do a
commendable job of highlighting them. The essence of their view, however, can
be summarized by the following sentence from their short book:
The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the
mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is
individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.
The
Durants believed that despite all that has and continues to change in our
external environment, the real battle is still internal. Real change doesn’t
happen until we face our minds and our thoughts.
There
is a fair degree of nuance that needs to be accounted for with a statement like
that, and it ties into larger questions of what progress is and how subjects
relate to objects, but the fact that our thoughts — and their
ability to change our minds — play a
pivotal role in our experience of reality is self-evident in ways that are
common sense. How we think affects everything from our
ability to solve problems to how we understand meaning, value, and purpose. The
Durants made it their life’s work to improve this ability in the average person
by disseminating information — mostly
history and philosophy.
But
information alone doesn’t make our thinking better. We also have to understand
and update the way our minds process this information.
Our Minds Get Stuck in Habit Loops
Based on
popular psychology literature, some thinkers have codified the way we form
habits into a simple loop: a trigger, a routine, and a reward. We see something
in our environment that sets off the trigger; the trigger leads to a routine
we’ve internalized based on our past interactions in such an environment;
finally, a reward at the end reinforces said routine.
If you
observe this in your daily life, you’ll see that it’s roughly right. Our brain
is a pattern-seeking survival machine, and habits are how it ensures that we
don’t have to think too hard about what to do when familiar situations arise,
letting us conserve energy.
With time, we start to recognize patterns around us, and
we internalize these patterns so that we can reuse them in the future.
When
it comes to the human mind, there are still no concrete theories of how thought
emerges. We know, however, that thought plays a pivotal role in facilitating
how we interact with the information that the Durants, for example, were trying
to impart on us.
In the
same way that we form habits of action relating to our environment, we also
form habits of thought when it comes to how we think about the world. We are
all born into a reality in which — at first,
at least — we can’t even distinguish
between our own separateness from the world. With time, however, we
start to recognize patterns around us, and we internalize these patterns — like we do habits — so that we can reuse them
in the future. Usually, if a pattern persists in our mental habits, it means
that it is valuable in some sense. But this is only the
case if we apply that pattern to the right information.
One of
the reasons it’s so hard to change our minds about things is that our brains
are stuck in these mental habit loops, which tend to look at information from a
singular point of view. Our brains have learned something in one context, so
they mistakenly apply it to others, mixing up the triggers that lead to routine
thoughts.
We’re
all capable of overpowering these habit loops, of course, but it’s very easy
and productive to have them operating as the default mode. To think well, we
must be aware of their limitations and to not let them restrict us.
Diversifying Thinking Patterns Changes Us
Each
of us faces different challenges at different times in different ways based
both on our biology and our unique cultural upbringing. No two people think
exactly the same way because no two people have lived exactly the same life.
In
fact, these different thinking patterns (mostly produced from our mental habit
loops) are, in large part, what makes you, you and me, me. Our identities are
borne from the convergence of these patterns. They create our subjective
experience.
The more diverse our trained thinking patterns are, the
more accurately we will be able to interact with information around us.
The
Durants are getting at the idea that although we’ve seen so much external
change throughout history, none of it truly makes a difference unless we
calibrate our internal, subjective experience with that objective, external
environment. Our subjective experience is limited, and using it — and the thinking patterns
that create it — as a baseline for
understanding the world is a limited way to go through life. It biases us in
the wrong direction.
At its
core, a thinking pattern is an implicit rule of thumb for the way we connect
aspects of our reality. Given the complexity of this reality, the more diverse
our trained thinking patterns are — and the
better refined the associated triggers are — the more
accurately we will be able to interact with information around us.
Because
thinking patterns emerge from the mental habit loops we form as a response to
experience, the only way to diversify them is to seek out new and conflicting
encounters. We can do this through books, unfamiliar environments, or even
hypothetical thought games.
Outside
of extreme external circumstances, any time we’re struggling to solve a problem
or lacking a sense of satisfaction and meaning, it’s due to the fact that our
current thinking patterns are not adequately suited for the job. Instead, we
have to remodel the form and shape of these patterns so they better fit the
form and shape of the issue at hand.
How We Think Is What Matters
We’re
born with a set of biological machinery, but we’re not born knowing how to use
it.
As
time goes on, however, we begin to make sense of our reality. We realize what
kinds of food are good for us, we learn to avoid things that are painful, and
we begin to get attached to those who can take care of us. With even more time,
we develop fully concrete distinctions between the different objects around us
and how we, as subjects, are to interact with them.
What
keeps this process going is our pattern-seeking brain. It forms both habits of
action and habits of thought that it embeds into our conscious and subconscious
memories to reduce cognitive load.
One of
the problems with this, however, is that it’s really easy for us to become
stuck in mental habit loops that don’t accurately assess the situation at hand,
leading to both problems of comprehension and satisfaction. To counteract this,
we have to be intentional in diversifying our thinking patterns. We have to
learn to recognize when we’re falling into a mismatched pattern of thought, and
we have to then use that information to update how we make connections between
the objects in our environment.
To say
that all issues can be solved with a shift in thinking patterns ignores the
larger picture, but there is a truth to what the Durants learned from history — how we think about what is
happening around us is arguably more important than what is actually
happening around us.
Zat Rana
https://medium.com/s/story/the-trick-to-thinking-clearer-and-better-4a61c54114fa
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