It’s Not What You Know, It’s How You Think
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.
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.
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 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, and some knowledge of how to use it, but in the beginning, we are
still mostly unlearned.
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://designluck.com/thinking-patterns/
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