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
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