> On 15 Jun 2014, at 2:34 am, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On the other hand there is no harder job in the world than being a
> intelligence theorist, but at least if you happen to stumble upon the correct
> intelligence theory the fact that you've suddenly become the world's first
> trillionaire is a pretty good hint that your theory is on the right track.
That guy was Edward de Bono. He was the first one to say that intelligence is
the horsepower of the car whereas thinking ability is the skill with which the
car is driven. He may have come up to the level of a trillionaire at some point
but he did at one point own 4 islands, one of them off the coast of Venice and
a castle or two in France as well as seeding organisations in over 34 countries
devoted to teaching thinking ability. He appears on a list of 250 people who
have contributed the most to humanity and NASA named an asteroid after him.
Now comes the sad part. He had a lousy marriage and had to sell off those
islands to finance his divorce settlement. So much for thinking ability. Just
the same, I don't see too many people making the necessary distinction between
perception ("seeing with the mind and the emotions/values") and thinking (data
crunching and survival strategies) People on this list routinely argue about
different things, thinking they are arguing about the same thing. That's
perception. De Bono also understood Gödelian Incompleteness; in the 1970s he
said that the choice of premises in any argument or discussion is arbitrary and
that the outcome of most discussions is determined by the starting point or
premises, so it hardly matters what happens in between.
A big part of intelligence is indeed knowing how to choose modes of thinking as
John says, and the biggest enemy of clear, effective thinking is confusion.
Confusion in thinking is where we try to do everything at once which is
impossible. The neurotransmitters governing the different modes of thinking
cannot all be optimised in the same direction simultaneously. So, De Bono
devised the Six Thinking Hats to force people to literally do one thing at a
time. Each coloured hat represents a particular mode of thinking: Red for
feelings, gut intuitions, White for facts and observations, Yellow for the
benefits, Black for the logical negative, Green for creativity and seeking the
alternatives (so-called "Lateral Thinking") and the Blue Hat is for
metacognition or the broad overview of the thinking process. This was based on
the neuroscience insight of the early 80s that a reasonably normal human has
about seven "slots" that comprise their thinking capacity that can be filled.
So, De Bono surmised that we would do better then to back-off by maybe one slot
to ensure brains don't go into meltdown so there are only six hats, not seven.
If you or your kid have not had this unbelievably simple yet incredibly
effective and powerful routine run past them at school yet, then you aren't
getting value for money for your school fees.
Kim
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