Behind your practical, everyday thinking there lies the most complex thing in the known universe: the human mind. Nobody hires and pays you nowadays for your physical strength. You are employed because you have a mind – and can use it effectively.
There is a vital distinction between brain and mind. Take a computer as an analogy. Your brain is what you see if you open up the back of the computer – all those chips and circuits – whereas the mind is what appears dynamically on the screen. In this book we are focusing on the mind, for that is accessible to us without peering into the skull.
There are two aspects to the mind: the information it can store in the memory, and what it can do. What we call technical or professional knowledge usually involves both. You not only need knowledge about a subject but you also need to be able to apply it in a variety of unforeseen situations.
Such applications of professional knowledge invariably involve the activities of decision making and problem solving. A doctor, for example, is problem solving when he or she tries to diagnose the cause of your weak left leg. Indeed, decision making and problem solving are so bound up with particular kinds of information or knowledge – areas of professional competence – that we find it hard to think of them in the abstract.
Are there any generic or transferable skills in these areas? Yes, I believe there are. The characteristic function of the mind is to think. So let’s leave on one side for a moment the memory or database function of the mind and concentrate on its primary role as a thinking tool. What is the nature of thinking? Are there any universal principles? If so, how can you use these principles to sharpen your skills as a practical thinker?
The physical base of your mind is of course your brain, the grey matter housed in your head. Your brain is composed of about 10,000 million cells. In fact it has more cells than there are people on the face of the earth! Each one of those cells can link up with approximately 10,000 of its neighbours, which gives you some 1 plus 800 noughts of possible combinations.
Our potential brain power is known to be far greater than the actual power it achieves. No one has remotely approached the limits of it. One estimate suggests that we use no more than about 10 per cent of our brain power. So don’t be worried by the fact that you are losing about 400 brain cells every day – indeed, if you do not exercise your mind throughout your life your brain will shrink at a faster rate.Use it or lose it!
Before we go any further, I suggest we double-check that all your 10,000 million brain cells are warmed up and working properly by trying to solve some problems. Actually, the three problems below require only about 3,000 million brain cells, so they will not take long or cause us much delay!
Two other points before we begin. The three problems are not just brain-teasers: they illustrate principles about thinking. So I am not playing games with you. Second, I am not going to give you the answers in this chapter to the first two problems, though I shall do so later. This can be a bit frustrating. But I have a reason for leaving you in suspense. For reasons I shall explain later, I believe that the answers to problems 1 and 2 – assuming that you cannot solve them immediately – may come to you later.
Problem 1 The nine dots
Take a piece of paper larger than this page and put on it a pattern of nine dots, like this:
Now connect up the dots by four straight consecutive lines (that is, without taking your pen or pencil off the paper). You should be able to complete this task within three minutes.
Problem 2 The six matchsticks
Place six matchsticks – preferably of the wooden variety – on a flat surface. Now arrange the matchsticks in a pattern of four equilateral (ie equal-sided) triangles. You may not break the matchsticks – that is the only rule. Again, you should be able to do it within three minutes. There are at least two solutions, but I want the best one.
Problem 3 Who owns the zebra?
Having got the two easy ones safely behind you – well done if you have solved both those problems – we come now to something a little more demanding, so you must call up your reserve brain cells.
The world record for solving both parts of this problem is 10 minutes. So I will give you 30 minutes which, I am sure you will agree, is overgenerous of me!
- There are five houses, each with a front door of a different colour, and inhabited by people of different nationalities, with different pets and drinks. Each person eats a different kind of food.
- The Australian lives in the house with the red door.
- The Italian owns the dog.
- Coffee is drunk in the house with the green door.
- The Ukrainian drinks tea.
- The house with the green door is immediately to the right (your right) of the house with the ivory door.
- The mushroom-eater owns snails.
- Apples are eaten in the house with the yellow door.
- Milk is drunk in the middle house.
- The Norwegian lives in the first house on the left.
- The person who eats onions lives in the house next to the person with the fox.
- Apples are eaten in the house next to the house where the horse is kept.
- The cake-eater drinks orange juice.
- The Japanese eats bananas.
- The Norwegian lives next to the house with the blue door.
Now, who drinks water and who owns the zebra?
Let’s now look at how the mind works. I suggest that there are three main functions: analysing, synthesising and imagining, and valuing.
Figure 1.1 The main functions of the mind
In the applied forms of effective thinking – decision making, problem solving, and creative or innovative thinking – all three of these functions are at work. It is their underlying health that largely determines the quality of your thought. Few people have them in harmonious balance, as shown in the illustration above. Most of us are better at one rather than the other two.
Our differing mental strengths are a powerful reason why we need each other: effective thinking in all its forms is both a solitary and a social activity. You should always see yourself alternately as thinking alone (for yourself) and as thinking with others – either face to face or, as in this case, by reading or some other method of communication. Still, it is a good idea to seek to develop your skills in the weaker areas, like a person building up muscles in a limb through exercise: you will not always have the right people at hand to correct your bias towards a particular function.
Analysing
The word ‘analyse’ comes from a Greek verb meaning ‘to loosen’, and it means separating a whole into its constituent parts. In tackling the ‘Who owns the zebra?’ exercise you were using your analytical skills of dissection, trying to break down the task into its parts.
Analytical thinking is closely related to logical or step-by-step reasoning. You may have noticed that one of the skills you were using in tackling that particular problem was your power of deduction.
Logic has two main parts: deduction and induction. Deduction means literally to subtract or take away. It is the process of deducing a conclusion from what is known or assumed. More specifically, it is a question of inferring from the general to the particular. ‘All swans are birds. This is a swan. Therefore…’ Induction works the other way round. It is the process of inferring or verifying a general law or principle from the observation of particular instances – the core of the ‘scientific method’.
Exercise 1: Spot the fallacy
Can you spot the logical fallacy in the following statement?
The chief executive of St Samaritan’s Hospital Trust cleared his throat and began.
‘Thank you all for coming to this meeting, which is, as you know, about how to improve the quality of our service in this hospital. To begin with I have decided to sack all the surgeons and physicians over the age of 55 years. Look at these letters! I have had five letters of complaint about the abruptness and lack of communication of doctors here, and two mentioned that the doctors are too old or have passed their “sell-by” date. The way to deal with this problem is to lower the average age of the staff, so I am going to ask everyone to take voluntary retirement at 55. Any questions before we move on to the next item on the agenda – litter in the corridors?’
For the main part, unlike the manager in the ‘Spot the fallacy’ exercise (above), most of us are quite good at analysing problems or situations. This is not surprising, as much of our education is concerned with developing our deductive/inductive powers (mathematics, sciences, history, and literature) and sharpening our analytical skills.
You may now like to look at the solution to the ‘Who owns the zebra?’ problem (see page 85). As you will see, it combines a test of your powers of reasoning or logical thinking with the important principle of trial and error. When you are faced with two alternatives – such as two roads at a junction without signposts that lead in the right general direction – there is no other way but to try each one in turn. In the case of this exercise, using a computer would save you time. But in real life you may, as they say, have to ‘suck it and see’. Decision making is not an exact science.
Synthesising
It is not easy to give a single label to the second function. Synthesising – another Greek word – is putting or placing things together to make a whole. It is the reverse process of analysing. You can synthesise things with your hands, which you do whenever you assemble or make anything. All products and services are the results of syntheses. But you can also do it mentally.
When that happens, another faculty is called into play – imagination. Now, imagination works in pictures, and a picture is a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. If you shut your eyes for a moment and think of your house or your car, you see a picture. In fact, it is almost impossible not to see a picture. Your computer-like memory flashes it up on the inner screen of your mind very quickly. What you see is neither a pile of bricks, in the case of your house, nor a heap of car components, but in each case a whole.
If, so to speak, you turn up the volume knob of your imagination, you can see things that do not exist. Imagine, for example, a 56-metre-tall man… This road takes us into how to generate ideas, the subject to be explored more fully in Chapter 5.
The link between creativity and the synthesising process is clear when you contemplate how nature works. A baby arrives whole and it grows. Nature is holistic. A famous South African, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, who was also a keen agricultural scientist, coined the word holism to describe nature’s way of creating wholes by ordering or grouping various units together. The essential realities in nature, Smuts argued, are these irreducible wholes. If analysed into parts, they lose their essential holistic quality. As the poet William Wordsworth put it, ‘We murder to dissect.’ Your mind has a holistic dimension. It can think holistically – in terms of wholes – as well as analytically (taking wholes to bits).
Valuing
The third function comes into play in such mental activities as establishing success criteria, evaluating, appraising performance, and judging people – as, for example, in a selection interview. Criticism (from the Greek word for a judge) is a form of valuing.
Incidentally, criticism, as commonly understood, most often suggests disapproval – some sort of a negative judgement. But in its more formal use it can suggest neutral analysis or even approving evaluation. Judgement is not always un favourable.
In all valuing there is an objective (outside yourself) element and a subjective one. We are all born with the capacity to value. What we actually value – our values – depends very largely upon our environment and its culture.
Values are rather like colours. What is the colour of grass? ‘Easy,’ you reply. ‘It is green.’ But scientists tell us that grass has no intrinsic colour: it is merely reflecting light in the wave band that we call green. The structure of our eyes is also a factor. Our subjective contribution to the perception of colour is significant. Being colour-blind to certain shades of the red–green spectrum – fortunately not to the greenest of grass – I am personally very aware of that fact.
The word value comes from a market metaphor: it is what you have to give in order to receive something across the counter. The invention of money revolutionised bartering. One merit of money is that it was a universal measuring stick. But there are plenty of other values that enter into any form of decision making, especially in business today. (See Exercise 2.)
Exercise 2: Values at work
Make a list of all the values – apart from financial value (profit) – which might influence any business decision over the coming 10 years.
Check to see whether the organisation you work for has issued a statement of its corporate values. If so, obtain a copy and underline what you judge to be the master value in it.
How far do your organisation’s values overlap with your own philosophy of life?
Whether or not values in the popular sense have a separate existence, and where they come from if not from ourselves, are philosophical questions that lie beyond the scope of this book. But in all thinking there is a strong case for acting as if truth – one member of the trinity of goodness, truth, and beauty – really does exist ‘out there’. It would be impossible, for example, to explain the immense success story of modern science without the working belief of scientists such as Einstein that the truth is ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered.
Introducing the Depth Mind principle
As we all know, we have subconscious and unconscious minds. But we are not so aware of the vital part that the dimension that I have named the Depth Mind plays in our thinking. You can, as it were, analyse, synthesise and value in your sleep or when you are consciously doing something quite different, like gardening or washing the dishes. Far from being chaotic, the Depth Mind plays a large part in scientific discovery and creative art. It is also the source of intuition – that all-important sixth sense.
Can you think of a similar decision or problem in your experience when your Depth Mind has played a similar role?
Checklist: Listening to your Depth Mind
| Yes | No | |
| Do you have a friendly and positive attitude to your Depth Mind? Do you expect it to work for you? | ||
| Where possible, do you build into your plans time to ‘sleep on it’, so as to give your Depth Mind an opportunity to contribute? | ||
| Do you deliberately seek to employ your Depth Mind to help you to: | ||
| analyse a complex situation | ||
| restructure a problem | ||
| reach value judgements? | ||
| Have you experienced waking up next morning to find that your unconscious mind has resolved some problem or made some decision for you? | ||
| Do you see your Depth Mind as being like a computer? Remember the computer proverb: Garbage in, garbage out. | ||
| Do you keep a notebook or pocket tape-recorder at hand to capture fleeting or half-formed ideas? | ||
| Do you think you can benefit from understanding how the Depth Minds of other people work? |
Roy Thompson, in his autobiography After I Was Sixty (1975), explains how the Depth Mind works.
When a new problem arose, I would think it over and, if the answer was not immediately apparent, I would let it go for a while, and it was as if it went the rounds of the brain cells looking for guidance that could be retrieved, for by the next morning, when I examined the problem again, more often than not the solution came up right away. That judgement seems to have come to me almost unconsciously, and my conviction is that during the time I was not consciously considering the problem, my subconscious had been turning it over and relating it to my memory.
The use of your Depth Mind in decision making, problem solving and creative thinking is such an important principle that I shall return to it later. The million-dollar question is: Can we develop our Depth Mind capability? My answer is: Yes, we can. And the first step is awareness that it both exists and works. The secret of effective thinking is working with the natural grain of your mind – go with the flow as they say, but see if you can steer the boat.
- We are called homo sapiens on account of our minds. The human capacity to exercise the mind – the activity we call thinking – is truly remarkable. Yet few of us use our minds to anything near their full capacity.
- Thinking is to regard or examine in the mind, to reflect or to ponder. As we experience it, thinking is a single stream of consciousness. But we can discern three interweaving currents in thinking to some purpose: analysing, synthesising and valuing.
- Analysing, the first function, tends to be highly developed by Western education. It is the men115tal ability to take things – material and non-material – to bits, to separate them into their component parts. It is related, but not identical, to logical or step-by-step thinking.
- Synthesising is the reverse process of putting things together to form a whole. When the resultant whole is formed from parts previously thought to be unconnected, when it looks new and has real value, then synthesising has become creative.
- Valuing, the third main function in purposive thinking, is self-explanatory. Even in the strictest schools of science or logic, it is impossible to exclude value. We are all valuing creatures; our actual values are largely shaped by our cultural experience. Of course, by helping us to escape out of the cultural box of our particular lives we encounter more universal values: goodness, truth and beauty.
- These functions – analysing, synthesising and valuing – can do their work at the unconscious level I have called the Depth Mind. Indeed, where complex decisions have to be made, problems solved or truly creative products involved, the Depth Mind is a vital dimension in the effective use of your mind.
We do not think as long as things run along smoothly for us. It is only when the routine is disrupted by the intrusion of a difficulty, obstacle or challenge that we are forced to stop drifting and to think what we are going to do.
John Dewey