Have you ever thought about how our process of thinking functions in our heads? Why do we consider one things to be good and other bad? Why do we hope that others should behave in the way we believe is right? About these issues and much more I am going to tell you in the series of posts on «How We Think» topic.
I’m sure that knowing how our the brain functions can make it much easier understand some things and teach it useful skills. That's why I want to share the material that I have studied in the course of The Science of Everyday Thinking from the Australian University of The University of Queensland.
Today such interesting questions willl be revealed: Illusions, Naive Realism and How To Improve Thinking Process.
So, let us start!
ILLUSIONS
Stereotype Thinking
A human has a fantastic dexterity of the mind to think with patterns (stereotypes), and this is applied not only to sound but also to visual perception. Look at this picture. What is depicted on it?
Without a clue it's difficult to say, but if you find out that the name of the picture is "Dalmatian", after a couple of seconds you can figure out the outlines of a dog. And the most interesting is that once you learn that there is a dog depicted here, you will NEVER look at the picture as before, seeing only black spots. The pattern was fixed in the head.
In fact, we, people, are the "determinants" of patterns in our lives, especially, it concerns faces (smiles). There are whole sites with photos where people post objects of everyday life which resemble smileys.
The above described refers to one important concept of distortion of reality, which is called the basic cognitive error. We ALWAYS interpret the things in our heads without realizing that they can be interpreted in thousands of ways.
HOW MEMORY WORKS
The expert in the field Beth Loftus says that our brain does not remember information in the same way as a video camera does. It's not just getting data into the brain in a linear order and then reproducing it. We are talking about transforming pieces of "our experience" into a fragment of memory. The new information is superimposed on the already existing fragments in the memory, so the data merges and partly mix.
That is why sometimes information is remembered as true in the past, but, in fact, it is false (despite the fact that a person is sure of its accuracy).
In this video, Beth Loftus talks about how much reliable memory is.
NAIVE REALISM
Lee Ross, professor of social psychology at Stanford University, first introduced the notion of naive realism in the 1990s.
Naive realism is a person's inclination to believe in supposition that he perceives and sees the world objectively, and that people who disagree with him must be misinformed, irrational and not impartial.
The professor claims that the world is exactly what it seems, so it is worth bearing in mind that everything we hear, see and remember involves a considerable representation and knowledge of how the world functions. That's why everyone's reality is different.
Given this, we can not foresee the behavior of other people, since the knowledge of an individual person is based solely on his experience and can not be related to the experience of others.
EVIDENT EXPERIMENT
The experiment was conducted by Elizabeth Newton in the 1990s. In the original, this experiment can be read on the Harvard Business Review website. The main idea was that a man was tapping a melody, sounding in his head, and the audience had to guess it. How do you think, what percentage of people coped with the assignment?
Correctly! Only 2.5%. At the same time, "tapping" people predicted a 50% guessing.
Why? Because the melody passed only through the mind of the tapping individual, and for everyone else it was just a rhythm. But after people were told what kind of melody the speaker was tapping, they could no longer hear tapping without having the melody in mind.
IMPROVEMENT OF THE THINKING PROCESS
To speed up the process of learning new things, you need to do the following according to Geoff Norman, Honorary Professor at McMaster University:
- practice what you learn (apply learned material in different context, in different situations)
- remember the material, attaching it to the already known one
- take for a model experts in the required field (read about them, their methods, their advice)
- use flash cards (didactic materials with pictures, headwords, diagrams)
- contribute to a frequent «collision» with the studied topic (The more times you stumble upon a material, the more it will be remembered)
- test yourself (Ask yourself questions like: Can I summarize what I learned? Gather with your friends and discuss the relevant topic, ask each other some questions about it)
- apply the principle of distancing the material (Do not reread the material once it has been learned. Do different thing, read something else, and only after time has passed, go back to the original material)
Rereading of the learned material and its memorization give only a short-term result of memorization, since only the operative memory is involved. This phenomenon can clearly be observed in preparation for exams.
Photos are under license CC0.