How to think better
One of the many questions that keep me up at night is: “how can I be a better thinker?” As you probably can tell, I’ve been on an endless journey (dedicating a publication to this, and reading a wide array of books like this, this, and that) to build up my intellectual capacity while reducing my anxiety, yet I still feel like I’m always hitting a roadblock.
So here I am, trying to apply first-principles thinking to my seemingly limited analytical mind to figure out how the heck can I “re-engineer” myself to think better? (Fun weekend, I know.)
Why do we think?
I started with a simple search:
And then this Quora forum (why do we think what we think when we think it) got me down a rabbit hole of debates between conscious and unconscious thinking. This is from the famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. This theory also talks about the preconscious mind, referring to anything that can be brought into the conscious mind.
Conscious thoughts are thoughts that we control. These are all thoughts, memories, feelings, wishes that we are aware of at any given moment. These are thoughts that are brought into awareness. The reason why there’s debate about whether conscious thoughts exist is that some philosophers think that conscious thought, judgment and volition are illusions, arising from processes that we are unaware of.
Unconscious thoughts are the opposite. These are thoughts we do not control. This is the reservoir of feelings, thoughts, memories, urges that are outside of our awareness, and usually contains feelings such as anxiety or pain. This also means that in your field of awareness, there are always blind spots.
Our brains are wired to adapt, so as to survive. Unconscious thoughts exist to assess danger. So for example, when we see a new scenario unfold, our brain immediately connects a story based on its observation with something that happened in our past to assess our level of threat. Tim Urban writes a really good article about this. This is called “judging” and “assuming”.
There was a series of experiments run by a couple of Harvard University folks that tried to uncover how we think. The experiments basically got participants to create sentences and images based on two words: an occupation and an object. From there, they found that there was no difference in the “vividness” of images or inner speech.
Then, they moved onto MRI scanners to track the participant’s brain activity.
“We found that people generated more robust verbal representations during deliberate inner speech … but they generated visual images regardless of whether their intent was to visualize something or to think verbally.” — Elinor Amit, an affiliate of the Psychology Department
They noticed that we mostly understand our world visually, with the language being more of an add-on. So even when we try to consciously attempt to think verbally, visual thinking usually overpowers. It “suggests that we can’t really go beyond the here and now and think in abstract ways about other people, places, or times” — we are almost always grounded in the present even when we try to think for the future.
So what’s next?
After spending quite a bit of time going down a Google rabbit hole, here are two core principles to follow when setting the foundation to think better:
1. Cut the busy.
“It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise” — William Deresiewicz
It can be very difficult to slow down in our fast-paced society. But it is the key to making better decisions and giving ourselves space to think. By learning to say “let me think about it and get back to you”, not only would we give ourselves space to evaluate critically, but also demonstrate that we are being thoughtful in our answers, especially for decisions that do not need to be decided at the very moment.
As Shane Parrish says: “Busy people spend a lot of time correcting poor decisions. And because they’re so busy correcting past decisions, they don’t have time to make good decisions.”
An interesting quora thread I found talks about the Dunning-Kruger effect where many people are not able to think well enough to see that they are not thinking well enough.
The field of cognitive psychology measures many limitations to human thinking, especially when we look at how humans form valuations and cognitive biases (this can be seen in Kahneman’s book “Thinking: Fast and Slow” — which I might do a book summary & review in a future post).
This NYT opinion article mentions that the mind’s natural tendency is to explore and to favour novelty, but when occupied it looks for the most familiar and inevitably least interesting solution. Our brains go back and forth on exploration and exploitation. When we are exploratory, we gravitate to a wide scope, curiosity and a desire to learn (for example, travelling to a new country). Other times, we rely on, or “exploit,” what we already know, we lean on our expectations, trusting the comfort of a predictable environment (another small example like making the exact same lunch for the week).
The study suggests that our internal exploration is too often diminished by an overly occupied mind, much as is the case with our experience of our external environment. By having the ability to “unload” our minds as often as possible (either through meditation, exercise, or getting as much sleep as possible), we would be able to create space for our minds to activate innovative thinking.
2. Ask more whys.
We can be better thinkers by being able to probe other people’s thinking and ours. This is through asking the key question “why”. I have written multiple articles about asking better whys like this and this, so it’s pretty clear that the word “why” is a really powerful one.
By probing our thinking, we can dig into whether we really understand a concept/idea/statement or if it is pure regurgitation. By probing other people’s thinking, we would be able to develop more empathy and not jump to conclusions too quickly.
I love watching the Youtube series “__ Expert Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty” from Wired (example here) where an expert takes a concept like blockchain, quantum computing, or biology, and explains it to 5 different people; a child, teen, a college student, a grad student and a professional.
The reason why the series is so intriguing to me is that it is such a great indicator of the clarity of the expert’s thoughts. This follows the assumption that if we can’t explain something so that everyone understands it, we don’t fully understand it either. It’s also a great example of first principles thinking.
In the next post, I will be focusing more on each of the core principles mentioned above. This is our next step of turning concepts into action to level up together.
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