High Cognitive Minds

I've been having a fascinating email conversation with a new friend, and one of the topics we stumbled into was "thinking." We found that we've both had the experience of realizing that most people don't really think much. It's such a simple word, and something we take for granted. In fact, the whole world functions as if people do think. Economists have always assumed that people act on the basis of information, making rational decisions about their lives on the basis of that information. Increasingly though, studies have shown that people, just as often as not, make decisions which are counter-productive, and which are detrimental to their interests rather than beneficial.

This is really a curious state of affairs. We've been persuaded that all people need for conducting their affairs in an intelligent way is education and accurate information. There are thousands of questions we could ask at this point, starting with "Then why is the world in such a mess?" For the answers, we usually depend on reliable scapegoats: greedy corporations, power-hungry dictators, crooked politicians, etc., etc. We do not ask whether the average person has the capacity to think rationally. It's a question that doesn't just spring to mind, but it's also a question that would open a very ugly can of worms if it were to be asked seriously.

My friend expressed her amazement that someone she knows, a person who is very intelligent, and a high achiever, had absolutely no insight into his thought processes. Asked what he was thinking, he admitted he had no idea. If you've ever hit someone with "a penny for your thoughts" you've more than likely gotten the same response. A lot of our mental processing is truly unconscious and more or less inaccessible. But...garbage in, garbage out. The scientist with a head full of questions and of knowledge about a particular subject may not be able to state exactly the internal processes by which he came to a Nobel-worthy insight, but he does know what made it possible. The bigot who hates and demonizes some ethnic group doesn't even have any idea of the influences which led him to that position.

The difference between them is that the scientist's career depends on thinking, and he knows how to nourish the process, how to guide it, and how to evaluate it. The bigot doesn't depend on thinking, but on emotional reactions, and he has no need or desire to analyze them. All he has to do is follow their lead. These are two extremes; every person falls somewhere on the line between cultivated rational thought and mere emotional reactivity. Taking a leap based on long observation and reading, I'd say that most people have fairly limited thought processes. Their thinking is based on what they have been taught, from the informal learning of early childhood, to the formal education which follows. The more intelligent they are and the more education they have, the more they can be said to think. But ask them to put their minds to topics with which they're not familiar, and they're lost.

Have you ever asked someone a question, either of fact, or a potential topic of discussion, and been told that they don't really know anything about that? Have you ever followed up with "well, think about it, only to hear "I wouldn't know where to start?" More often than not, my experience has been that they have no idea where to start. They don't know how to start thinking about something, how to formulate questions or even ask themselves what they need to know in order to get to the answer.

Why are self-help books, television programs, and experts on everything from personal finance to sexuality and child rearing so popular? Why do people continue to seek them out and trust them even when the advice fails to solve their problems? Consider how society has changed. People once learned from their family and neighbors how to conduct their lives. This was knowledge handed down from generation to generation, tested, tweaked, and proven workable. For the most part, no one had to re-invent the wheel; each generation could start out in the world secure in the knowledge of how to cook, raise food, bring up children, build a house, shoe a horse, etc. If they needed to know something more, they knew who to turn to. But today, there is no one to turn to. The old knowledge is obsolete, the social structure that passed it on is gone, and the modern world becomes ever more complicated and difficult to traverse and understand.

The great mass of humanity has never had to think for itself, but the world in which that was a viable mode of existence is gone. No matter where we look: politics, poverty, education, war, environment, violence, overpopulation, we see the evidence that the human race is not equipped to deal rationally with constant and accelerating change, complex issues, long-term consequences of our actions, matters of life and death. Simply, most humans lack the ability to think rationally, to think beyond the truisms which guide their lives. Is this an innate flaw, an evolutionary error that we can't correct? Or is it merely the result of a universal, grossly mistaken assumption: that thinking is a natural process that doesn't have to be taught? I believe human survival may depend on the answer. How do we start thinking seriously about thinking?