Understanding Thinking

This book explains how we learn, how our pre-conscious experience-trapping neural networks, ‘generalise’ and ‘abstract’ from a stream of personal and cultural experiences, to construct our causal maps and models of reality, our value systems and our emotional associations. It explores the strengths and weaknesses of human thinking and shows how we can take conscious control of our personal development, updating old and dysfunctional models of reality to take account of new experiences and changed circumstances. It opens up the possibility of rewriting the HOWs and WHYs that drive our behaviour and motivation, and presents a powerful new Graphical Thinking Tool that everyone can use, individually or in groups, to explore and understand the deep structure of any problem, any system, and any body of knowledge. Understanding may be unfashionable, but it is still ‘the ultimate study skill’, and the key to success in any field of endeavour.