Albert Rutherford - Neuroscience and Critical Thinking

Neuroscience And Critical Thinking

Understand the Hidden Pathways of Your Thought Patterns - Improve Your Memory, Make Rational Decisions, Tune Down Emotional Reactions, and Set Realistic Expectations

Written by

Albert Rutherford

Copyright 2019 Albert Rutherford. All rights reserved.

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First Printing, 2019.

Printed in the United States of America

Published by Kindle Direct Publishing

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Thinking is something we do every day, often unconsciously. When you make your breakfast, brush your teeth, and drive to work, you're thinking. But have you ever thought about your thought processes, how you make decisions like what to eat for lunch and when to wake up to get to work?

Thinking about your thought process is known as metacognition. Having awareness of how your thoughts work is the first step toward developing critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is a method you can use to examine your thoughts and beliefs carefully, and be able to thoughtfully engage with other people's ideas. This will make your everyday conversations and decisions easier and more carefully considered, but it can also help you solve bigger issues. The best thinkers in the world use critical thinking strategies to help solve major problems like getting to Mars, global climate change, and nuclear disarmament. These sound too large to tackle on your own, but if you think about the questions behind them, they suddenly become much more solvable. What is the cause of climate change? Who is responsible for this cause? How do you get them to change their practices? What would this process look like? What makes it effective? Starting to think about these things is how even the most brilliant people do their work.

You can apply this to smaller scale problems, too: If you want to start exercising, how do you know what to do? Which workout program is right for you? To solve this problem, you can break it down: Do you want to get stronger or be able to run faster? What health benefits are you looking for? Is one workout as good for you as it claims to be? How would you figure out the quality of the exercise you're looking at? Luckily, we have access to more information through the Internet than ever before, but the problem with this information is that it's not always accurate or valuable to the problem you want to solve. Critical thinking skills will help you sift through this information and use it to its full potential.

The brain is an amazing organ. Not only can it think, it can also think about how it thinks. It can think about the past, imagine the future, and imagine things that never happened. But the brain can also trick us. We all have biases that we are unaware of, based on our experiences and knowledge, which influence how we think and can cloud our judgment. Humans evolved emotions as tools for survival, but they can also work against our reasoning. Emotions and "gut instincts" tend to guide us to conclusions that are not always correct. Instead, they tend to be the conclusions that are easiest, that we feel the most comfortable with based on our biases, because this was a good survival strategy for early humans. They lived in a world where it was useful to have these instincts, but the modern world is much more complicated. It is more important than ever to carefully examine our perspectives and thought processes, for the good of ourselves and all of humanity.

You can think of critical thinking as a set of strategies to help guide us away from emotional, biased decision-making and toward rational consideration of our actions and beliefs. This helps us become independent thinkers who can make our own choices thoughtfully. The skills one develops as a critical thinker include understanding the logic that underlies ideas and theories, being able to deconstruct and formulate arguments, finding the holes and flaws in arguments, being able to construct step-by-step solutions, determining the validity of ideas, and being able to examine the reasoning behind your own beliefs. You might notice that critical thinking doesn't just mean knowing facts. It is an entirely different process than memorization or absorbing information; being good at remembering things doesn't make you a good critical thinker! Critical thinkers focus more on how they know than what they know. This means they're able to use what they know to predict the consequences of actions, solve problems, and determine what information to use when they want to learn something new.

Critical thinking doesn't mean "being critical," either. In fact, a big part of critical thinking is being able to hold a well-reasoned, calm, intellectual debate. Critical thinking will allow you to deconstruct people's arguments and show them why they're wrong, without resorting to personal insults or petty words. This will actually make it easier to work with people you don't agree with. Critical thinking is a great strategy to use in group projects and collaborative work, precisely because it creates ideal conditions for intellectual interaction.

This intellectual process doesn't necessarily need to stunt creativity. Although we often think of logic as being diametrically opposed to creativity, the whole idea behind critical thinking is that you can use logical guideposts to stimulate your creativity. Logical examination of every idea means that you could actually find that a less-popular idea is the most sound one, or that there is a better solution than the ones you've previously thought of for the problems you're considering. Using critical thinking skills can open up entire worlds that you've never even considered before.

We are not born with critical thinking skills. Instead, we have to learn them and practice them to be able to use them well. The good news is that anyone can learn how to think critically! Like any process of self-improvement, learning critical thinking begins with recognizing the things you need to improve. This means realizing what the errors are in our own thinking.