Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed - How to Foolproof Your Mind, part 1

From Denny: From our friends over at the litemind blog comes yet another great article about how best to use our minds efficiently.

From Luciano, the author:

"Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble.

Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them.

1. The Anchoring Trap: Over-Relying on First Thoughts

“Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million? What’s your best estimate?” Researchers asked this question to a group of people, and the estimates were seldom too far off 35 million. The same question was posed to a second group, but this time using 100 million as the starting point. Although both figures were arbitrary, the estimates from the ‘100 million’ group were, without fail, concomitantly higher than those in the ‘35 million’ group. (for the curious, here’s the answer.)

Lesson: Your starting point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions, ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts.

This trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for example.

What can you do about it?

•Always view a problem from different perspectives. Avoid being stuck with a single starting point. Work on your problem statement before going down a solution path.

•Think on your own before consulting others. Get as much data as possible and explore some conclusions by yourself before getting influenced by other people’s anchors.

•Seek information from a wide variety of sources. Get many opinions and broaden your frame of reference. Avoid being limited to a single point of view."

By Luciano Passuello @ litemind

For the rest of this intriguing article just click on the title link, great reading!

critical thinking decision making psychology

Brain: Creative Problem Solving with SCAMPER

Image of Luciano Passuello

From Denny: From our friends over at LiteMind comes another useful article for your everyday life. They like to write about efficient and innovative ways to use our minds.

Here is an intriguing article about one of my favorite subjects: creative problem-solving!

This is an excerpt from the post by blog owner Luciano Passuello:

"SCAMPER is a technique you can use to spark your creativity and help you overcome any challenge you may be facing. In essence, SCAMPER is a general-purpose checklist with idea-spurring questions — which is both easy to use and surprisingly powerful.

In this posting, I present a complete SCAMPER primer, along with two free creativity-boosting resources: a downloadable reference mind map and an online tool that generates random questions to get you out of a rut whenever you need.

SCAMPER Primer

SCAMPER is based on the notion that everything new is a modification of something that already exists. Each letter in the acronym represents a different way you can play with the characteristics of what is challenging you to trigger new ideas:

S = Substitute

C = Combine

A = Adapt

M = Magnify

P = Put to Other Uses

E = Eliminate (or Minify)

R = Rearrange (or Reverse)

To use the SCAMPER technique, first state the problem you’d like to solve or the idea you’d like to develop. It can be anything: a challenge in your personal life or business; or maybe a product, service or process you want to improve. After pinpointing the challenge, it’s then a matter of asking questions about it using the SCAMPER checklist to guide you."

For the rest of this great article just click on the title link!

Video: Memory Man

From Denny: Memory loss is still a mystery to the medical world. Gianni Golfera is known as the Memory Man for his unusual and accurate memory. He claims to remember events as far back as his infancy. He has also studied memory techniques for years and teaches them to others in seminars. Scientists still don't know how much genes play in memory ability.

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• How To Cope Up With Memory Loss and Aging (after50health.com)
• Reading a book and knitting can delay the onset of dementia (news.bbc.co.uk)

A Whole New Mind

“The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind — computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands.” - A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

"This starts and sets the tone for the thought-provoking best-seller A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel Pink. In an easy-to-read way, Dan outlines the changes that are underway, as well as how to develop ourselves in order to thrive in this new era.

Half-a-Mind Is Not Enough

A Whole New Mind is based extensively on the classic left/right brain metaphor — and I must say it’s a very useful one in making the point of the book.

In the last few decades, most of the thriving professionals were those who excelled in “left-brain thinking” — information processing, sequential thinking, analysis, logic, organization, numeric ability and attention to detail.

Lately, however, information is getting easier and easier to acquire. Knowledge that was once locked behind hard-to-earn degrees is becoming widely and cheaply available. In this new world, a great deal of the information processing we performed can now be cheaply automated or assigned to high-qualified professionals overseas — for a fraction of the cost.

Although “left brain skills” continue to be useful, they’re not enough anymore. The rules of the game are changing."

By Luciano Passuello
Litemind.com

From Denny: Well, I guess the right-brained ones finally win! Yay! When I was a kid I was called stupid because I liked to take disparate elements be they people or situations or objects and synthesize them into a new meaning. These days folks like me are being hailed as brilliant! Gee, maybe the world finally caught up to the minority? This isn't rocket science, folks. It's fun doing right-brained things!

Photo by Hammer51012 @ flickr