Brain Power: Learn to Improve Your Thinking Skills

Karl Albrecht

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781439188644
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Creative Ability in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Do you want to expand your mental power? Think more clearly, logically, and creatively? Improve your memory? Solve problems and make decisions more effectively? Brain Power introduces the six functional thinking abilities you need to become an adaptive, innovative thinker. As you develop your ability to think on your feet, to isolate and arrange facts, and to avoid logical pitfalls you will see how to use creative problem solving strategies, both in business and in private life. With practical exercises to improve your full range of mental capabilities from concentration to intuition, management consultant Karl Albrecht answers all your questions on becoming a more efficient and effective thinking. Offering a gold mine of ideas and techniques to use in most any situation, Brain Power provides fascinating illustrations, games, and puzzles that will stimulate and expand your brain power.

1
why many people
don’t think clearly

The spirit of the age is filled with disdain for thinking.

ALBERT SCHWEITZER

how thinking almost went out of style

Not many years ago, to call someone “an intellectual” was usually considered a high compliment. Today, many people use the term freely as a general put-down. Perhaps thinking as a basic human skill has never really enjoyed a fashionable status, but the period following World War II has seen a remarkable decline in the general significance that Americans have attached to it. We see today in the United States certain styles of talking and patterns of living that virtually discount the use of our brains except for the mundane, mechanical aspects of functioning. For many people, especially the young, this has become the official Age of Emotion. The head is out—the gut is in.

We’ve seen an enormous number of changes in the American culture since World War II, many of which should have helped Americans become much more effective in using their brains. Yet, despite the changes, the importance of using one’s gray matter in enlightened, sophisticated, and creative ways seems to have taken quite a beating.

At a time when we know a great deal about thinking processes and how to develop them, we find a curious scarcity of courses on thinking in high schools, colleges, universities, university extensions, and in business organizations. And we find a notable shortage of practical, how-to books on thinking offered by the publishing industry. In view of the fact that thinking skills are among the most basic and the most important life skills we can ever learn, such a general lack of attention to the topic seems truly remarkable.

the “instant” society

Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.

H. MUMFORD JONES

One of the curious side effects of America’s tremendous industrial capacity for producing and distributing consumer goods and for providing creature comforts is the tendency of people to become oriented to passive experience much more than active experience. With the ability to trade their money for solutions to the various logistical problems of living, Americans may be losing their ability to solve problems, to innovate, to improvise, and to repair. For a toothache, one goes to a dentist. For a muscle pain, one goes to the doctor. For a leaky pipe, one calls a plumber. For a cranky television set, one calls a repair shop. For a malfunctioning car, one goes to a service station. For a torn shirt, one buys a new shirt. Probably very few people, especially under the age of twenty, know how to darn a sock or have ever even thought of doing anything other than throwing it away. Americans have instant breakfast cereal, instant news, instant sex, and instant vacations. The fast food restaurant more or less epitomizes the American obsession with making things easier and faster. Television and movies have made many Americans into habitual consumers of synthetic experience—audiovisual fantasies that simply pass the time.

The American technological attitude occasionally borders on downright arrogance. One lady remarked on seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, “You can’t tell me that was done without human help!”

In America during the last quarter of the twentieth century, most people face fewer mental challenges than ever before—fewer demands to deal actively and logically with their environments. Even the fruits of technology have been simplified enormously for use by people who can’t or don’t want to think. Microwave ovens, cameras, color television sets, automobiles, calculators—all have been designed to be readily operable by persons with average to dull-normal mental faculties. Although Americans command enormous amounts of energy, and have at their disposal extremely sophisticated items of equipment, they face even fewer challenges to use their thinking abilities than ever before.

the american education system: obedience training

The object of the education of children lies not in communicating the values of the past, but in creating new values of the future.

JOHN DEWEY

Many criticisms have been aimed at the American public school system over the past few years—most of them fully justified. As a mass delivery system for dead information, American schools have functioned fairly well. As a mechanism for helping growing children to acquire and use the skills of thinking—especially critical thinking—the schools have been a spectacular flop. In retrospect, this is understandable, and not necessarily “wrong.”

Wave after wave of new educational theories, technological advances, social movements among teachers, infusions of enormous amounts of tax revenues, and the inevitable government programs have deluged the American educational system. Yet, never has it showed the slightest signs of veering from the primary task assigned to it by our society, namely the useful function of incarcerating children between the ages of about six and eighteen to free their parents from the tiresome task of raising them. A casual glance around a typical grade school, a junior high, or a high school will show any observer who chooses to take a neutral look that the facility is optimized for obedience and conformity.

The subject matter of the school system itself generally reflects conformity to conveniently measured norms. Subjects such as English grammar, spelling, arithmetic, geometry, history, and science are all easily measured, easily packaged, easily spooned out, and easily tested. Musical skills, artistic skills, creative craftwork, journalism, and drama receive only the smallest attention, if they are included at all. Individualized skills like these are inconvenient and difficult for the school to “deliver.”

Many teachers, especially new ones, who bring fresh ideas and imaginative techniques to their jobs find themselves pressed into the mold of ritual and conformity by the structure of the school system itself. And many of them, exasperated by the lack of freedom, oversized classes, and narrow-minded school board policies, find themselves at midcareer with a “what the hell” attitude. The teachers get the same message that the students get: conform or get out. Very few teachers or administrators manage to retain a real enthusiasm for their careers and for the learning experiences of the students in the “factory” setting that characterizes so much of the educational system.

I’m not contending that children don’t learn anything at all of value in this setting, nor that the setting is particularly harmful to them. But I am emphasizing the fact that the overall school system, as a social apparatus, has always operated according to unspoken but clearly communicated values about how growing children should be handled. And I think we make a mistake if we assume that the development of creative, logical, or critical thought in and of itself has been the principal value governing the “teaching” process.

Many parents apparently don’t want teachers to show their children how to think critically, to question, to challenge the values and purposes of the adult world, or to explore alternatives that might be uncomfortable for the parents. They do, of course, approve of such objectives in principle, but when the teaching process begins to have an impact on their parental authority over a child’s value systems and behavioral standards, they conveniently and firmly draw the line.

One school administrator confided an incident that brought home this point emphatically. He had pioneered the development of a course in problem solving and decision making for a group of junior high school students. He found himself under attack by the irate parents of one teenager who took it upon himself to apply the decision model he had learned to the question of whether he should smoke marijuana. The youngster had weighed the various elements of the question and decided to go ahead and try it. Far from admiring the teenager’s flair for independent thought, the parents were outraged that he had elected such a course of action on his own, against their desires.

By the time they finish high school, most Americans have become so accustomed to the pursuit of irrelevance that they take it quite nicely in stride. It seems perfectly reasonable, or at least acceptable, to sit for hours each day going through the motions prescribed by the teacher. Unfortunately, most of them automatically carry their obedience training well into their adult lives, and usually with them to the grave.

A charming story told by a grade-school teacher in Seattle illustrates the typical classroom situation as well as any I’ve heard. In response to a quiz covering the lesson unit on the human body, one youngster wrote: “The human body is composed of three parts—the Brainium, the Borax, and the Abominable Cavity. The Brainium contains the brain. The Borax contains the lungs, the liver, and the living things. The Abominable Cavity contains the bowels, of which there are five: A, E, I, O, and U.”

My experiences in teaching university extension classes for business people have convinced me that the typical adult “learner” brings the very same habits and expectations to the classroom in grown-up life that he or she learned so well in obedience school. Many business people who have enrolled in a course for the first time since leaving high school (or college—a more sophisticated form of obedience school) will sit passively in a classroom and grant the teacher absolute authority to decide what they should learn, how, when, and why. The notion that they are customers, and that the teacher is there to perform a service for them, seems to escape most of them altogether.

Years of obedience training seems to make the trainees highly skilled at conforming—at finding how things are “supposed to be done” and at doing them the “right” way. And it makes them into excellent consumers—uncritical respondents to a constant barrage of television news and advertising. If we’re looking for ways to foster creative, imaginative, and critical thinking skills among American citizens, the public educational system as we presently have it arranged is probably not the best place to find them.

television: chewing gum for the mind

The experience of watching television continuously for several hours relates to active thinking in about the same way that chewing a wad of gum relates to talking. Part of the same apparatus is involved, but there is no output. Extensive television watching apparently inhibits the development and use of active mental skills, due to its essentially passive nature. It is no accident that intellectual pablum dominates the programming of most television networks. Situation comedies, soap operas, melodramas, sports events, and movies outnumber documentaries and educational programs by a wide margin, but not because television watchers are unintelligent or incapable of concentration and logical reasoning. It is because the television watcher drifts along in an altered state of consciousness—a trancelike stupor in which active thinking becomes an unwanted distraction from a narrowly fixated sensory state.

A number of investigations have shown that, after spending about 30 minutes or more staring into a television screen at typical programming material, a viewer’s brain is in a condition qualitatively similar to hypnosis. The body becomes more or less inert, with markedly diminished kinetic processes. Respiration and heart rate may decline somewhat. Attention narrows to include only the images on the screen and the sounds coming from the speaker. Shifting attention to other events or processes in the room requires an unwanted mental effort. The popularity of automatic channel-selecting devices, operable from the easy chair, probably stems from this condition of quasi-hypnosis more than from any supposed characteristic of “laziness” on the part of the viewer. From the point of view of brain activity, passivity is self-reinforcing. The longer one remains fixated on a sensory process that requires little or no active thought, the more fixated one is likely to become, until it takes a moderate effort to break out of the semitrance condition.

If you’d like to experiment with this passivity phenomenon, try watching a thirty minute TV program while standing up. Resist the urge to kneel, crouch, or sit on the edge of some item of furniture. I’ll bet you find yourself much more alert and much more aware of what you’re doing. And you might find yourself taking a much more observant, critical attitude toward the commercials. This illustrates fairly dramatically the interactions between your bodily processes and your mental processes.

For many people, watching TV merely offers a way to kill time. Because they’ve watched television so much in the past, they have trouble thinking of other ways to structure their evening hours, so they repeatedly opt for sitting in front of the set, absorbing synthetic experiences, as a ready-made way to pass the time. Some researchers estimate that Americans average as much as five to six hours per day in front of television sets. This average includes the effects of people who don’t even own TV sets and those who only watch occasionally. Over ninety-six percent of American homes have television sets, and over fifty percent have two sets or more. Publishers estimate that only five to ten percent of Americans read books on a regular basis.

We’re in science fiction now. Whoever controls the media—the images—controls the culture.

ALLEN GINSBERG

Because television stations operate for twelve to eighteen hours each day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, they need a heavy supply of broadcast material. TV is an enormously hungry medium. Scriptwriters, programmers, and producers must work steadily at the task of turning out programming material and pouring it into the hopper of their greedy broadcast machines.

Television had gained a central place in American life by about 1960. By about 1970, TV scriptwriters had run out of material. Of course, that didn’t slow them down. They merely continued to redo the same basic material—human interest situations with simplified plots—in different forms. They substituted one cadre of stock characters for the previous set, changed the story lines a bit, readjusted the ratio of sex to violence, and brought out the next season’s series.

Nobody ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American public.

H.L. MENCKEN

The mass production of more than 50,000 hours of program material over about ten years inevitably lead to the level of intellectual mediocrity that characterized nearly ninety percent of the programs offered by the three major broadcasting networks by about 1970. With the notable exception of a few media events of great cultural significance, such as the live telecast of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, television programming had become a vast intellectual and cultural wasteland. Of course, the movie industry had traveled much the same road, although it emphasized a smaller number of more spectacular productions in contrast to the television networks’ virtually continuous use of the airwaves.

Television, together with radio and the record industry, converted a number of obscure performers into instant celebrities. Mass-produced music, mass-produced comedy, and mass-produced personalities had become the primary fare of the television viewing public by the 1970s.

Television Suckling Its Young. From LANGUAGE IN THOUGHT AND ACTION, Third Edition by S.I. Hayakawa, copyright © 1972 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the publisher ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• contents
• preface
• 1 why many people don’t think clearly
• 2 learning to think more effectively
• 3 crap detecting
• 4 thinking on your feet
• 5 how your words shape your thoughts
• 6 developing mental flexibility
• 7 finding facts and facing facts
• 8 using your logic
• 9 solving problems and making decisions
• 10 producing ideas
• 11 better thinking in the business world
• 12 building brain skills
• 13 what is the potential of the human brain
• Bibliography
• appendix solutions to puzzle problems
• Index