Brain Bias: Why You Shouldn't Emulate Geniuses and Their Rigid Thinking Processes
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How do you get out of a mental feedback loop? The smartest people—call them geniuses or what you will—tend to shut down outside voices and tend to only listen to sources that they know they'll agree with. But the thing is, this works for geniuses because they are, well, geniuses. Barbara posits that the best thing to do for the other 99.9% of us is to get outside of your own head and be flexible about ideas. Travel more. Even just sitting in a different chair can open new avenues in your head. Your brain craves new stimuli, so give it something to grow on. Ideally, Barbara says, you should listen to people and things that might initially rub you the wrong way, but ultimately get you out of your own mental feedback loop. The best thinking doesn't have to come from emotion—taking a step back and thinking critically about all sides of an issue in a 3dimensional way is often the best way to think, period. Barbara Oakley's latest book is Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential.

BARBARA OAKLEY:

Barbara Oakley, PhD, is a professor of engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and Ramón y Cajal Distinguished Scholar of Global Digital Learning at McMaster University. Her research involves bioengineering with an emphasis on neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Alongside legendary neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski, Dr. Oakley teaches two massive open online courses (MOOCs), 'Learning How to Learn,' the world's most popular course, and 'Mindshift,' the companion course to her most recent book of the same title.

TRANSCRIPT:

Barbara Oakley: It turns out that it’s all too easy for us to fall into a sort of rut in our thinking and it can feel so comfortable, so good. We can feel so certain that it’s right that we can’t even realize that we’re stuck in a rut. Part of this is called "Einstellung," right, this kind of effect. And that is this sort of you see one approach to do things and you are convinced it’s right— And even it if isn’t the best approach you just can’t see other approaches because you’ve already locked in that first approach.

And to some extent we do that in everything we do in life because as we grow, as we grow from infants and we’re maturing there are synaptic – we’re born and kind of our earliest years we have lots of synaptic connections. And as we don’t use some of them they just wither away and die. So even by six months of age what happens is you’ve lost the ability to even hear certain sounds of other languages because you haven’t actually used those circuits yourself.

So what you want to do in your life is you want to try to expose yourself to novel stimuli as much as possible. So I mean that doesn’t mean that you have to like live a topsyturvy life, but try things like sitting at a different place at the dinner table or brush your teeth with the other hand.

And, of course travel is a great way of getting out of your comfort zone. One of the things that I think is very interesting is Nobel Prize Winner Ramon y Cajal had said that—he’s considered the father of modern neuroscience and he’d worked with many geniuses—And he said, you know, “I’ve worked with these geniuses, and,” he said, “I am not a genius.” He said, “What I am is persistent and I’m flexible when I see that the data is telling me something different than I thought it should tell me.”

So he was able to change his mind. Now what happens with really smart people, those geniuses who Ramon y Cajal was referring to is they’re super smart. So they’re used to being right and figuring things out quickly. They tend to jump to conclusions and they haven’t had the experience of changing their minds when they’re wrong because they haven’t been wrong that often. And what that does is that makes them less flexible in the face of changing data or even being more open to different ideas.

So I think it’s really important to try to keep yourself flexible, try to talk to people of different opinions, listen to them. Of course you’ll be forming your own opinions, but you’ll be surprised if you listen carefully how you can find yourself being a more open and caring person just for the fact that you’ve listened...

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/barbarao...