Friends of mine say that I live in my head, thinking all the time. I find this an odd comment insofar as, hopefully, everyone is thinking all the time. Even when we are dreaming, the brain is thinking, that is if we consider the neural firings and riverbeds of thought thus created to be the very definition of thinking. The brain is firing on several cylinders at once, although many learned thinkers believe we use maybe, what, ten percent of our brains at any given time? But be that as it may, I will accept my friends’ commentary as a compliment. I do live in my head and this has gotten to me thinking – how precisely do I think?
I am not talking about the biologics of the gray matter. I get that the brain is this vast complicated organ of which we maybe understand 1%. Imaging and so-called neural linguistics are telling us more and more each day, but a complete understanding of the brain is perhaps decades away. No, what I am talking about (writing about) is the way in which any one of us come to the various perceptions we make of the world around us. This is a function of learning, I think. The less we know, the less the world makes any kind of sense. Even with knowing more, the world can seem quite senseless, but less so. The theorists in my field of counseling psychology, including Erickson, have set forth various models that explain how our prisms of thought change as we age. As an infant, for example, we would look upon the world largely as a place of mystery and risk and would seek only to have our basic needs met. As we age, we come to perceive the world as less of a threat (not entirely, of course) and will take certain aspects of it as “givens” – the sun will come up, the stove is hot to the touch, snow is cold, etc.
What has happened, me thinks, is that we have developed “models” of thought – models of the world into which we fit our observations and spit out perceptions that are, by and large, correct and reliable. The problem with acquiring wisdom (well, let’s call it knowledge anyway), is that we also develop many different models of thought. Think here of what goes through our minds when we read a balance sheet. We process what we are seeing through the model, the prism, of our financial learnings and come to some conclusions about the company’s whose numbers are presented. Let’s say the numbers aren’t good. Another model might come into our heads – a model that ask for inputs around non-financial data. For instance, the product model, or the people model. I think you get the drift here.
Farnam Street calls this assembly of models in our head a Latticework of Mental Models. It is their concept, not mine, so let’s quote their words around what it means:
Acquiring knowledge may seem like a daunting task. There is so much to know and time is precious. Luckily, we don’t have to master everything. To get the biggest bang for our buck we can study the big ideas from the big disciplines: physics, biology, psychology, philosophy, literature, sociology, history, and a few others. We call these big ideas mental models.
Farnam goes on to quote the great Charlie Munger, the partner and co-founder of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway. I think it brilliant and will end the post with it:
Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.
You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.
What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does…
It’s like the old saying, “To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” And of course, that’s the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you’ve got to have multiple models.
And the models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.
You may say, “My God, this is already getting way too tough.” But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.
Thoughts? I’d love to hear from you! josephvrusso@outlook.com
