CONFIDENT THINKING

CONFIDENT THINKING

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 13, 2010

“All grand thoughts come from the heart.”

Luc de Clapiers Vauvenargues (1715 – 1747), French moral philosopher

REFERENCE: This is an excerpt from my book CONFIDENT THINKING soon to be published.

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CONFIDENT THINKING CONFIRMED

Throughout this book, you are introduced to yourself in terms the power of your emotions. We are increasingly moving into a comfort level with the bicameral mind or the mind that is emotional as well as rational, a mind that thinks intuitively as well as doggedly deterministically. The latest confirmation of the power of emotions is Jonah Lehrer’s “How We Decide” (2009), which is a book about how the brain works.

Lehrer makes a systematic study of how the brain functions and makes decision. He takes issue with neuroscientists who focused almost exclusively on the rational brain paying little homage to the emotional brain. What he does in this book, which is comprehensible to the layman, is make the reader conscious of his brain. He makes you aware, in other words, that you are processing information as you are reading, primarily using the prefrontal cortex of the brain.

He argues throughout the book that most assumptions made about the brain by philosophers and writers of the past were faulty. They championed rational thought as the desired goal, trumping our emotions that lead us astray. He considers that unfortunate as some of our best decisions come through our emotional brain.

As I have attempted to do here, Lehrer also uses examples from life to illustrate how powerful feelings, or the nature of those feelings can be in our decision-making. We have the expression in sport that the person “choked,” meaning the pressure got too great and the person “lost it.” Jean Van de Velde choked on the final hole of the 1999 British Open largely because he started to think too much about his swing. The same thing happened to opera star Renee Fleming who began to flub songs when she started wondering if she could hit the proper note, something she had done a thousand times before. Professional athletes know this only too well.

It can also happen to a group. The Tampa Bay Bucs, of the National Football League, were 9 and 3 going into the last month of the season. Three of their final four games were at home against only one team with a winning record. Yet, they lost all four games. They were expecting to win the divisions championship, to get a first round bye in the playoffs, and have home field advantage throughout with a good chance of making the Super Bowl, which was being played in Tampa in February 2009. What happened?

The legendary defensive coach and coordinator Monty Kiffin announced he was leaving to join his son, Lane Kiffin, who was to be the head football coach at the University of Tennessee. The Bucs, known for their defense, and the reason for their success, collapsed defensively the month of December 2008. They missed the playoffs entirely. This led to the firing of head coach Jon Gruden and general manager George Allen.

Confidence went out of the team once it became emotionally preoccupied with defending how “we’re all professionals” taking coach Kiffin’s departure “in stride.” The evidence suggested otherwise. Kiffin was tantamount to their surrogate father as well as leader. Yet they argued passionately that they would not lose their edge, but they did. Lehrer would say they spent too much time thinking about not losing it.

Research has shown that once the brain knows how to do something, the best thing is to stop obsessing and let the brain and body take over and do their work. My own life is riddled with episodes of this being true.

Once I was taking a calculus final in university. I was a bit of grind, meaning I studied my ass off for every course. The calculus examinations were passed out, and I read the first question, then the second question, and then the third. By that time, I was in a state of total panic – I had no idea how to start much less complete the questions. I was hyperventilating, my hands were clammy, and I had broken out into a cold sweat. I thought I was about to faint.

I had long known, long before the good professor had written “How We Decide,” that I was emotional, and couldn’t handle stress well. That was the reason I prepared so thoroughly. It was the only way I could relax, could have confidence that I would do well. My insecurity welled up in me as I thought for sure I had blown it.

Then I did something that was masochistic, something without thinking. I jammed my pencil into the back of my left hand, breaking off the tip. My hand was bleeding. I wrapped my handkerchief around it, raised my hand, and asked for another pencil. A calm fell over me. I looked back at my test, and as if by magic, everything appeared clear, not only clear, but elementary. I raced through the exam, set the curve, and have remembered that episode all my life. Those who read me know that I don’t back away from declarative statements, or from the composition of my peculiar emotional motor.

If there is a central theme to all my works it is to pay attention to your feelings. Our feelings are the result of years of the programming of our brains in how to respond to certain situations. The brain makes instantaneous computations of which we are not aware or for which we have placed barriers to deny, and always at our disadvantage.

The neural transmitter (dopamine) stimulates the nucleus accumbens (Nacc) part of the brain that generates pleasurable feelings. This can happen after strenuous exercise, listening to music that resonates with us, eating a favorite food, or watching our beloved sport’s team come through in victory. Unfortunately, dopamine is what addictive drugs activate. It triggers a massive release of the neurotransmitter that overwhelms the brain with ecstasy. Dopamine produces more than feelings of happiness. It assists in regulating our emotions from the first stirrings of love to the most visceral forms of disgust. Put otherwise, there are no such things as good or bad emotions. What is unfortunate is to deny the emotions or fail to be aware of what triggers them and why.

Dopamine is at the ready to stimulate whichever part of the brain that your brain feels should be stimulated. This is another way of saying the instinctual feelings you have for a situation kick in. On the other hand, we can become slaves to our emotions and addicted to “feeling good” so that we don’t accept and move naturally with the random fluctuations inevitable in a life of ups and downs.

People have been known to make a great deal of money, and then to become obsessed with making more, taking inordinate risks denying the chronic downs that accompany the occasional ups. We have seen this with day traders on the stock market, chronic gamblers, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, among others.

Lehrer also delves into the limits of the brain, a subject covered by author, inventor William L. Livingston in “Friends in High Places” (1990) and “Have Fun At Work” (1988). Scientists confirm what Livingston has uncovered in his research in our problem solving. That is the maximum number of issues one brain can consider at the same time is limited. This explains why so many of us are overwhelmed when we are distracted by a much larger number of issues than our minds can handle on a daily basis. Here is what Livingston has to say on the subject:

“There are two limiting conditions in our cranial cellular congress to cope with reality. The brain capacity to process information is finite, and the machinery with which to do it is not a conscious unity. When the space requirements of problems fit the network there, things go well. When they don’t, things go to Hell.” (Have Fun At Work, p. 32).

“Problems are systems moving in a trajectory shaped by the force field of natural law. Problem systems are as coherent as natural law itself. The stuff sloshing around in the human cranium masquerading as solutions, however, is sterile and incoherent. Until the magic of human genius assembles elements into a system married to a problem system, there is no such thing as a solution candidate. Solutions only obtain coherency by being wed to problems. When vocabulary is limited to solution-speak, communication is incoherent.” (Friends In High Places, p. 98)

“Life is complicated. Like it or not, the substance of life is deceptively intricate. The bulk of things we take for granted are labyrinthine, non-linear and beyond causal understanding. Bid farewell to the trivialization of rules. The threshold of problem solving competence is accepting reality for what it is --- the passage of a complication through Nature’s flux. All substitutes for this perspective precipitate failure.” (Ibid, p 184)

Lehrer confirms what others have referenced more empirically such as Livingston and that is the computation powers and limits to the brain.

He then goes on to provide evidence of how food can affect our thinking. He writes of an experiment regarding a “sugar fix” given to students drinking sugar rich lemonade. It stimulated the prefrontal cortex (where rational thinking occurs) resulting in students being more successful in problem solving than those not getting the sugar fix. This may be counterintuitive to what you have been told about sugar making children hyperactive. This research, he claims, explains why we get cranky when we’re hungry and tired. The brain is less able to suppress the negative emotions sparked by small annoyances. “A bad mood,” he insists, “is really just a rundown prefrontal cortex.”


PROBLEM SOLVING WITHOUT CONFIDENT THINKING IN THE MIX

It is a small leap from we are what we eat to we are what we think. Confident Thinking, given its powers and limitations, breaks temporarily free of these, if only occasionally, when we engaged in thinking creatively. Livingston insists that the problems we solve are not necessarily the problems we face, but the problems we feel confident we can solve. No surprise, problems not addressed eventually gang up on us, and cause such troubles as the global economic meltdown of 2008 – 2009, or personal collapse such as a mental-physical breakdown in us individually.

We are familiar and comfortable with critical thinking, or rational thinking in terms of what is already known. But as Einstein has pointed out we are unlikely to be able to solve a problem with the same thinking that was its cause. That takes creative thinking, which engages the emotional as well as the rational ordering centers of the brain, and considers what is not known but can be found out.

It is my view that creative thinking has been on holiday. Education focuses on grades rather than creative thinking. Creative thinking encourages students to explore and discover by embracing the unknown, not regurgitating the “right answer.” We have moved as an enlightened society beyond the reiterative tests of critical thinking that dominate our textbooks. The word “education” after all means to “to lead forth,” not to retreat back. Simply regurgitating information is not education, at least, not in the twenty-first century.

What exactly is the function of SAT and GRE cram review courses?

If they are necessary for students wanting to qualify for the best colleges or graduate schools, what are these examinations actually measuring? Certainly they are not measuring conceptual skills. Better yet, what did these test takers learn in their degree programs in preparation for these opportunities? Are our schools that poor that the student has to cheat to look good because these crib courses can be called a lot of things but obtaining an artificial edge is cheating is it not?

Since course work is largely regurgitation, I suspect there is something to this. Chances are once a course is completed it is soon forgotten. This backdoor cram-exam preparation for qualification personifies a reactive society that never gets on top of its problems because its focus is always on effects not causes.

In my day, students bragged about never taking a book home in all of high school. Today nearly every child has homework from preschool on, but I wonder if it is more ritual than self-motivated conceptual learning. I sense that it is reprogramming with the same old critical thinking criteria. This spills over into life.

There are exceptions to this rule. Educator Melvin Freestone has created a tactical program, “Thinking for Understanding” (2007), which deals systematically with what is advocated here. Freestone gets inside issues discussed in Confident Thinking, and reveals a strategy for multi-layered thinking, intentions for thinking, and processes for thinking, all in order to establish thinking and understanding. He moves out of the mechanics of conventional thinking to bring out the imagination to think conceptually, creatively and aggressively. It would be a good beginning to embrace his ideas as they deal with the cause of our dilemma, false programming.

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