I think it is undeniably true that the human brain must work in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person's brain because it understands the most fundamental models- ones that will do most work per unit.
The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.
New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.
The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends.
WHAT a person thinks is determined by HOW a person thinks.
Sports became a favorite subject of reflection and will soon be the only way of thinking
The western mind is linear, the eastern mind is circular.
We are all shaped by the tools we use, in particular: the formalisms we use shape our thinking habits, for better or for worse, and that means that we have to be very careful in the choice of what we learn and teach, for unlearning is not really possible.
The problem with any philosophical consideration is that once you open a door in your mind, you can never close it. Once you learn something, you can never convince your mind that you didn't learn it. If you learn the world is round, you can never fit in with a world that thinks it's flat.
What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.
I feel like we want to compartmentalise things and say, 'Well, that's emotional, artistic and subjective, while this is intellectual, objective and measured.' I have difficulty thinking that's the way we experience things.
Remember that our reactions are a product of our perceptions, and our perceptions are a result of what is at the center of our life.
We try to organize the world, which isn't organized the way our brains want to organize it. We tell stories about the people in our lives, we project ideas onto them. We project relationships with people, we make our lives into stories. I don't think we can avoid doing that.
In my worldview, there are filers, and there are pilers. Filers think alphabetically. Pilers think geologically.
Each of us has a network of emotional and logical associations that is unique to us. Activate one mode of the association, and you activate a predictable pattern of behavior. A situation isn't just the external events that take place; it is how each individual processes those events and integrates them into her thoughts and feelings.
Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.
If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.
It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think.
Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected; they must be replaced. Where there is no replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, bafflement, or defeat.
Forward steps are made by giving up old armor because words are built into you - in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word-armor you carry; for example, when you read this page your eyes move irresistibly from left to right following the words that you have been accustomed to.
Your belief systems limit your reality to a sub-set of the solution space that does not contain the answer.
Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens.
