How Do We Know What We Know?
Now, to ‘know’ something, there are two paths - we can go for a wander up the valleys, round the lake and note the gullies and rocks, the layers of earth in the hills and the direction of the valley itself. All those pieces of information can lead us to decide, to arrive at Knowledge based on all the little pieces we’ve managed to associate so they carved the valley together. This takes time, and at the end we can describe all those pieces of information that led us to the conclusion.
But we’ve all experienced another way. de Bono looks at lateral thinking, the times when we make sudden creative jumps from what we know and find new knowledge. In this analogy, this is like getting into a mental glider and flyuing above the landscape, looking at it as a whole and seeing the shape of the valleys or the extent of the lake at a glance. It happens almost instantly and because we can see so much more than the single subject/valley of the other method, we can bring in other data to form our conclusion. It is very fast and we can’t, once the conclusion is formed, tell anyone how we came to that conclusion - it was the shape of what we saw.
Oh, and the overall landscape? (this is my thoughts on it) It’s our personality. All the experiences, all the thoughts, carve an individual landscape that, viewed as a whole, make us who we are. Our personal valleys are why we react to a stimuli differently to others. And the common features are why we react the same.
Which brings us to what goes wrong…
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