Tips For Thinking Rationally?
How to transcend our biases and go beyond groupthink.
All humans must deal at one time or another with misdirected thinking built on the foundations of cognitive bias. Though this happens to all of us, many seemingly intelligent people may combine so many different biases that they can articulately state ideas that on the surface seem rational but when viewed a bit closer are irrational, improbable, and violate the basic rules of statistics, logic, and critical thinking (deductive, inductive, adductive).
Many individuals who are trapped in Idea Prisons build on foundations of cognitive bias and will do everything they can to support a concept that any truly logical thinker can see is flawed. In spite of this, the person who possesses those flawed ideas will hold onto them at all cost, cherry-picking facts, organizing low-hanging fruit, and other approaches all for the purpose of supporting an argument that is possibly correct but according to strongly objective statistical analytics unlikely so. In the end, these flawed ways of thinking can lead to frustration, anxiety symptoms, and stress vulnerability, and intellectual and social isolation.
“A truth that’s told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
One can certainly teach a person stuck in an Idea Prison to logically understand the limitations in their way of thinking but that doesn’t mean you can get them to shift out of it for more than a limited period of time. That is because people have deep-rooted patterns of thought that become embedded in their cellular memory-what Eckhart Tolle calls the pain body. The concept of cellular memory/pain body goes back to Wilhelm Reich the pioneering and controversial psychiatrist. The concept put simply is that “…unresolved childhood issues and personal trauma are energetically stored in the body's physical structures including bones, muscles, and connective tissue. Because of the body-mind connection, these patterns within the body create a psychological grid that clouds the clarity of thought. Logical ideas are dumbed down and filtered through biases. These logical ideas cannot pass through a person’s psychological and energetic filters unless the person opens up and pulls the veil away.
Thus a person can sound totally irrational but be irrational. How can this be? Studies have shown that what seems like rational thinking is actually an irrationality framed in rational terms for the community at large. It may seem to make sense but still be nonsensical. This is especially common when the cognitive bias of the person promoting an idea matches the biases of the individuals taking in that idea. Many alternative realities (often called conspiracy theories) concerning race, gender, and political and economic realities are the result of multiple cognitive biases.
Takeaway
The question then becomes, how do you get someone to become a logical, clear, precise, productive, effective, and efficient thinker when they are struggling internally and may not even realize that their ability to think and communicate clearly in the information age is limited and weighed down by the ball and chain of their pain body, cellular memory and the unresolved early childhood emotional baggage that creates these elements.
The solution to the challenge of transcending these limitations can be found in a series of techniques and methodologies I have developed for my Life and Executive Coaching students and clients.
The method is known as the Critical Thought Process (CTP). CTP is based on research I gathered on a procedure called Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM). CBM refers to procedures used in psychology that aim to directly change maladaptive or adaptive cognitive processes, such as attention and interpretation. The procedures are designed to modify information processing via cognitive tasks that implicitly strengthen an association between a stimulus and target response, and increase selective attention to a particular stimulus. Through repeated practice of these tasks, it is anticipated that the patterns foster a change in cognitive bias to favor the type of information processing encouraged by the training contingency — in the case of my work, teaching a student or client to discard specific cognitive biases that may influence how they make decisions, including decisions concerning or what is not a fact or true.
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Author: Lewis Harrison is a skilled life hacker, a creative writer, and a psychonaut. An Independent Scholar and a Results-Oriented Success Coach, He has a passion for knowledge, personal development, applied game theory, self-improvement, creativity, innovation, problem-solving, and story-telling. He is a practitioner of Transmoderm Zen. You can read all of his Medium stories at [email protected].
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