Forms of Thinking

CONNECTEDNESS Looking at forms of thinking as well as contents of thinking – or thoughts – is essential if we are to change or improve how we think. The forms of thinking are the ways in which we put thoughts together. If we only use a linear form, we can only get linear thinking. So the widespread practice of writing and making presentations is pretty restrictive. Thoughts put into a line soon become separated, so we lose sight of connections. Using lists, bullet points, flip charts and Power Point presentation formats tends to fix our thinking onto tramlines, and has been brilliantly criticized by Edward de Bono and others. There is a relation between what we can do to put our thoughts together on paper and how we can think. The medium of expression is not neutral. We can imagine a kind of thought in which every idea is linked to every other in a way specific to each linkage, all at once. This would be impossible on paper. Yet by a very simple step, we can radically improve our situation. This step is just to make use of the two dimensions of surfaces and learn how to read in both horizontal and vertical ways at once. Rich forms of expression such as poetry actually make use of this potential, but it can be put to use by anyone willing to make the experiment of writing and reading in two dimensions. There is a relation between what we can put onto paper and what we can think. They are not identical, because there are ‘hidden dimensions’ inside our minds that may never become outwardly visible. But the more we can represent outwardly to ourselves, the more deeply we can go into what it means. If we have just a line to think along, the best we can do is to contrast and correlate two ideas. We do this when we make tables or columns, typically with the ‘lesser’ on one side and the ‘greater’ on the other, or the ‘negative’ and the ‘positive’, or simply the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ and so on.