#041 DFQ – Cognitive Science

Just imagine that you owned the best music system that you could get your hands on.

Imagine that you paid for a great amplifier and a DVD player plus great surround-sound speakers and you could now boast that you owned the best music hardware system in your street, maybe even the best in your town.

Now, imagine you only had one solitary Patsy Cline CD to play on your music hardware. There’s nothing wrong with Patsy but a narrow diet of I Fall To Pieces and Your Cheatin’ Heart may be somewhat limiting when it comes to long term music entertainment.

These same limitations face us when we boast possession of a necktop computer – a brain – yet only have one piece of thinking software, logic.

In your necktop computer, logic is useful enough for labelling and mail-sorting and dealing with the past but it’s not nearly enough to help you cope with the challenges of the future.

We do need some more software for our brain to help us survive in a rapidly changing environments and increasingly competitive and shrinking global markets. We also need more brain software because we’re not happy being stuck with what we have at present.

Brainpower and Intelligence
Brainpower is how you use tools, like software, to enhance your intelligence. These tools are higher-order cognitive tools that help us think about what we should think about. Sometimes this ‘thinking about thinking’ is called by cognitive scientists, metacognition.

There are two main types of intelligences: Data Intelligence and Game Intelligence.

– Data Intelligence is the role that information plays in thinking.

– Game Intelligence is the role of strategies, clever moves, clever ideas, ploys and tricks that are the product of thinking about and exploring the information.

Data Intelligence is only necessary for the relatively dumb, unthinking reaction to situations – What do I do next? Game Intelligence goes a step further where the individual asks himself, What do I think about next? before asking What do I do next?

Brain software is a mind tool which permits the brainuser to go a step even further by allowing him or her to ask, How do I think better about what I should think about next?

Apps for Intelligence — ET 3
Let’s start with the third and most recent method of English Thinking, apps for intelligence or ET3. Tools and apps are important for intelligence. Tools, like an iPad or iPhone with their expanding extravaganza of apps, are not just the result of intelligence but they actually ENDOW intelligence on the user.

When you give someone a laptop or an iPad app you increase or enhance their chance at arriving at more intelligent move

Anthropologists have long recognised that the advent of tool use accompanied a major increase in intelligence, observes Daniel Dennett, Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and author of Consciousness Explained. Commenting on the value of mind-tools in developing the user’s intelligence Professor Dennett goes on to say:

“Tool use is a two-way sign of intelligence. Not only does it require intelligence to recognise and maintain a tool, but tool use CONFERS intelligence on those who are lucky enough to be given the tool. The better designed the tool the more potential
intelligence it confers on the user.”

Cognitive Science
Since the explosion of the Information Revolution and the rise of personal computers, we’ve become even more interested in the brain and how it works. What is intelligence? and How can we improve it? are questions being asked in a whole new field of science devoted to these things called — cognitive science.

Cognitive science is concerned with neuroplasticity and the processes of sensing (seeing, hearing, smelling); storing information (memory) and recall; reasoning, planning and intelligent action. It also includes areas like AI (Artificial Intelligence) and robotics. In other words – thinking – both in animals and machines.

Like all human traits – height, strength, sexuality and looks etc – intelligence is distributed unequally. Some people have more intelligence than you do and some have less than you do and, of course, the same applies to me.

Brain software for better thinking
In the coming lessons you will acquire all 4 new codes of software for your brain that you can immediately use to get better personal results at school, at home and at work – and also at sports.

In these COMING lessons you will acquire and be drilled in the SOT’s universal brain software also known as The Switch:

Current View of Situation (SWITCH TO) Better View of Situation

OR

cvs2bvs

This is the basic brain software taught by SOT which can be stated in ten keystrokes as cvsx10=bvs and was once described by Jack Welch of GE as “the simplest idea in the world”.

DFQ #041:

Copy and paste the one sentence from this lesson that you will think more about today.