#058 DFQ

So far we have looked at PTV, how it arose and how it spread via the medieval church into the Western education system.

We saw how this truth-driven education system with its emphasis on ‘the search for certainty’ was exported to Australia and around the world, and, how your own brain may have become infected.

The Effects of PTV

If this is so, how does PTV work to inhibit your abilities as a sovereign thinker. Well, as a cognitive disease, PTV in your brain can produce a number of deleterious effects. Let’s look at just four manifestations of PTV:

• Brain Vain (opinion pride and conceit)
• Righteous and Sightless (consequence blindness)
• Space Glutton (output-mania)
• Lazy Critic (mistake-phobia)

Brain Vain

A brain vain thinker is one who is suffering from opinion pride. This PTV-infected brainuser is unable to see a better way of looking at things. Because the brain vain thinker is so proud of her or his own opinion they find it difficult to do any other kind of thinking but to defend it.

The more intelligent the brain vain thinker, the more they may suffer from this kind of cognitive conceit. Very bright thinkers who are PTV-infected may be only using their brainpower to defend their opinion. They are unable to escape from their viewpoint to look for a much better one.

Righteous and Sightless

The righteous brain is blind to consequences. PTV may have so incapacitated a True Believer that he is unable to see the results of his actions. In the belief that they are “morally right” any action is justified by the Righteous and Sightless, regardless of what follows. This is a very dangerous condition and so often fatal.

Millions have rushed headlong into death because ‘God is on our side’. Millions have been killed because they are ‘infidels’, ‘Jews’, ‘Catholics’ or ‘Protestants’. “I-am-right-and-you-are-wrong” is the hallmark of the Righteous and Sightless condition.

In 1994, John Paul II urged all Roman Catholic Cardinals to reflect on this aspect of the Church’s history. He wrote to them asking them to seize the unique beginning of the new millennium to recognise the “dark side of its history”. He asked: “How can one remain silent about the many forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the faith–wars of religion, tribunals of the Inquisition and other forms of violations of the rights of persons.”

Space Glutton

In a meeting, the space glutton always takes up considerably more than his or her fair share of airtime. Space gluttons may suffer from output mania, the inability to shut-up.

Gathering input by listening to the opinions of others is an important cognitive skill which is crippled in the space glutton. PTV may allow the thinker to wreak such enthusiasm for his or her own ideas that he or she is quite unable to listen to others.

In business, much creativity and productivity is lost in meetings due to those suffering from this condition. This condition is disastrous for those in sales or in management.

Lazy Critic

Lazy critics suffer from mistake-phobia, the morbid fear of ever making a mistake. The PTV-infected brain has an aversion to ever being wrong. It comes from our medieval habit of looking at the world through the concept of “right” and “wrong” (not shared as much by other cultures like the Chinese).

When a sovereign thinker is about to try something new, he never really knows what will happen. There is always risk and uncertainty. This risk is enough to keep the mistake-phobiac hiding in inertia. As an effective disguise the mistake-phobiac often assumes the role of ‘the critic’.

Taking pot-shots from the relative safety of his bunker of reluctance, the lazy critic simply waits for another thinker to make a mistake and then the whingeing and whining begins.

These are a few of the cognitive conditions caused by PTV, there are many others. The purpose of the School of Thinking is to help brainusers deal with these conditions by designing and offering tools they can use.

Since 1979, SOT has developed a number of tools and strategies. You can see them at the SOT Dashboard for Thinkers. For example:

• ‘thinking caps’,
• ‘brain software’ and
• ‘memeplexes’.

The Brain Software

The SOT brain software is provided in Part Two of this training which begins in the coming lessons and is for you to use at school, at work, at home and at play.

SOT Brain Software consists of a dashboard or suite of four software codes for your brain. This SOT dashboard contains 15 mind-tools. These mind-tools can be used by the brainuser in an ever-widening repertoire of combinations to produce a virtually unlimited number of effects.

The SOT neuro-software is a four-part code:

SDNT CVSTOBVS QRH PRR

Each code or acronym stands for a specific piece of brain software which will be dealt with in the following chapters.

Once it is programmed into your brain, the neuroware helps to neutralize or by-pass PTV by giving you, the brainuser, a simple way to increase your awareness of the thinking strategies that are available to you in any situation that comes your way.

DFQ #058:

Over the next 24 hours, try to notice at least one example of each of the following:
– Brain Vain (opinion pride and conceit)
– Righteous and Sightless (consequence blindness)
– Space Glutton (output-mania)
– Lazy Critic (mistake-phobia).