An interesting article I came across brings up an interesting issue: how do we do complex thinking? Are some people just better at it? The short answer appears to be ‘no’. Instead, a couple of tools play a role, and I think it’s an interesting excursion.
The article says that our brains are limited in thinking about complex situations. Yet, experts can do this. How? The article cites metaphors as the key, grounding our thinking in models that we’ve developed from our experiences. They draw upon George Lakoff’s work on metaphor (a core aspect of my grad school experience) to explain how our understanding advances. At core, there’s a fundamental requirement that our knowledge builds upon previous knowledge, which ultimately is grounded in our physical activities.
My PhD thesis topic was thinking with analogy, which shares much with this model. The point being that we use familiar frameworks to make inferences in new areas. We map the familiar to the points in the new that match, and then we extrapolate from the familiar to explain things in the new. And using familiar models as explanatory frameworks are essentially the same process as metaphors. Metaphors tend to be more literal, with a shared point, while analogies go further, and share structure. The latter is, I’ll suggest, more useful.
Note that the frameworks are built of conceptually-related causal relationships, e.g. models. Thus, when we want to communicate models, we can detail them, but using metaphors or analogies are short-cuts. When we want someone to be able to understand, particularly to be able to use the reference as a tool to support doing, we can use them to facilitate comprehension. We want to leverage, as much as possible, pre-existing knowledge. And people aren’t necessarily great at coming up with analogies (research shows), but they’re good at using them.
Another short-cut that the article cites is diagrams. Here, we’re making visible the relationships, supporting the understanding. Equations can get specific, but conceptual understanding is facilitated by seeing the connections.
The important outcome is that we all have our cognitive limitations to overcome, but we’ve also developed powerful tools to support these limitations. To the extent we understand how these tools support learning, we can use them to help achieve the outcomes we need. We can do complex thinking, with the right tools. Are you facilitating success by leveraging these tools?
This is a nice, succinct explanation. I wonder how deciding which methods of delivery help connect the dots between metaphor, analogy and models. For example, where does VR, immersive simulations, Classroom, and eLearning work best for hands-on skills that require operating heavy machinery that is rarely available in the operation for practice.
Brandon, I reckon it has to do with the core affordances of the skills. Is it inherently 3D? Then VR. If it’s more about complex decisions in interpersonal interactions, I wouldn’t necessarily invoke the technical and cognitive overhead in VR. Classroom/elearning may be good for developing the models, but you want contextual practice. Role-plays in the classroom, world interactions through sims, and 3D constraints with VR. AR could be useful too, laying on models on top of the real world, when scaffolded practice doesn’t have too heavy a consequences, or it’s more about performance support than learning. The devil’s in the details. (This is where you’re supposed to hire me to come in and help you get this detailed out for your specific situation. ;) Thanks for the comment.
That complex thinking requires cognitive access to relevant analogies or visualizable diagrams is bang on. It relates to how concepts—complex or otherwise are represented in the brain. Now the caveat here is that no one has ever seen a concept actually mapped in the brain (because we don’t know what it would even look like); but we are getting closer.
So what we think is that ideas/concept/thoughts/pick your metaphysics are represented by transient patterns of activation across millions of synapses in specific sequences. In fact, the sequence and specific synapses may never even be the same when you “think†about an idea. However, they are spatially dependent and proximity dependent. Location and distance are expensive commodities in the brain where every signal costs energy.
With that explanation, the analogy I’ll use for analogies is that they are like taking a step off a path and walking along beside it. That requires less energy and effort than taking off perpendicular to the path or charging into a field with absolutely no paths. The neural correlate of conceptual similarity is less difference in neural patterns, less synapses that aren’t used to connecting in that way. Metaphor and analogy make complex thinking simpler by reducing the conceptual distance between the new concepts and ones that are already understood. In other words complex thinking is only complex to the degree that it is different from thoughts you’ve already had and trodden down a pathway for and therefor lack relevant metaphors to help conceptualize.
Taken to the extreme, this suggests that all thought—complex or otherwise IS metaphor and analogy. It implies that I’m watching my 6-month old sons lay down the foundational neural pathways right now on top of which all their language, thought, and behaviour will be layered. I’ll buy that.