The person who is running says, naturally: “Do you want it ‘with thinking’ or ‘without thinking’?
When a client, a famous fashion designer, mentioned it to me, I immediately grasped the mischievousness of the expression, and the insight of popular knowledge:
– “with think” it involves thinking, and therefore the work has a higher cost.
– “without thinking” it is cheaper, because the person does his homework without applying reason.
Surely you have ever heard a certain variation of this expression when an employee says “I am not paid to think.” It occurs in the same context. And it is like this: there are people who do not like to think.
I open a fundamental question: why would someone choose to work without thinking, without applying their ability to reason, contemplate possibilities, evaluate and make decisions?
The key seems to be in the complexity of the act of thinking in our brain.
thinking is complex
The famous phrase of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, “Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people prefer to judge”, It comes to illustrate the amount of resources that the brain uses for the act of thinking, and why most people find it faster to make a judgment or give an opinion without reasoning, than to reflect and then act.
The brain is the organ that regulates the impulses of all other vital functions. It’s like the hardware in a computer, the part that runs everything else. If it fails, there will be consequences in the rest.
Continuing with the analogy, we can associate the mind with software, that is, the programs that make everything work.
As the brain works every day of life, twenty-four hours a day, the act of thinking implies that it must slow down or optimize resources to be able to carry out several functions in parallel. And this can block it, like when you think about something and you don’t find a quick answer, and even when there is a contradiction between your trace of life experiences and what you are analyzing. There is a kind of internal ‘short circuit’ at the level of reasoning, conclusions and decisions.
What is a thought and how does it occur?
But what is thought? Neuroscience explains that they are pure information circulating at a greater or lesser speed within the brain through the nerve cells that we know as neurons. We have approximately 100 billion neurons specialized in receiving and transmitting information.
It is also known that, per day, a human being has between 60,000 and 65,000 thoughts of all kinds. In turn, about 12,000 ruminant dialogues take place in the mind per day: permanent self-talk, that little voice that speaks to you sometimes in a positive way, and many others, recriminating or questioning you in the worst way.
A few years ago, a team of neuroscientists from the University of California, Berkeley, observed for the first time, live and direct, the process of a thought in the brain. The results were published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour.
They were able to see the process from what triggered that thought to the response, and they concluded that it is the prefrontal cortex part of the brain that coordinates this activity.
With electrodes in the thin outer part of the brain, they were able to observe that the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex was born there. They did the study with 16 patients with epilepsy, as part of their treatment. They were asked various tasks, from repeating a word or identifying the gender of a face, to something more complex like determining a facial emotion, or evaluating the antonym of a word.
Thus they concluded that the brain revealed four types of activity in the neurons in the process of thinking.
When the task was simple, the auditory and visual areas are activated to process these signals. And the sensory and prefrontal cortices are responsible for extracting the meaning of the stimulus.
In contrast, the study also revealed that when it comes to something to think about, with greater difficulty, for example, knowing the opposite of a word, the brain took several seconds to respond. There, various parts were activated, including memory networks, the person’s evocation of experiences, and only then did the motor cortex generate a response.
Another detail: the brain is prepared from the beginning whatever the difficulty; “This would explain why people respond even before thinking,” said neuroscientist Avgusta Shestyuk, principal investigator of the project. She commented that the cognitive process also comes into play, which are the mental operations carried out by the brain to process information.
All this, taken together, produces a thought.
The brain never stops thinking
To make sense of “with think” or “without think”, we can analyze that it is not just a matter of laziness, as many may hasten to say.
When the person is not sufficiently trained in the process of generating thoughts, analyzing and making decisions, it becomes much more complex to take it as something habitual. Instead, those accustomed to doing so decode it as part of something habitual in the brain, and thus act, generating ideas, thoughts and alternatives.
In this way, the value of thinking opens the door to new knowledge, to exploring unknown territories, expanding the frontiers of the mind and allowing one to enrich himself simply by activating the areas of thought more frequently.
5 ways to encourage thinking when we work
To make sense of the act of thinking associated with achieving better results in any area of life, including work, here are five ways to go from “without thinking” to “with thinking”:
1 – The brain thinks to know
Curiosity is a basic element of the thought process. When we are curious, we process in the mind, we investigate, we connect information and we enrich the experience of knowledge.
The point is that most of us who do it believe that what we know is what we should know. However, there is infinite uncharted territory in thinking that we do not yet know.
The simple act of facing “I don’t know” and “I know I don’t know” produces a debate in the brain, which many people choose not to think about.
The tool to add is to develop higher levels of thinking, analyze, explore and open windows to new perspectives. This achieves greater agility when thinking.
2 – Connect experiences and update them permanently
The brain is not devoid of knowledge. Even people without any kind of formal education have knowledge, because we all carry a huge baggage in the cerebral hold full of thoughts, experiences, beliefs, experiences, culture, life history.
To generate a new thought, the brain always goes through a previous one; that is to say that there is some antecedent or association, a point of reference, a trace, a consilience -in the term of neuroscience- that is the brushstroke of that experience that we have lived.
To encourage this process, I recommend exposing ourselves to unusual readings, challenges, challenges that make us reflect and think permanently; to make decisions and choose between various options. Also, that the tasks are not repetitive and monotonous, since you would literally put your thoughts to sleep.
3 – The brain does not like to be contradicted
If this function were reversed, perhaps changes and transformations would not cost us so much. The mind prefers something that confirms what it knows, instead of something that questions or contradicts it.
Therefore, the mental process prefers answers over questions, and here is the interesting aspect that it is easier to react or jump to conclusions than to ask and investigate, and then answer.
To encourage critical thinking, which stimulates diversity, contradiction and doubt as a possibility of finding better answers, a certain aspect of rebelliousness of the brain can be developed; that is, question and analyze before giving immediate answers. Inspiration, creativity and innovation are three ways to achieve it.
4 – Get out of linear thinking
Another way to train thinking is to know that, if we are left with a limited repertoire of responses, it is possible that there is a linearity such that the surprise factor does not arise, which the brain likes so much as a stimulus.
Linear thinking is when the person has only one scheme to think, a single possible answer, and does not visualize other alternatives.
Conversing with people very different from you, doing brain teasers that test your skills, striving to learn something completely new, are three ways to get out of linearity.
5 – Expand your own mental model
The mental model is the way in which each person represents the world. It is made up of beliefs, paradigms, life experiences, hereditary and biological aspects, education and the culture where it was developed, and it is activated by thinking based on that history.
The mind has several spaces, such as the conscious mind, the unconscious and the subconscious, where it is stated that impulses of emotions and feelings are generated; gives meaning to experiences.
If you manage to work on the subconscious mind, you will learn to generate other types of thoughts that will help you go faster towards the results you are looking for.
Some ways to manage and stimulate thinking is with breathing techniques, yoga, mindfulness and everything that allows attention to be focused.
With continued practice you will be able to expand the ability to think, as an essential capacity of any human being who wants to grow and develop to the fullest.
Facilitator and Master Executive Coach specialized in senior management, professionals and teams; mentor and professional communicator; international speaker; author of 32 books. LinkedIn Top Voice Latin America. Professional Coach certified by ICF at its highest level, Certified Coach and Member of the John Maxwell Team.
Source: Ambito
