Why So Stupid?

How the Human Race has Never Really Learned to Think

By: Edward De Bono

This book was totally disjointed, jumping around continuously. If this is thinking, I’m happy with my way, thank you.

Following are ‘The Good Points’:

You can analyze the past but you have to design the future.

Humour is by far the most significant behavior of the human brain. Humor tells us more about how the brain works than any other human activity.

The Gang of Three was Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The Renaissance rep-introduced into Europe and Western Civilization, the thinking of the Greek Gang of Three. This then became the standard ‘software’ of Western thinking and has remained so to this day.

The human brain is designed to form standard patterns for dealing with a stable world. The Gang of Three thinking emphasizes and enhances this natural behavior of the brain.

One day a fellow set his computer to figure out all the different ways of getting dressed with eleven pieces of clothing. The computer took forty hours of continuous processing. The total combinations with eleven pieces of clothing are 39,916,800 ways of getting dressed.

The brain is a ‘Self-Organizing’ Information System. This means that incoming information organizes itself into patterns, which form in our brain and determine our future perceptions.

To challenge our traditional concept of ‘truth’ does not mean that one is therefore in favour of ‘untruth’.

Perception is undoubtedly the biggest source of false truth. The trouble is that many different perceptions may all be equally right, valid or true. The danger is that those who hold one perception as true are reluctant to accept the possible truth of other perceptions.

‘Description Truth’ has always been extremely dangerous as a form of perceptual truth. There is no limit to the variety of descriptions and all of them are ‘true’ in the sense that they are valid.

There is a very big difference between description and action. Unfortunately, most of our attention to thinking has been in the form of description, analysis, reflection and philosophical examination. None of these approaches provide simple, practical and effective operational tools for thinking.

The big difference between ‘Parallel Thinking’ and ‘Adversarial Thinking’ (argument) is that at any moment every one is thinking parallel.

There is no mystery at all about ‘Idea Creativity’, which can be produced deliberately by using methods based on the behavior of a self-organizing information system that makes asymmetric patterns. There is close system relationship between humor and lateral thinking.

Every valuable creative idea will always be logical in hindsight. This is why we have never paid serious attention to creativity.

If 95% of an idea is valid but 5% is more doubtful, we focus on that 5%. If we did so in order to improve the idea by attention to that weak 5%, then that would be valuable. We do not do this. We focus on the 5% to suggest that if this 5% is weak then the whole idea is worthless.

We need simple ways of dealing with complexity rather than complex ways of dealing with simplicity.

‘Hodics’ is the study of paths and patterns. A challenge to the concept of cause and effect: because B follows A does not mean that A has caused B.