Mental Models : How to Train Your Brain to Think in New Ways
You can train your brain to think better. One of the best ways
to do this is to expand the set of mental models you use to think.
Let me explain what I mean by sharing a story about a world-class thinker.
I first
discovered what a mental model was and how useful the right one could be while
I was reading a story about Richard Feynman, the famous physicist. Feynman received
his undergraduate degree from MIT and his Ph.D. from Princeton. During that
time, he developed a reputation for waltzing into the math department and
solving problems that the brilliant Ph.D. students couldn’t solve.
When people
asked how he did it, Feynman claimed that his secret weapon was not his
intelligence, but rather a strategy he learned in high school. According to
Feynman, his high school physics teacher asked him to stay after class one day
and gave him a challenge.
“Feynman,” the
teacher said, “you talk too much and you make too much noise. I know why.
You’re bored. So I’m going to give you a book. You go up there in the back, in
the corner, and study this book, and when you know everything that’s in this
book, you can talk again.”
So each day,
Feynman would hide in the back of the classroom and study the book—Advanced
Calculus by Woods—while the rest of the class continued with their regular
lessons. And it was while studying this old calculus textbook that Feynman
began to develop his own set of mental models.
“That book
showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign,” Feynman wrote.
“It turns out that’s not taught very much in the universities; they don’t
emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn
tool again and again. So because I was self-taught using that book, I had
peculiar methods of doing integrals.”
“The result was,
when the guys at MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a certain integral, it was
because they couldn’t do it with the standard methods they had learned in
school. If it was a contour integration, they would have found it; if it was a
simple series expansion, they would have found it. Then I come along and try
differentiating under the integral sign, and often it worked. So I got a great
reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from
everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the
problem to me.”
Every Ph.D.
student at Princeton and MIT is brilliant. What separated Feynman from his
peers wasn't necessarily raw intelligence. It was the way he saw the problem.
He had a broader set of mental models.
What is a Mental Model?
A mental model is an explanation of how something works. It is a
concept, framework, or worldview that you carry around in your mind to help you
interpret the world and understand the relationship between things. Mental
models are deeply held beliefs about how the world works.
For example, supply and demand is a mental model that helps you
understand how the economy works. Game theory is a mental model that helps you
understand how relationships and trust work. Entropy is a mental
model that helps you understand how disorder and decay work.
Mental models guide your perception and behavior. They are the
thinking tools that you use to understand life, make decisions, and solve
problems. Learning a new mental model gives you a new way to see the world—like
Richard Feynman learning a new math technique.
Mental models are imperfect, but useful. There is no single
mental model from physics or engineering, for example, that provides a flawless
explanation of the entire universe, but the best mental models from those
disciplines have allowed us to build bridges and roads, develop new
technologies, and even travel to outer space. As historian Yuval Noah Harari
puts it, “Scientists generally agree that no theory is 100 percent correct.
Thus, the real test of knowledge is not truth, but utility.”
The best mental models are the ideas with the most utility. They
are broadly useful in daily life. Understanding these concepts will help you
make wiser choices and take better actions. This is why developing a broad base
of mental models is critical for anyone interested in thinking clearly,
rationally, and effectively.
The Secret to Great Thinking and Decision Making
Expanding your
set of mental models is something experts need to work on just as much as
novices. We all have our favorite mental models, the ones we naturally default
to as an explanation for how or why something happened. As you grow older and
develop expertise in a certain area, you tend to favor the mental models that
are most familiar to you.
Here's the
problem: when a certain worldview dominates your thinking, you’ll try to
explain every problem you face through that worldview. This pitfall is
particularly easy to slip into when you're smart or talented in a given area.
The more you
master a single mental model, the more likely it becomes that this mental model
will be your downfall because you’ll start applying it indiscriminately to
every problem. What looks like expertise is often a limitation. As the common
proverb says, “If all you have is a hammer,
·
If you ask an evolutionary biologist, they might say, “The
chicken crossed the road because they saw a potential mate on the other side.”
·
If you ask a
kinesiologist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because the
muscles in the leg contracted and pulled the leg bone forward during each
step.”
·
If you ask a
neuroscientist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because the
neurons in the chicken’s brain fired and triggered the movement.”
Technically speaking, none of these experts are wrong. But
nobody is seeing the entire picture either. Each individual mental model is
just one view of reality. The challenges and situations we face in life cannot
be entirely explained by one field or industry.
All perspectives hold some truth. None of them contain the
complete truth.
Relying on a narrow set of thinking tools is like wearing a
mental straitjacket. Your cognitive range of motion is limited. When your set
of mental models is limited, so is your potential for finding a solution. In
order to unleash your full potential, you have to collect a range of mental
models. You have to build out your decision making toolbox. Thus, the secret to
great thinking is to learn and employ a variety of mental models.
Expanding Your Set of Mental Models
The process of accumulating mental models is somewhat like
improving your vision. Each eye can see something on its own. But if you cover
one of them, you lose part of the scene. It’s impossible to see the full
picture when you’re only looking through one eye.
Similarly, mental models
provide an internal picture of how the world works. We should continuously
upgrade and improve the quality of this picture. This means reading widely
from the best books,
studying the fundamentals of seemingly unrelated fields, and learning from
people with wildly different life experiences.
The mind's eye needs a variety of mental models to piece
together a complete picture of how the world works. The more sources you have
to draw upon, the clearer your thinking becomes. As the philosopher Alain de
Botton notes, “The chief enemy of good decisions is a lack of sufficient
perspectives on a problem.”
The Pursuit of Liquid Knowledge
In school, we tend to
separate knowledge into different silos—biology, economics, history, physics,
philosophy. In the real world, information is rarely divided into neatly
defined categories. In the words of Charlie Munger, “All the wisdom of the
world is not to be found in one little academic department.”
World-class thinkers are often silo-free thinkers. They avoid
looking at life through the lens of one subject. Instead, they develop “liquid
knowledge” that flows easily from one topic to the next.
This is why it is important to not only learn new mental models,
but to consider how they connect with one another. Creativity and innovation
often arise at the intersection of ideas. By spotting the links between various
mental models, you can identify solutions that most people overlook.
Tools for Thinking Better
Here's the good news:
You don't need to master every detail of every subject to become
a world-class thinker. Of all the mental models humankind has generated
throughout history, there are just a few dozen that you need to learn to have a
firm grasp of how the world works.
Many of the most important mental models are the big ideas from
disciplines like biology, chemistry, physics, economics, mathematics,
psychology, philosophy. Each field has a few mental models that form the
backbone of the topic. For example, some of the pillar mental models from
economics include ideas like Incentives, Scarcity, and Economies of Scale.
If you can master the
fundamentals of each discipline, then you can develop a remarkably accurate and
useful picture of life. To quote Charlie Munger again, “80 or 90 important
models will carry about 90 percent of the freight in making you a worldly-wise
person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy
freight.”
I've made it a personal mission to uncover the big models that
carry the heavy freight in life. After researching more than 1,000 different
mental models, I gradually narrowed it down to a few dozen that matter most.
I've written about some of them previously, like entropy and inversion, and
I'll be covering more of them in the future. If you're interested, you can
browse my slowly expanding list of mental models.
My hope is to create a list of the most important mental models
from a wide range of disciplines and explain them in a way that is not only
easy to understand, but also meaningful and practical to the daily life of the
average person. With any luck, we can all learn how to think just a little bit
better.
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