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I am right, You are wrong (a view of our brains at work)

From this to the new renaissance: From rock logic to water logic

By Edward de Bono

• Table of Contents
  • Preliminary
    • Foreword by Ivar Giaever , Nobel Prize for Physics, Rensselaer Institute ix
    • Foreword by Brian Josephson , Nobel Prize for Physics, Cambridge xiii
    • Foreword by Sheldon Lee Glashow , Nobel Prize for Physics, Harvard xv
    • Author's Note xix
    • Introduction: The New Renaissance 1
  • OUR THINKING SYSTEM 33
    • Human Affairs 38
    • Perception 42
    • Humour 45
    • Practical Outcomes 46
  • THE HUMAN BRAIN 49
    • Validity of the Model 54
    • Different Universes 59
    • Traditional Table-Top Logic 64
    • The Nerve Network of the Brain 67
  • HOW PERCEPTION WORKS 75
    • Sequence Patterns 81
    • Trigger and Reconstruction 83
    • Asymmetry of Patterns 86
    • Insight 93
    • Learning Backwards 96
    • Time Sequence 98
    • Catchment 100
    • Knife-Edge Discrimination 108
    • Preemption 112
    • Mismatch 114
    • Readiness 116
    • Context 120
    • Circularity 126
    • Making Sense 131
    • Attention 135
    • Relevance and Meaning 138
    • Zero-Hold 141
  • OUR TRADITIONAL THINKING HABITS 145
    • Language 152
    • Thinking and Intelligence 159
    • Critical Thinking 164
    • Laffer Curves 168 :
    • Problem-Solving 172
    • Analysis 176
    • Description 182
    • Natural 187
    • Mathematics 190
    • Either/Or 194
    • Absolutes 198
    • Argument and Clash 204
    • Belief 211
    • Science 213
    • Creativity 217
    • History 220
    • Logic 223
    • Art 227 :
  • THINKING IN SOCIETY AND ITS INSTITUTIONS 231
    • Change 236
    • The Next Step 241
    • Full Up 244
    • Education 246
    • Ludecy 249
    • Short-Term Thinking 252
    • Democracy 254
    • Pragmatism 257
    • Bureaucracy 260
    • Compartments 262
    • Universities 264
    • Communication 266
    • Packaging 268
  • SUMMARY OF PRACTICAL OUTCOMES 269
  • SUMMARY 287
  • APPENDIX: WATER LOGIC 290
    • Hodics 293
• Our thinking system
  • Some of the topics that are covered in this book are listed below:
  • Why humour is the most significant characteristic of the human brain and why humour has always been neglected by classical philosophers.
  • Why, contrary to our traditional view, the brain may be a very simple mechanism acting in a highly complex way.
  • The very important difference between our usual 'passive' information systems and 'active' information systems.
  • Why the very excellence of language for description has made language so crude and inefficient for perception.
  • Why we are able to see only what we are prepared to see.
  • Why it may be much easier to learn things backwards rather than forwards.
  • How patterns have both broad catchment areas and also knife-edge discrimination.
  • Why the classical thinking traditions of truth and reason that we inherited from the Greeks may have set civilization on the wrong track.
  • How we became, and remain, so very obsessed with history.
  • Why I call our traditional reasoning 'table-top' logic.
  • How we can have been so successful in technical matters and yet made so little progress in human affairs.
  • Why the analysis of data cannot by itself produce new ideas and is even unlikely to discover the old ideas in the data.
  • How we can move from the behaviour of a neurone in a neural network to the behaviour of the mind in politics, economics and world conflict.
  • How we can have a patterning system and yet enjoy free-will.
  • Why we have completely failed to understand creativity and why something that is logical in hindsight may be inaccessible to logic in foresight.
  • Why logical argument has never been successful at changing prejudices, beliefs, emotions or perceptions. Why these things can be changed only through perception.
  • How beliefs are cheap and easy to set up in a self-organizing system and how they provide the only perceptual truth.
  • How traditional logic has trapped us with the righteousness of its absolutes.
  • How we can design specific creative tools that can be used deliberately to generate new ideas.
  • Why there may not be a reason for saying something until after it has been said - the logic of provocation which is mathematically necessary in a patterning system.
  • How a simple, randomly obtained, word can be so powerful a creative tool.
  • Why there is an urgent need to create many new words to help our thinking.
  • Why there is a need for the functions (such as zero-hold) carried by the new word ' po '.
  • Why the established scientific method and its call for the most 'reasonable' hypothesis is perceptually faulty.
  • How the Laffer curve (more is better) is such a problem in our traditional thinking.
  • Why our cherished argument mode sets out to provide motivated exploration of a subject but soon loses the 'exploration'.
  • Why our underlying model of progress - evolution through muddling along - is bound to be ineffective.
  • Why philosophy can never again be more than a word-game unless we take into account the system behaviour of the human mind.
  • Why the false dichotomies we constructed in order to operate the logic principle of contradiction have been so especially disastrous.
  • Why poetry and humour both illustrate so well the logic of perception, which is different from the logic of reason.
  • Why we left perception to the realm of art and why art has done such a poor job.
  • Why truth is best described as a particular constellation of circumstances with a particular outcome.
  • How we may eventually derive a new ideology from information technology just as Karl Marx derived one from the steam-engine technology of the industrial revolution.
• Summary of Practical Outcomes
  • At this point we have reached the end of a progression which had the following stages:
    • 1. A look at the self-organizing model of the brain and a contrast between self-organizing information systems and table-top systems.
    • 2. A look at how the behavior of perception arises directly from the behavior of self-organizing systems.
    • 3. A look at the impact of an understanding of perception on our traditional thinking habits and their defects.
    • 4. A look at thinking in society and its institutions.
  • I would now like to pull together and summarize in this section some of the practical outcomes of this exercise.
    
    There are many, ranging from the very specific (such as creativity tools) to the more general (such as concern with the deficiencies of language). Some of the points are simple but others open up huge areas of further consideration. To repeat a point I have so often made in this book, I have not set out to provide all the answers but to indicate that these matters now need very serious attention. There are other points implicit in the book which I have not listed here but which individual readers will note and consider.
    
    
    • The practical outcomes fall into two broad areas:
      • 1. Practical points arising directly from our understanding of the nature of perception.
      • 2. Defects in our traditional thinking habits made visible by our understanding of perception.

Humour is by far the most significant behaviour of the human mind.

You may find this surprising. If humour is so very significant, why has it been so neglected by traditional philosophers, psychologists and information scientists?

Why humour is so significant and why it has been so neglected by traditional thinkers together form the key to this book. Humour tells us more about how the brain works as mind, than does any other behaviour of the mind—including reason. It indicates that our traditional thinking methods, and our thinking about these methods, have been based on the wrong model of information system. It tells us something about perception which we have traditionally neglected in favour of logic. It tells us directly about the possibility of changes in perception. It shows us that these changes can be followed by instant changes in emotion—something that can never be achieved by logic.

There are probably no more than two dozen people in the whole world who would really understand (at the most fundamental, system level of brain mechanisms) why I claim such significance for humour. After reading this book there may be some more who come to understand the basis for the claim—and its implications for the future of society.