Synopses & Reviews
This book about thinking presents readers with a systematic, practical, and friendly approach that encompasses all fields of study and business. It explores a valuable skill that will inspire and enlarge people's ability to think through life. Chapter topics cover what thinking is, personal barriers, sensing, brain and memory, language, feeling, creative thinking, organizing, logical thinking, scientific thinking, persuasive thinking, problem solving, evaluating, decision and action, and the challenge to go on thinking. They draw ideas on thinking from every period of history–from the philosophers, poets, scientists, psychologists, linguists, and neuroscientists. For thinkers of the new millenium.
Table of Contents
1 What Is Thinking?
OUR CULTURAL LEGACY
WHY THINK?
THINKING ACTIVITY 1.1: Things More Important Than Thinking
Thoughts Richer Than Gold
Thinking as Possibility
Thoughts Accumulate
Life Without Thinking
WHAT IS THINKING?
The Mystery
Toward a Definition: Thinking as Communicating
BOX: The Centrality of Thinking
COMMUNICATING: THE MIRROR OF THOUGHT
Thinking as Writing: Clarity, Exactness, Awareness, Richness
THINKING ACTIVITY 1.2: Thinking, Sensing, Writing
Thinking as Dialogue: Validation and Insight
MISTHINKING
SUMMARY
THINKING CHALLENGES
2 Personal Barriers
ENCULTURATION
Sources of Enculturation
BOX: Some Common American Beliefs
Religion and Enculturation
BOX: Spinoza: A Man of Reason
THINKING ACTIVITY 2.1: Our Own Enculturation
SELF-CONCEPT
THINKING ACTIVITY 2.2: The Idea of Self
THINKING ACTIVITY 2.3: Letting Go
EGO DEFENSES
Denial
Projection
Rationalization
SELF-SERVING BIASES
BOX: Other Attribution Errors
BOX: Self-Serving Biases?
THINKING ACTIVITY 2.4: Owning Up to Our Dark Side
THE ROLE OF EXPECTATIONS AND SCHEMATA
EMOTIONAL INFLUENCES
Anger
Passion
Depression
THINKING ACTIVITY 2.5: Five Thinking Errors
STRIVING FOR COGNITIVE CONSISTENCY
STRESS
BOX: Signs and Symptoms of Stress
Stress Management
THINKING ACTIVITY 2.6: Five Ways to Prevent Stress
SUMMARY
BARRIER CHALLENGES
3 Sensing
SENSUAL BEGINNINGS
THE POWER OF OUR SENSES
THE DECEPTION OF OUR SENSES
THINKING ACTIVITY 3.1: Ideas: Innate or Learned?
THINKING ACTIVITY 3.2: Our Personal Sense Deceptions
SHARPENING OUR SENSES
THINKING ACTIVITY 3.3: Seeing Anew
POWERFUL LISTENING
The Paradox of Powerful Listening
How to Listen
THINKING ACTIVITY 3.4: Developing an Action Plan
SUMMARY
SENSING AND THINKING CHALLENGES
4 Brain and Memory
THE MYSTERY
THINKING AND OUR BRAIN
THINKING ACTIVITY 4.1: An Exercise in Mental Discipline
Food and Drugs
Sleep
THINKING ACTIVITY 4.2: Critical Reading Before We Sleep
Our Thinking Potential
BOX: Brain and Mind
THINKING AND MEMORY
The Changing Nature of Memory
THINKING ACTIVITY 4.3: Memories of Childhood
Forgetting
BOX: Recall versus Recognition
Why We Forget
How to Improve Memory
THINKING ACTIVITY 4.4: Using Mnemonics
BOX: Memory Pills
SUMMARY
BRAIN AND MEMORY CHALLENGES
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