Work-Related Prospection to Code Switch Between Work and ...

...people who engage in “work-related prospection”– that is, thinking and planning about the day and week ahead and the steps you need to take to achieve your career goals – tend to weather the stresses of the journey better than people whose minds wander aimlessly. This translated to greater job satisfaction throughout the day. Jachimowicz suspects that these benefits come from the fact that it eases the conflict we feel between our roles at home and our roles at work. After all, yo...

 Formalized Thinking is Non-Intuitive for Humans

Ancient scribes learned not merely to read and write, but also to use catalogues, dictionaries, calendars, forms and tables. They studied and internalised techniques of cataloguing, retrieving and processing information very di

 Teacher Approval Ends Discussion

After years of classroom research, Dillon (1988) concluded that teacher interventions during student discussions tend to shut down student thinking and student talk. He found this to be particularly true of positive feedback or praise. The rationale, of course, is that when a teacher communicates agreement with one student’s thinking, both the speaker and other classmates conclude that there is no need for further thought because the teacher has gotten the answer he or she was after.

 Trust in Truth

TRUST IN TRUTH Understanding, accepting, and knowing how to effectively deal with reality are crucial for achieving success. Having truth on your side is extremely powerful. While the truth itself may be scary—you have a weakness, you have a deadly disease, etc.—knowing the truth will allow you to deal with your situation better. Being truthful, and letting others be truthful with you, allows you to explore your own thoughts and exposes you to the feedback that is essential for your lear...

 What Is Learning?

Learning is very difficult to define. It is the matter of our minds, and includes thinking, becoming aware, imagining, seeing, hearing, hoping, remembering, abstracting, planning, and problem solving (Malone, 1991). Learning is deep in our species, emerging from our desire to take in new information by actively exploring new territory. Learning is a physical phenomenon, occurring in the sensory systems, as energy from light waves and vibrations in the air is converted into electrical impulses...

 Five Talk Moves

Move 1. Repeating When a student says something that a teacher or student thinks is important, one way to highlight it is to repeat it. A teacher might ask, "Who can repeat what Mia just said?" Repeating helps confirm that what the speaker said is what the listener heard, and it lets the speaker know that he or she was heard—and that it matters. It enables teachers to highlight an idea that's central to the discussion. Moreover, hearing the idea again, or multiple times, helps students lear...

 Opinion is Not Necessarily a Good Thing

We live in a civilization that believes that opinion per se is good. This can be seen in the very derivation of the word, which comes from the Latin opinari, meaning to think. It is a fundamental tenet of our civilization that thinking is good, a noble process which is one of the few things separating us from the base animal world. I too believe that thinking is a noble calling and that it is necessary to have opinions for the sake of the kind of thinking that can lead us to a better world. ...

 Against Mindfulness

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

 Humans Are Abstraction Masters

What distinguishes us from cavemen is the level of abstraction we can reach. Abstraction enabled humans to move from barter to money, and from gold coins to plastic cards. These days, what's left of "money" is often just an account record we read on a computer screen, and soon it could just be a line of code in a bitcoin ledger. Today, abstraction is all around us — and math is the language of abstraction. In the words of the great mathematician Henri Poincare, mathematics is valuable beca...

 The Century of Biology

The century of biology upon which we are now well embarked is no matter of trivialities. It is a movement of really heroic dimensions, one of the great episodes in man's intellectual history. The scientists who are carrying the movement forward talk in terms of nucleo-proteins, of ultracentrifuges, of biochemical genetics, of electrophoresis, of the electron microscope, of molecular morphology, of radioactive isotopes. But do not be fooled into thinking this is mere gadgetry. This is the depe...