When people come together there is more opportunity for shared wisdom and the construction of practical new possibilities.  It makes sense that the introduction of 18^th century coffeehouses in England and salons in France drew human beings together to share and grow their wisdom in an era forever called the Enlightenment.  This was powerful stuff. Fresh thinking from this era led to the American Revolution and soon thereafter, the French Revolution.

Today, we still see this kind of collaborative thinking in all-too-obscure international organizations like Rotary which has been credited for thinking about – and then eradicating – polio around the world.  We also see extraordinary degrees of intellectual collaboration in places like the European  Center for Nuclear Research, CERN, where 10,000 scientists and technicians from nearly 100 countries share the joy derived from thinking about how to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos – then doing it. Their discoveries will undoubtedly contribute to a better life for all of us.

The problem is that over time we have turned from developing free thinking in groups about what is possible and instead, save for pockets of scientific investigation, trained the mind how not-to-think and to do so in isolation.  Rather than think as a groups, we learn  to follow rules and to memorize things as individuals.  This type of general non-thinking training has been taking place in the West for over 2,000 years.

Worse, when we are about 21 years old, when the brighter among us graduate from college, society says we can stop whatever form learning that we have undertaken. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics opines that half of what we learn is obsolete in 36 months, this is pretty dangerous.

And, it gets worse.  When the mind stops learning, it starts cognitive decline.  So, even the obsolete tricks do not work as well.

So now it is time to stop this approach to facing the world’s issues.  So let’s begin.

However it occurs, improved thinking requires two attributes.  The first attribute is an expansion of an individual’s knowledge base, or memories.  The second attribute is the ability for the brain to link elements in the knowledge base in novel ways.  This is similar to the use of hyperlinks in the World Wide Web.  Hyperlinks in the World Wide Web link databases of information (digital memories) distributed throughout the world.  Modern search engines sort through and then bring together information from the relevant databases in a literal heartbeat.

In effect, the brain also employs hyperlinks to link distributed pockets of information.  Even as you look at the word ‘information’, the ‘i’, ‘n’, ‘f’ etc. are stored in different hyper-linked locations in the cortex and are pulled together on demand to form the word ‘information’.  Other cognitive mechanisms examine context and ultimately give the word its meaning.  When several hyperlinks are amalgamated by the brain’s circuitry we have a new idea.

The very good news is that the brain is designed to not only acquired and use data through hyperlinks to databases owned in the mind of an individual but also data bases stored in the minds of other human beings.  When this kind of information is shared between humans the brain issues a pleasant reward.  That reward is a shot of dopamine and a feeling of profound pleasure.  It is this reward, the feeling of pleasure, which draws people together as occurred during the enlightenment in the 18th century. This collectivization of information has been a key to the growth of human civilization and continues to be essential for our survival today. .

We do not understand thinking. Thinking is not taught in the classroom.  There are no adult educational courses on thinking, few books have been written about thinking and so forth.  Yet it’s something that we have to be able to do well.  So what do we do?

Fortunately the brain is designed to think. After all, that is how human beings have blossomed.

We are just unraveling the mysteries of thinking – and the news is good.  For example, one of the long-standing paradigms of thinking is that dramatic ideas appear to a chosen few why have a mystical and sudden ‘aha’ experience.  That is to say, brilliant thoughts suddenly appear to the inspired in a flash of blinding light.  This belief is typified by Archimedes’ alleged joyous running down the street naked with sudden insights into what we now call specific gravity.  Inasmuch as few of us get these blinding inspirations, we assume we are not good thinkers. This belief is wrong and because it dissuades people from thinking, it is pretty harmful.

Of course it’s true that we all get sudden insights.  The reality is that most brilliant thoughts come over time from social groups who link together a bunch of subordinated hunches. Here are two truths.

While inspiration can manifest suddenly, most of the thinking behind the inspiration percolates the idea over a considerable amount of time. Darwin pieced together his theory of evolution during years of thinking and discovery  on the Beagle.

Thinking also benefits from a cooperative, collective brain. Einstein stood on and among the shoulders of many who preceded him (Maxwell) and worked with him (Bohr).  At that, his ideas took a lot of time to crystallize. Einstein followed a hunch after lunch most of which, (Einstein wrote 99% of which) were dead ends.  In fact, it took Einstein ten years to move from his theory of special relativity (1905) to general relativity (1915).

There are about a dozen other pivotal issues which threaten our species.  Here is jost one – albeit a big one.

About 2 billion humans live in dire poverty with daily incomes not sufficient to purchase one Starbucks’ latte.  This horrible circumstance becomes even more grave in the face of a population boom which will see another 2 to 3 billion people added to the planet’s population in the next 40 years or so. Most will appear on equatorial Africa.

The minimal projected increment of 2 billion people is greater than the total number of people that were on the planet just 2,000 years ago. Going further forward in time, left unchecked, in another 2,000 years the biomass of human beings on the planet would be greater than the mass of the planet itself.

Most humans on the planet will want to enjoy the same prosperity that Americans do. To do this, the forecasted earth population of at least 9 billion people would have to be reduced to 4 billion people – one way or another.  That would be genocide for about 5 billion people.

The planet simply does not have the resources to support this forecast of population growth.  We need to stop the growth in our species – something no species has ever consciously done.

This is one of several serious problems.  We need to think about solutions which are sensible and which can be practically implemented.  This gets us back to the fundamental problem that we do not know how to think.

The secrets to thinking are being unveiled on a daily basis by new technologies available to neuroscientists.  Much of the new discovery relates to the brain’s neural plasticity and the ability of humans to manage not only the development of new, sophisticated neural networks but also to control the busy soup of supporting neurochemicals, brain waves and glial cell activity.

Dr. Edward de Bono is a medical doctor and an Oxford PhD-trained psychologist.  He is also a prolific author and the world’s foremost expert on thinking.  While Dr. de Bono notes how important it is that we are able to think well, he also correctly points out that we humans do not know how to think. This is very troublesome given the problems that our world faces.

There is bad news in all of this.  As reported in Jared Diamond’s unnerving book, Collapse, the treacherous dilemma is that because we have forsaken our ability to think, we often fail to anticipate problems.  Worse, when problems appear we don’t recognize them.  And finally when we do identify them we do not react properly.  For example, scientists have been warning us about the potential consequences of climate change for over a decade.  The carbon dioxide level in the air and in the ocean is suddenly higher than it has been for millions of years.  Still worse – on a geological timeline 10,000 years is considered an instant.  This shocking climate variation has happened in less than 100 years – a tiny fraction of a tiny amount of time.  And, we do not have the will as a species to save ourselves.

The bottom line is that we have about five years to positively or negatively change the destiny of our planet.  Yet even with climate change clearly upon us and quite palpable, we are not doing very much about it.  And, as if things couldn’t get worse, they may.