Perception
July 2, 2009 by iainchalmers
Edward de Bono’s Message
It is not possible to pay attention to everything at once. In a market there are different stalls so that you need only pay attention to one thing – once you have chosen that thing.
The CoRT programme so widely used in schools provides frameworks for directing attention. It is incredible that education has never realised that attention and perception are a much more important part of thinking than logic. Yet such things are completely absent in education.
Many years ago, David Perkins at Harvard showed that ninety per cent of errors of thinking were errors of perception. Goedel’s theorem shows how from within a system you can never logically prove the starting points – which remain arbitrary perceptions.
Again it may be that the Church influence on thinking neglected perception because in Church thinking matters of faith replaced actual perception.
In agreeing with the essence of De Bono’s blog I suggest that FEAR plays as big a part in misdirecting religiously bent perceptions.
This is not new.
Anyone with half of an intact brain, especially anyone who has experienced fear at the hands of others, knows that our modern day failures have been caused or brought about by fear.
So, over the ages, threat has been promoted by politicians and religious leaders alike – to ends which may not necessarily benefit the populous. Have recent events changed that fact?
Even in world of education, POWER remains the major threat to vital change.
How we educate our leaders is therefore the key. Again, we need applied Ghandi thinking.
In Iran, if we are to learn best what needs to be learned, we must observe the power of the voice of the people. They’ve done it before, with the Shar …and we’ve done it with Obama – for that was surely the result of international pressure of the mass voice – reaching in to a badly informed, self interested, previously poorly informed USA. The positives of Iraq? That!
If we are to arrive at a mutually acceptable vantage, a perception we can all share and agree to follow, like a plane endlessly adjusting its direction on a planned journey in which the perspective constantly changes, then we, in the creative thinking industries’, need a louder voice, accurate data on which to reinforce our view of the perspective…then movement, as a supportive and supported front, towards the drop off point.
Simply, we need to fly our ships so that they no longer keep returning to port, so continuing on our better guided voyage of discovery and application. That way lies the real change we seek.