sn't it strange? And isn't it even stranger when critical thinking has been mentioned over the last decades as one of the most important human competences for our future as humanity, as something that differentiates us from machines and gives us a competitive advantage over all non-human devices?
When we know that we are emotional beings and that we inhabit a world that has been programmed to fire messages addressed to our hearts, isn't it urgent to stop and think about how we think?
And what changes in our thinking process when we learn that fake news spread 70% faster than real news and reaches many more people as scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) concluded in 2018? And that each true publication reaches an average of a thousand people, while the most popular fake publications reach between a thousand and a hundred thousand people? And I wonder what's so fascinating about fake news that we don't find in real news?
Why do we devote so little time in our lives to developing a human skill that helps us to be truly free, able to reason and think for our own head?
Is it because we want to avoid the discomfort of thinking? And are we just confirming what the Universities of Virginia and Harvard concluded in 2014 that humans derive greater satisfaction from doing than from thinking? That we'd rather give ourselves electrical charges than get 15 minutes alone with ourselves and our thoughts?
Or is it because we believe that it is not possible to teach someone to think? Is it that we can't teach anyone to ask better questions? To understand our unconscious biases that prevent us from making the best choices? Do we not have to think better about everything we believe in?
Apart from better understanding to what is happening around us, what we read or what we hear, do we really know what we gain when we learn to think? Do we know if we learn more and better because we ask more questions and improve our learning strategies? Do we discover our human imbalances and missing pieces because we get to know ourselves and others better? Do we come to make better judgements and express more sustained opinions because we question our beliefs? Can we find more creative solutions to our problems?
And why does critical thinking make us more creative? Is it because it helps us look for relevant information and structure it better? Or is it because it makes us more reasonable? But isn't creativity the opposite? Thinking in an illogical way? So where does this magic that links critical thinking to creativity come from?
Wouldn't we all think better if we stopped to ask the hard questions and weren't so obsessed with chasing the easy answers?
Mirror mine, mirror on the wall... why didn't I discover earlier that my power is far greater than yours?
This is a republication of an article published by Rock In Rio Humanorama - Read the original article here
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