Outside highly technical matters, perception is the most important part of thinking. Perception is how we look at the world. What things we take into account. How we structure the world.
Professor David Perkins at Harvard has shown that almost all the errors of thinking are errors of perception. In real life logical errors are quite rare. Yet we persist in believing that thinking is all a matter of avoiding logical errors.
In the early days of computing there was a simple acronym GIGO. This stood for: Garbage In Garbage Out. This means that even if the computer is working flawlessly then what you got out was rubbish if what you put in was rubbish.
Exactly the same thing applies to logic. If your perception is limited then flawless logic will give you an incorrect answer.
Bad logic makes for bad thinking. Everyone would agree with that. But the opposite is not true at all. Good logic does not make for good thinking. If the perception is poor then good logic will give you a faulty answer. There is even the added danger that good logic will give a false arrogance with which to hold the false answer.
Unlike most books on thinking, this book is not about logic but about perception.
It now seems very likely that perception works as a ‘self-organizing information system’ (see the books The Mechanism of Mind and I Am Right You Are Wrong). Such systems allow the sequence in which information arrives to set up patterns. Our thinking then remains trapped within these patterns. So we need some ways of broadening perception and of changing perception (creativity). These are the kinds of matters which are covered in this book.
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Passage taken from: “de Bono’s Thinking Course”, by Edward de Bono, ISBN 0563 37073 4 Copyright © MICA Management Resources 1982, 1985, 1994
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