Problem Solving Through Digital Information Storage. Do Adaptive Thinkers Have the Edge?

Reading..still part of my life..

People don’t read much anymore. They scan and skim and digest bits and pieces and perhaps make note of things but don’t really delve into the heart of the articles and books and certainly don’t embrace the details as once happened. What does this do to our mental processing? It means that intuitive leaps are less likely to happen.

Think about the thought process as a whole. It really isn’t known exactly how we think or what fires off in your mind as you are problem solving. We know that certain synapses become more strongly bonded as we think the same thoughts over and over again, and others become weaker as we think about them less. This is demonstrated by the ability to speak multiple languages. If you have learned English as a second language, you have built a new map in your mind.

The highways and byways become strengthened as you use a language more and more, and if your native tongue falls into disuse, those pathways become less serviceable. Think of a path through a forest that was once a popular route to a destination. A different, better trail becomes available and the first path becomes overgrown. It is still usable, but you have to chop your way through the undergrowth.

This is more applicable if you learn a foreign language, live in a country that speaks that language primarily, and then you move back to your native land. The pathways of the foreign tongue dwindle and your vocabulary disappears and soon you can only speak a pidgin version. You could recapture that language if you spent the time and rebuilt the pathway — strengthened the synoptic pathways involved.

So those pathways become overgrown and the leaps to verb conjugation are now struggles instead of being intuitive. Now, imagine that instead of ever learning a foreign language you have to communicate with someone from Germany by looking up words in an English-German dictionary. This is hampered because they also are constricted by the same barrier/bridge. Add in the possibilities of mispronunciation and colloquialisms and the task becomes daunting indeed.

I’ll apologize because that was a long way to go to get to this point: aren’t we doing the same thing to ourselves by using external storage devices instead of using the gray matter between our ears? Anyone under the age of 40 is using the internet and/or computers as a means to access information without having to memorize it. Think about knowing the capital of Venezuela or the distance from the Sun to the earth. Do you know those facts off the top of your head or is it not worth memorizing? Maybe some facts aren’t worth memorizing.

What difference does it make to know the capital of a foreign country or the amount of corned beef the United States exported in 1982? Perhaps it makes no difference at all. But suppose you are trying to figure out why a process in a manufacturing plant or in a classroom doesn’t work. If you have studied classroom behavior and can do a statistical analysis on how tweaking certain factors impacts student behavior, you may be able to find a solution. But the factors you may decide to tweak have to come from somewhere.

That somewhere may be years of experience dealing with students. You have worked with cohort after cohort and you have thought about how the different classes interacted with faculty. The classes acted different ways even though the material was the same and perhaps the teaching methodology was similar. It’s the psychological profile of the group. Individuals will act different ways, but the group dynamics should be similar one group to the next. So what changes? Time of year, temperature, the teacher’s state of mind and social situation, etc, etc.

But, and here is the key, you can’t think about all of these factors unless they are in your memory to start with.

Does that sound like an obvious statement? It is and it isn’t. The problem is that many of us don’t keep information in our brain anymore. We may not even read through books that are relevant to our profession, even if they deal specifically with a situation that would be of immense help to us. We skim and take note of certain points that are made, and then we have a mental reference of where to find more information (the book, perhaps, or the author’s website or a discussion board) and we go about our day.

The danger is that we go about our lives like this and so do most people in the world. There was an interesting segment in a book by Napoleon Hill, “Think and Grow Rich,” where Hill talked about Henry Ford being put on a witness stand in a trial. Ford was asked a lot of questions and eventually he snapped. He said that he didn’t need to know the answers as long as he could access the information through experts that he kept on staff and specialists that he could call in to do consultations. Ford’s line of reasoning was that he didn’t need to clutter his mind with the information if he could access it.

But here is the downfall. Unless you have the information in your head, you cannot make intuitive leaps. You aren’t going to be accessing information in a database or on a website and intuitively jump to a different database or website and magically make two plus two equal five. That only happens when your data is stored biologically, not digitally.

So given all that (and I know even that is a lot to digest, and in our pick and choose society, not many people may bother to wade through the previous paragraphs), how does this impact people who solve problems innovatively versus people who solve problems adaptively? Does this favor one style of problem solving over another? I would propose that it does.

Quite simply put, intuitive thinking through biological data storage is more an innovative characteristic. Finding and applying pieces of data through digital storage is very much a step-by-step process and seems to favor the adaptive problem solver.

What does this mean as we move forward in time? Are the adaptive thinkers likely to have the advantage in the field of problem solving as information doubles every few years and is stored “out of brain?”

Tagged as: adaptive thinking, innovative thinking, KIA, Michael Kirton, problem solving