Cognitive Flexibility Quotes

Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.

Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought,

Seemingly innocuous language like 'Oh, I'm flexible' or 'What do you want to do tonight?' has a dark computational underbelly that should make you think twice. It has the veneer of kindness about it, but it does two deeply alarming things. First, it passes the cognitive buck: 'Here's a problem, you handle it.' Second, by not stating your preferences, it invites the others to simulate or imagine them. And as we have seen, the simulation of the minds of others is one of the biggest computational challenges a mind (or machine) can ever face.

Cognitive flexibility is an important executive function that reflects our ability to shift thinking and to produce a steady flow of creative thoughts and answers as opposed to a regurgitation of the usual responses. The trait correlates with high-performance levels in intellectually demanding jobs. So if you have an important afternoon brainstorming session scheduled, going for a short, intense run during lunchtime is a smart idea.

Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.

Focus is one of the main pillars of self-discipline; a person who lacks the ability to focus is almost certainly one who will also lack discipline. Focus itself is dependent on something that neuroscientists call executive functions. The three executive functions that we are most concerned with when it comes to being disciplined are working memory, impulse control, and cognitive flexibility and adaptability. You can see why they are aptly named the executive functions. Your brain has to be able to set and pursue goals, prioritize activities, filter distractions, and control unhelpful inhibitions.

Professor Adam Galinsky, an American social psychologist who has studied the connection between creativity and international travel, says that ‘Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms.’1

Design thinking is about cognitive flexibility, the ability to adapt the process to the challenges.

Exposure to the modern world has made us better adapted to complexity, and that has manifested in flexibility, with profound implications for the breadth of our intellectual world. In every cognitive direction, the minds of premodern citizens were severely constrained by the concrete world before them.

hope is not an emotion; it’s a way of thinking or a cognitive process. Emotions play a supporting role, but hope is really a thought process made up of what Snyder calls a trilogy of goals, pathways, and agency.4 In very simple terms, hope happens when We have the ability to set realistic goals (I know where I want to go). We are able to figure out how to achieve those goals, including the ability to stay flexible and develop alternative routes (I know how to get there, I’m persistent, and I can tolerate disappointment and try again). We believe in ourselves (I can do this!).

In fact, one of Gopnik’s most important arguments is that this cognitive flexibility and creativity is a design feature of youth. She and her colleagues review evidence that suggests that when it comes to novel learning tasks, the young of many species often outperform their elders.20 This is certainly true of humans.

Two Dimensions of Executive Skills: Thinking and Doing Executive skills involving thinking (cognition) Working memory Planning/prioritization Organization Time management Metacognition Executive skills involving doing (behavior) Response inhibition Emotional control Sustained attention Task initiation Goal-directed persistence Flexibility

ACT uses acceptance and mindfulness processes and commitment and behavioral activation processes to produce psychological flexibility. It seeks to bring human language and cognition under better contextual control so as to overcome the repertoire-narrowing effects of an excessive reliance on a problem-solving mode of mind as well as to promote a more open, centered, and engaged approach to living.

Human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own limits. The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities.

exposure to modern work with self-directed problem solving and nonrepetitive challenges was correlated with being “cognitively flexible.” As Flynn makes sure to point out, this does not mean that brains now have more inherent potential than a generation ago, but rather that utilitarian spectacles have been swapped for spectacles through which the world is classified by concepts.*

The more the frontal cortex matures, the less flexible our cognition becomes. The PFC, while key for remaining on task and delaying gratification, is the deadly enemy of creativity. It allows us to remain laser-focused on task but blinds us to remote possibilities. Both creativity and learning new associations require a relaxation of cognitive control that allows the mind to wander.

Neural pathways become ingrained, automatic, if they operate only by habit. They are highly attuned to alterations, to novelty. New sights, sounds, languages, tastes, smells stimulate different synapses in the brain, different message routes, different webs of connection, increasing our neuroplasticity. Our brains have evolved to notice differences in our environment: it’s how we’re alerted to predators, to potential danger. To be sensitive to change, then, is to ensure survival. Professor Adam Galinsky, an American social psychologist who has studied the connection between creativity and international travel, says that ‘Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms.

But what separates human consciousness from the consciousness of animals? Humans are alone in the animal kingdom in understanding the concept of tomorrow. Unlike animals, we constantly ask ourselves “What if?” weeks, months, and even years into the future, so I believe that Level III consciousness creates a model of its place in the world and then simulates it into the future, by making rough predictions. We can summarize this as follows: Human consciousness is a specific form of consciousness that creates a model of the world and then simulates it in time, by evaluating the past to simulate the future. This requires mediating and evaluating many feedback loops in order to make a decision to achieve a goal. By the time we reach Level III consciousness, there are so many feedback loops that we need a CEO to sift through them in order to simulate the future and make a final decision. Accordingly, our brains differ from those of other animals, especially in the expanded prefrontal cortex, located just behind the forehead, which allows us to “see” into the future. Dr. Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, has written, “The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future. As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an ‘anticipation machine,’ and ‘making the future’ is the most important thing it does.” Using brain scans, we can even propose a candidate for the precise area of the brain where simulation of the future takes place. Neurologist Michael Gazzaniga notes that “area 10 (the internal granular layer IV), in the lateral prefrontal cortex, is almost twice as large in humans as in apes. Area 10 is involved with memory and planning, cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, initiating appropriate behavior, and inhibiting inappropriate behavior, learning rules, and picking out relevant information from what is perceived through the senses.” (For this book, we will refer to this area, in which decision making is concentrated, as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, although there is some overlap with other areas of the brain.)

Psychologist J.P. Guilford, who carried out a long series of systematic psychological studies into the nature of creativity, found that several factors were involved in creative thinking; many of these, as we shall see, relate directly to the cognitive changes that take place during mild manias as well. Fluency of thinking, as defined by Guilford, is made up of several related and empirically derived concepts, measured by specific tasks: word fluency, the ability to produce words each, for example, containing a specific letter or combination of letters; associational fluency, the production of as many synonyms as possible for a given word in a limited amount of time; expressional fluency, the production and rapid juxtaposition of phrases or sentences; and ideational fluency, the ability to produce ideas to fulfill certain requirements in a limited amount of time. In addition to fluency of thinking, Guilford developed two other important concepts for the study of creative thought: spontaneous flexibility, the ability and disposition to produce a great variety of ideas, with freedom to switch from category to category; and adaptive flexibility, the ability to come up with unusual types of solutions to set problems.

There are so many valuable techniques for regulation, for exploring and integrating traumatic experience, and so on. Once we get to know these protocols, they may pull on us in ways that invite us to seize control of the therapy. The other pathway suggests that her system holds the answers and that if I can offer enough safe support, it will likely begin to speak with us. At least cognitively, I can recognize that this person's inner world contains much more information about the root causes of her upset than I do. From this perspective, I am less interested in dealing with symptoms than moving towards making room for the implicit origin to emerge so that the protective systems can take care of themselves.

However, there is now a sizable body of experimental work documenting flexible learning capabilities in insects that, in some cases, rival those found in mammals and birds. These cognitive abilities range from conditional discrimination and concept formation to spatial cognition, planning, causal reasoning, and social learning. Indeed, a review of the insect cognition literature leaves one with the impression that bees are likely to outperform birds and mammals on many quintessential cognitive tasks, such as matching-to-sample discriminations and the cross-modal transfer of learned concepts - often necessitating fewer trails for success than is necessary to train up similar abilities in mammals (including primates!).

That is what I want our young nascent readers to become: expert, flexible code switchers -- between print and digital mediums now and later between and among the multiple future communication mediums....I conceptualize the initial development of learning to think in each medium as largely separated into distinct domains in the first school years, until a point in time when the particular characteristics of the two mediums are each well developed and internalized. That is an essential point. I want the child to have parallel levels of fluency, if you will, in each medium, just as if he or she were similarly fluent in speaking Spanish and English. In this way the uniqueness of the cognitive processes honed by each medium would be there from the start.

In this simple observation about the nature of human consciousness lies a challenge that was taken up sometime in the course of Hinduism’s long development: focus the mind so that the tumble of extraneous thoughts is slowed, then stilled altogether. The practice that developed, which we know as meditation, is of unknown antiquity. It was certainly already in use when the Upanishads were put into writing circa –6C. An archaic form may be inferred from the Rig Veda, which takes the practice back at least to –1200. If recent arguments that the Rig Veda dates to the Indus-Sarasvati civilization hold up, then we must think in terms of an additional millennium or two during which some form of meditation was practiced. I have dated the culmination of the development of meditation to –2C because that is the most popular dating for the life of Patanjali, the Hindu sage who is seen as the progenitor of classical Yoga, an advanced system of meditation. Since its initial development in India, forms of meditation have become part of most religions and of a wide range of secular schools as well. In the West, despite the importance of forms of meditation in Catholicism and some Protestant Christian churches, the word meditation has become identified with some of the flamboyant sects that attracted publicity in the 1960s and 1970s. In some circles, meditation is seen as part of Asian mysticism, not a cognitive tool. This is one instance in which Eurocentrism is a genuine problem. The nature of meditation is coordinate with ways of perceiving the world that are distinctively Asian. But to say that the cognitive tool called meditation is peculiarly useful to Asians is like saying that logic—my next meta-invention—is useful only to Europeans. Meditation and logic found homes in different parts of the world, but meditation, like logic, is a flexible, powerful extension of human cognitive capacity.

Catastrophizing. Predicting extremely negative future outcomes, such as “If I don’t do well on this paper, I will flunk out of college and never have a good job.”   All-or-nothing. Viewing things as all-good or all-bad, black or white, as in “If my new colleagues don’t like me, they must hate me.” Personalization. Thinking that negative actions or words of others are related to you, or assuming that you are the cause of a negative event when you actually had no connection with it. Overgeneralizations. Seeing one negative situation as representative of all similar events. Labeling. Attaching negative labels to ourselves or others. Rather than focusing on a particular thing that you didn’t like and want to change, you might label yourself a loser or a failure. Magnification/minimization. Emphasizing bad things and deemphasizing good in a situation, such as making a big deal about making a mistake, and ignoring achievements. Emotional reasoning. Letting your feelings about something guide your conclusions about how things really are, as in “I feel hopeless, so my situation really must be hopeless.” Discounting positives. Disqualifying positive experiences as evidence that your negative beliefs are false—for example, by saying that you got lucky, something good happened accidentally, or someone was lying when giving you a compliment. Negativity bias. Seeing only the bad aspects of a situation and dwelling on them, in the process viewing the situation as completely bad even though there may have been positives. Should/must statements. Setting up expectations for yourself based on what you think you “should” do. These usually come from perceptions of what others think, and may be totally unrealistic. You might feel guilty for failing or not wanting these standards and feel frustration and resentment. Buddhism sets this in context. When the word “should” is used, it leaves no leeway for flexibility of self-acceptance. It is fine to have wise, loving, self-identified guidelines for behavior, but remember that the same response or action to all situations is neither productive nor ideal. One size never fits all.  Jumping to conclusions. Making negative predictions about the outcome of a situation without definite facts or evidence. This includes predicting a bad future event and acting as if it were already fact, or concluding that others reacted negatively to you without asking them. ​Dysfunctional automatic thoughts like these are common. If you think that they are causing suffering in your life, make sure you address them as a part of your CBT focus.

Roberts and Kyllonen (1999) explored the relation of morningness to cognitive ability. Using 420 U.S. Air Force recruits in the sixth week of basic training, they found that cognitive ability was positively correlated with eveningness and negatively correlated with morningness. They cite Sternberg’s doctrine that flexibility is associated with intelligence, and that adapting to the electrically lighted evening hours would be an example of such flexibility. Interesting, that those of us who, evolutionarily speaking, have adapted to become night owls, and not rigidly adhered to thousands of years of early to rise, early to bed routine, show greater signs of intelligence.

Psychologists define cognitive dissonance as “The state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs or attitudes; especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change”.  Perhaps nowhere is this cerebral flexibility on better display than in religious claims of divine intervention.  As atheists we are constantly baffled by an acquaintance crediting god with some minor convenience in their lives, seemingly unaware of the horrible moral contradictions that arise when one asserts that a god concerns itself with finding their lost glasses but not with the children sold into sexual slavery.

Many experiments show that when people are put into a good mood (e.g., by giving them candy or showing them a funny movie), they are more creative. For example, they are better at inventing diverse and unusual ways for getting a candle to burn without dripping, or at finding more obscure and remote associations between words and ideas.22 People in good moods are “more cognitively flexible —more able to make associations, to see dimensions, and to see potential relationships among stimuli—than are persons in a neutral state.”23 In other words, they generate more varied ideas and combinations of those ideas, which are crucial aspects of creative work.

Why matrix organizational structures became so popular I’m not really sure. There is certainly an element of flexibility and collaboration suggested by them, but in reality they are forums for confusion and conflict. They have certainly not contributed to the breakdown of silos; they’ve merely added an element of schizophrenia and cognitive dissonance for employees who are unlucky enough to report into two different silos.

And this is arguably an adaptive cognitive strategy. A creature that encodes the world using more or less veridical mental models has an enormous advantage in problem-solving flexibility over a creature that encodes purely in terms of presently foreseeable activities.

Questions have changed me immensely. I have greater self-confidence and a more relaxed attitude. I don't feel that I always have to have the answers in conversations or in situations where I need to speak at the spur of the moment. I feel this has increased my communication skills, especially listening and persuading. I have more trust in myself and others. Leading with questions has led to more trust, which appears to be a paradox of group life. I have stronger initiative and commitment. I learn more as I have become more directional by more questions. I have more patience and self-control, have greater openness and transparency. I now see myself as more adaptable and flexible. I am optimistic about opportunities [and] more inspirational and have greater vision and cognitive capability. Questions have given me greater understanding of organizational and political realities; I recognize the importance of organizational context and orientation. I am more willing to take risks in creating opportunities. I have a greater empathy with employees, customers, and others and a stronger commitment to develop others. My empowerment orientation is greater.

A notable experiment in 2007 showed that cognitive flexibility improves after just one thirty-five-minute treadmill session at either 60 percent or 70 percent of maximum heart rate.

Just because psychology seems relevant to explaining why the left and the right have diverged over reality doesn't mean that nothing else is, or that I am reducing conservatives to just their psychology (or reducing psychology to cognitive neuroscience, or cognitive neuroscience to genes, and so on). [...] Complex phenomena like human political behavior always have many causes, not one. This book fully recognizes that and does not embrace a position that could fairly be called determinism. Human brains are flexible and change daily; people have choices, and those choices alter who they are.

I was shocked to discover that hope is not an emotion; it’s a way of thinking or a cognitive process. Emotions play a supporting role, but hope is really a thought process made up of what Snyder calls a trilogy of goals, pathways, and agency.4 In very simple terms, hope happens when We have the ability to set realistic goals (I know where I want to go). We are able to figure out how to achieve those goals, including the ability to stay flexible and develop alternative routes (I know how to get there, I’m persistent, and I can tolerate disappointment and try again). We believe in ourselves (I can do this!). So,

what else is cognition but information processing? Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.

As for employees working at organizations who treat all people the same way, it will be up to you to push for the things you value: the balance of vacation time versus pay, a flexible schedule, the way your role within the company works. If you’re a manager, make a list of the cognitive strengths of your team. Some of your employees may be great at memorizing things. Others may be better at quantitative tasks. Some have good people skills. Some don’t. Assigning work projects based on an employee’s strengths may be critical to your group’s productivity. You may discover you had a Michael Jordan on your team but couldn’t see it because you were only asking him to play baseball.

To begin with, the child of five, six, or seven is in many ways an extremely competent individual. Not only can she use skillfully a raft of symbolic forms, but she has evolved a galaxy of robust theories that prove quite serviceable for most purposes and can even be extended in generative fashion to provide cogent accounts of unfamiliar materials or processes. The child is also capable of intensive and extensive involvement in cognitive activities, ranging from experimenting with fluids in the bathtub to building complex block structures and mastering board games, card games, and sports. While some of these creations are derivative, at least a few of them may exhibit genuine creativity and originality. And quite frequently in at least one area, the young child has achieved the competence expected from much older children. Such precocity is particularly likely when youngsters have pursued a special passion, like dinosaurs, dolls, or guns, or when there is a strain of special talent in areas like mathematics, music, or chess or simply a flexibility, a willingness to try new things.

both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language. It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting and fornicating? However, fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.

2) Cognitive flexibility and reappraisal, two funda-mental aspects of emotion regulation, can also be learned, practiced, and ultimately used as a form of psychological resilience.

2A signaling has been shown to play a role in cognitive flexibility.71 There have also been links between “trait pessimism,” like “pathological brooding” and deficient 2A receptor stimulation.72, 73, 74, 75 Both of these roles of 2A receptors make sense considering how people use psychedelics for personal growth, but some of the most interesting links between the serotonin system and psychedelics have to do with neural plasticity. Essentially, researchers have found evidence that 2A signaling may enhance neural plasticity, meaning that psychedelics may be able to promote brain plasticity by acting on those receptors.

Given the obvious “will to power” (as Friedrich Nietzsche called it) of the human race, the enormous energy put into its expression, the early emergence of hierarchies among children, and the childlike devastation of grown men who tumble from the top, I’m puzzled by the taboo with which our society surrounds this issue. Most psychology textbooks do not even mention power and dominance, except in relation to abusive relationships. Everyone seems in denial. In one study on the power motive, corporate managers were asked about their relationship with power. They did acknowledge the existence of a lust for power, but never applied it to themselves. They rather enjoyed responsibility, prestige, and authority. The power grabbers were other men. Political candidates are equally reluctant. They sell themselves as public servants, only in it to fix the economy or improve education. Have you ever heard a candidate admit he wants power? Obviously, the word “servant” is doublespeak: does anyone believe that it’s only for our sake that they join the mudslinging of modern democracy? Do the candidates themselves believe this? What an unusual sacrifice that would be. It’s refreshing to work with chimpanzees: they are the honest politicians we all long for. When political philosopher Thomas Hobbes postulated an insuppressible power drive, he was right on target for both humans and apes. Observing how blatantly chimpanzees jockey for position, one will look in vain for ulterior motives and expedient promises. I was not prepared for this when, as a young student, I began to follow the dramas among the Arnhem chimpanzees from an observation window overlooking their island. In those days, students were supposed to be antiestablishment, and my shoulder-long hair proved it. We considered power evil and ambition ridiculous. Yet my observations of the apes forced me to open my mind to seeing power relations not as something bad but as something ingrained. Perhaps inequality was not to be dismissed as simply the product of capitalism. It seemed to go deeper than that. Nowadays, this may seem banal, but in the 1970s human behavior was seen as totally flexible: not natural but cultural. If we really wanted to, people believed, we could rid ourselves of archaic tendencies like sexual jealousy, gender roles, material ownership, and, yes, the desire to dominate. Unaware of this revolutionary call, my chimpanzees demonstrated the same archaic tendencies, but without a trace of cognitive dissonance. They were jealous, sexist, and possessive, plain and simple. I didn’t know then that I’d be working with them for the rest of my life or that I would never again have the luxury of sitting on a wooden stool and watching them for thousands of hours. It was the most revelatory time of my life. I became so engrossed that I began trying to imagine what made my apes decide on this or that action. I started dreaming of them at night and, most significant, I started seeing the people around me in a different light.

We need to feel comfortable with who we are but be able to change. We need a secure but flexible identity. If our identity becomes set in stone, then any sort of threat to our inner narrative is interpreted as an attack. We’ll dig in, defending who we are at all costs and utilizing our cognitive bias to keep our sense of self intact. If, on the other hand, we acknowledge our foibles, then we can take ourselves out of this defensive stance, with the knowledge that the structure of who we are is stable, but the details are up for revision. It’s not an attack, but an aid to understanding our weaknesses.

Cognitive flexibility: In a basic way, cognitive flexibility is the ability to switch from one task to another when the goal or circumstances have changed. Through a more conceptual lens, cognitive flexibility refers to the ability to revise plans in the face of obstacles, setbacks, new information, or mistakes. It’s the kind of “roll with the punches” idea whereby we are flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions.

Decreased cognitive flexibility, including difficulty or increased difficulty with attentiveness, focus, processing, and concentration. You might feel like your processing speed or your ability to problem-solve is decreasing. Learning can be or feel more difficult or slower to cement, especially in later perimenopause.

There’s an assumption out there that good leaders are decisive and clear. They know the priorities and don’t let themselves get tangled up in agonizing thoughts about details. If you’re an executive, you want others to see you this way. Decisiveness gives the impression of confidence. And confidence helps others have confidence in you. As an entrepreneur, professional or executive, you know that making decisions is a large part of your daily life. You signed up for this – making decisions, big and small. So what make it difficult for smart, driven executives to be fully decisive? Indecisiveness is not just about decision fatigue or over-responsibility, although they may play a role. It’s about your executive functioning (EF) and how you’re managing it. To make difficult decisions, you need great EF – the brain-based skills for goal-directed behaviour and everything that goes with it. By virtue of where you are in your career, your EF is already well developed. And yet, you’d like to be more decisive. So what’s going on when you feel stuck in indecisiveness? Your particular brand of EF – your brain profile – may be highly comfortable with abstract thinking. Perhaps too comfortable. And that’s what can take you into endless ambivalence. Have you noticed that when you can’t land on a decision, there’s a sense of not quite settling? If you’re accustomed to thinking in the abstract, you may find it uncomfortable to land on a choice. If you want to be muscularly decisive, look at your emotions. Are they heightened? Triggered? If so, your EF will definitely go offline. You’ll experience mental fog, poor focus, and rumination. How do you respond when you’re triggered? Do you put your emotions aside? Do you tell yourself there’s no time during the work day to deal with them? Emotions don’t go away just because you decided not to pay attention to them. They’re still there, bubbling under the surface. If you try to think past the emotions, you won’t be effective. EF functions best when the brain is calm and clear. But emotions are very useful too – when you choose to pay attention to them. They’re a gold mine of information about risks, values, priorities and self-management. You need a balance of emotional information and facts to make a good decision. The most powerful leaders make decisions with a combination of intuition, past experience, emotional intelligence and cognitive flexibility. If you cut off these valuable data sets, the result will be indecisiveness. So how do you become confidently decisive? 1. Check in. Ask yourself: Who do I want to be as I make this decision? In what way may I be too comfortable with the abstract? What might I be resisting? Recognize that No decision IS a decision. Ask yourself: How do I benefit from making no decision? What if no decision is the best decision? Commit to making a decision anyway. Ask yourself: In what way can I make this decision more clear? Who will I be once I’ve made this decision? Accept that some ‘good’ decisions will feel uncomfortable. Ask yourself: What do I believe about what makes a good decision? What will deepen my comfort with what I don’t have control over? You can be a good leader and still be indecisive from time to time. The next time you have a difficult decision to make, draw from both emotional and factual information. And don’t forget to enjoy the afterglow of clarity! With love and gratitude, Lynda

None of this is to say that experts are inflexible automatons. Experts act with demonstrably more flexibility than novices in a particular domain. Psychologists specify two types of expert flexibility. In the first type, the expert internalizes many of the domain’s salient features and hence sees and reacts to most of the domain’s contexts and their effects. This flexibility operates effectively in relatively stable domains. The second type of flexibility is more difficult to exercise. This flexibility requires experts to recognize when their cognitively accessible models are unlikely to work, forcing the experts to go outside their routines and their familiar frameworks to solve problems. This flexibility is crucial to success in nonlinear, complex systems.

None of this is to say that experts are inflexible automatons. Experts act with demonstrably more flexibility than novices in a particular domain. Psychologists specify two types of expert flexibility. In the first type, the expert internalizes many of the domain’s salient features and hence sees and reacts to most of the domain’s contexts and their effects. This flexibility operates effectively in relatively stable domains. The second type of flexibility is more difficult to exercise. This flexibility requires experts to recognize when their cognitively accessible models are unlikely to work, forcing the experts to go outside their routines and their familiar frameworks to solve problems. This flexibility is crucial to success in nonlinear, complex systems. So how do experts ensure they incorporate both types of flexibility? Advocates of cognitive flexibility theory suggest the major determinant in whether or not an expert will have more expansive flexibility is the amount of reductive bias during deliberate practice.4 More reductive bias may improve efficiency but will reduce flexibility. To mitigate reductive bias, the theory prescribes exploring abstractions across diverse cases to capture the significance of context dependence.

The good news is that you can quickly reclaim your genetic fat-burning abilities. Metabolic flexibility allows you to feel great all day long, with stable mood, energy, cognitive functioning, and appetite, whether or not you eat regular meals. I believe that reigniting your metabolic flexibility is the holy grail of all health pursuits. With it, you can naturally derive energy from a range of sources: the fat on your plate of food or the fat on your butt, belly, or thighs; the carbohydrates in your meal, the glucose in your bloodstream, or the glycogen in your muscles; and even from ketones, the superfuel that your liver makes when you’re fasting or restricting dietary carbs. The best part is that your body doesn’t care where those calories came from, because your source of calories to burn will move seamlessly from one substrate (fuel source) to another depending on your immediate energy needs.

And so we have the most basic structural framework of uniquely human cognition: socially shared realities and the ability to flexibly manipulate and coordinate different perspectives on aspects of those shared realities (mental coordination). This structural framework fundamentally transforms great ape cognition by turning straightforward cognitive representations into perspectival cognitive representations. Moreover,

Openness to experience is a personality trait associated with a number of characteristics like cognitive flexibility, intellectual curiosity, unconventional thinking, and absorption, and researchers have consistently found people high in openness to be naturally energetic, inventive, and compassionate. And because of these characteristics, and the broader nature of the experiences open people typically seek out and encounter, people high in openness frequently live nonconforming, less traditional lives.

while reciprocal altruism does require a higher level of cognitive sophistication and behavioral flexibility than kin selection altruism, insofar as the altruist must be able to recognize free riders and discontinue interactions with them, too much cognitive sophistication may in the end undermine the altruistic impulse.

But in terms of what they need to flourish in whatever society is round the corner, the following are the top ten things the OECD say children will need to be able to do:   1    Solve complex problems.   2    Think critically.   3    Think creatively.   4    Manage people.   5    Co-operate with others.   6    Demonstrate emotional intelligence.   7    Be confident in judgement and decision-making.   8    Be service orientated.   9    Be skilled in negotiation. 10    Show cognitive flexibility. To repeat, learning information is no longer enough – you can Google it. What you have to be able to do is to make use of knowledge – and you have to want to.

The good news is that positive construal can be taught. “We can make ourselves more or less vulnerable by how we think about things,” Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of stimuli in different ways—to reframe them in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how they experience and react to the stimulus. You can train people to better regulate their emotions, and the training seems to have lasting effects. Training people to change their explanatory styles from internal to external (“Bad events aren’t my fault”), from global to specific (“This is one narrow thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my life”), and from permanent to impermanent (“I can change the situation, rather than assuming it’s fixed”) made them more psychologically successful and less prone to depression. The same goes for locus of control: not only is a more internal locus tied to perceiving less stress and performing better but changing your locus from external to internal leads to positive changes in both psychological well-being and objective work performance. The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none. Unfortunately, the opposite may also be true. “We can become less resilient, or less likely to be resilient,” Bonanno says. “We can create or exaggerate stressors very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.” Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened. In a sense, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow. Focus on it, frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible, and more likely to be negatively affected.

Figure 1-9. Four principles. To serve memory and use, I’ve arranged these principles and practices into a mnemonic –STAR FINDER. In astronomy, a “star finder” or planisphere is a map of the night sky used for learning to identify stars and constellations. In this book, it’s a guide for finding goals, finding paths, and finding your way. First, we can get better at planning by making planning more social, tangible, agile, and reflective. At each step in the design of paths and goals, ask how these four principles might help. Social. Plan with people early and often. Engage family, friends, colleagues, customers, stakeholders, and mentors in the process. When we plan together, it’s easier to get started. Also, diversity grows empathy, sharing creates buy-in, and both expand options. Tangible. Get ideas out of your head. Sketches and prototypes let us see, hear, taste, smell, touch, share, and change what we think. When we render our mental models to distributed cognition and iterative design, we realise an intelligence greater than ourselves. Agile. Plan to improvise. Clarify the extent to which the goal, path, and process are fixed or flexible. Be aware of feedback and options. Know both the plan and change must happen. Embrace adventure. Reflective. Question paths, goals, and beliefs. Start and finish with a beginner’s mind. Try experiments to test hypotheses and metrics to spot errors. Use experience and metacognition to grow wisdom.

Cognitive flexibility: the ability to fine-tune our thoughts, attitudes, and behaviours in the face of changing contexts and situations.

If you have a growth mind-set, you operate with faith. You believe in something you can’t see. You believe you can actually get better at something, even though that growth is currently visible only in your mind. If you have a fixed mind-set, you aren’t operating with faith. You don’t believe in what you can’t see. You’re a doubter. You’re overconfident and overcommitted to a certain “cognitive commitment,” or way of seeing yourself. Because you don’t believe you can learn something, you actually can’t. You’ve put yourself in a box and you have no vision for the future in that area. However, psychologists and learning theorists have plenty of evidence now showing that you can learn any of the learning styles. But only if you’re a flexible and adaptive learner. This changes everything. It changes the notion of each person having fixed “strengths” and “weaknesses,” and instead paints a far more compelling picture.