Barbara Oakley: Brain Bias: Why You Shouldn’t Emulate Geniuses and Their Rigid Thinking Processes

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How do you get out of a mental feedback loop? The smartest people—call them geniuses or what you will—tend to shut down outside voices and tend to only listen to sources that they know they’ll agree with. But the thing is, this works for geniuses because they are, well, geniuses. Barbara posits that the best thing to do for the other 99.9% of us is to get outside of your own head and be flexible about ideas. Travel more. Even just sitting in a different chair can open new avenues in your head. Your brain craves new stimuli, so give it something to grow on. Ideally, Barbara says, you should listen to people and things that might initially rub you the wrong way, but ultimately get you out of your own mental feedback loop. The best thinking doesn’t have to come from emotion—taking a step back and thinking critically about all sides of an issue in a 3-dimensional way is often the best way to think, period.

Barbara Oakley’s latest book is Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential.

[Video and text source: Big Think YouTube channel]