By: Steve Pearlman, Ph.D
Publisher: TEDx Talks, TEDxCapeMay
“Critical thinking” increasingly stands as the most sought-after skill that has long been too fleeting to define. Employers rate it as a pinnacle skill, but one of which they see too little, and educators claim to teach it, but over half of Millennials recently failed a simple Mindedge critical thinking test. So, what is critical thinking? Analysis? Information literacy? Thinking outside the box? Informal logic? Problem-solving? Evaluating data? Decision science? What if all of our efforts to define critical thinking as above have been the core problem with teaching it?
What if, instead of using our brains to devise conceptions of critical thinking, we eliminated the noise and revolutionized a way to teach people how to think better by tracing critical thinking back to its core evolutionary survival mechanisms?
What are the basic survival skills for all organisms?
- Perceive their environment
- Sense danger vs. reward
- Decide between danger and reward
- Act on the decision