~Sid
The first chapter of the book tries to highlight the way our minds work, how this way of working is useful, and the disadvantages caused by this system.
The author describes the mind as a pattern recognition and a self organizing system (as a virtue of its structure itself) . I find myself agreeing with most things he proposes. The mind looks for patterns and uses these patterns to make sense of the world. We truncate what our senses perceive into codes, the minimum effective dose of information needed to make a judgement about which pattern our perceptions fall into. This is the what magic tricks, riddles and still image visual illusions take advantage of, the mind’s tendency to categorize and pattern match to understand.
There are a lot of inherent benefits of this system.The pattern web can store an ever increasing amount of information. The access time for repeatedly accessed patterns in also quite low. However, the author is interested in how to mitigate the downsides of the system, such as: falling into rigid patterns of thought, difficulty of changing patterns to drive insight, and difficult of interconnecting information across patterns is difficult.
Bono has laid the groundwork to make us care about learning to think laterally.