Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Edward de Bono's weekly message: Perception

It is not possible to pay attention to everything at once. In a market there are different stalls so that you need only pay attention to one thing - once you have chosen that thing. The CoRT programme so widely used in schools provides frameworks for directing attention. It is incredible that education has never realised that attention and perception are a much more important part of thinking than logic. Yet such things are completely absent in education. Many years ago, David Perkins at Harvard showed that ninety per cent of errors of thinking were errors of perception. Goedel's theorem shows how from within a system you can never logically prove the starting points - which remain arbitrary perceptions.

Again it may be that the Church influence on thinking neglected perception because in Church thinking matters of faith replaced actual perception.

Edward de Bono
20th June 2009

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