Jim Stroup

We naturally develop patterns of thought and behavior over time. These are a sort of survival technique, enabling us to deal with what life has taught us can be classified and dealt with by recourse to routine approaches. As a result, our reservoirs of intellectual energy are freed from being drained by repetitive solutions to the same problems, and are available to be alert to new developments and to devise stratagems to deal with them.

The problem is twofold. We sometimes erroneously classify the countless cues that assault us each day, and wind up well down dysfunctional paths to addressing some of them before we realize, if we ever do, what is happening. Second, we begin to accord undue status to the patterns we have created, evaluating data according to how they fit our theories, rather thanthe reverse. We need to periodically redirect our newly liberated capacity for espying new information back onto our old solutions in order to reassess them—and our use of them.

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