Running head: WHY SO STUPID?

HOW THE HUMAN RACE HAS NEVER REALLY

LEARNED TO THINK
1

Book Review of Why So Stupid? By Edward De Bono

Karanpal Singh - 11409276
Lovely School of Architecture and Design

Why So Stupid? How The Human Race Has Never Really Learned to Think

Book Review of Why So Stupid? By Edward De Bono

With a provocative title the book aims to help us acknowledge and accept the indubitable
system bias of the human brain and then to design thinking solutions around that. Our source of
thinking is recognition-based thinking, that is to say, we analyze the situation in order to
identify all the standard parts or components. The more complex or unknown the situation, the
more parts our brain will need to break it down into in order to recognize known parts.

This method of thinking can be found back to Ancient Greek thinkers Aristotle, Plato and
Socrates. Their method of, or approach to, thinking, can be broadly described as follows:
Socrates was critical on his subject matter by argument or debate. His method was to ask leading
questions (ones with obvious answers) and the answers would therefore lead to inevitable
conclusions. A criticism of this style is that it ignores relevant and potentially-influential factors.
He was the original critical thinker (or critic).Plato believed in ultimate truths whereas Aristotle
was, arguably, the most influential thinker. His contribution was to set up principles, boxes or
categories. Under this method, everything must be judged and placed in a prescribed box or
category, for example, things are either right or wrong, there is no provision for things to be
almost right, or a little wrong. The rationale for this is that the human brain is incapable of
registering subject matter on a spectrum.

The natural behavior of the brain is to set up stable patterns for dealing with a stable
world; Following on that, our brains box-labeling system comes an in-built mismatch
mechanism. While critical thinking has enormous value, you cannot design a better way forward
with judgment alone. Traditional thinking is consumed with what is? design thinking considers

Why So Stupid? How The Human Race Has Never Really Learned to Think

what can be?, Parallel thinking gets every party thinking and looking in the same direction at
the same time. De Bono gives a simple definition of creativity as Unexpected Effectiveness.

Our existing thinking system is excellent at analysis, judgment and recognition. This system
seeks truth. We need to develop much better thinking for creativity and design. That thinking
would seek value. You can analyze the past but you have to design the future.