Buy this, support that, vote for this, say that, accept this, oppose that, donate to this, do that, my idea is good, her proposal is not, this is right, that is wrong, this is good for you, that is not, follow me, don’t listen to him…

How very many messages we receive each day. We today are loaded down, virtually drowning, in facts, opinions, data, surveys, studies, reports findings, critiques, discussion, breaking news, gossip, e-mail, evidence, hearsay, broadcasts, you name it. But what really should we be listening to or acting upon and how do we decide?

I think sorting all this out can be very difficult even when we understand what a certain piece of information really means and how it impacts us. But how much more difficult, confusing, and even misleading, it can be when we cannot, or choose not to, decipher clearly what a message is really saying and do not understand or perceive how that message is acting on us.

I can use the analogy of learning to drive as an illustration. When we first get behind the wheel we are suddenly deluged with having to remember the rules, steer the car, adjust the mirrors, apply the gas or the brake, use the clutch, shift the gears, check your position on the road, watch in front of you, look behind you, watch to the left and to the right, maintain a following distance, keep a lookout for pedestrians and kids at play, look for traffic lights and stop signs, watch for suddenly changing traffic and unexpected events. When I first was learning to drive I felt simply overloaded and that to absorb and do all of these things was quite impossible. But now I do it all and have the ability as well to adjust the stations on the radio. So what happened between then and now?

Well, much of it has to do with the fact that a great many of the overwhelming number of activities, inputs and calculations associated with driving a car become automatic. Now I recognize vehicles, judge distances, make adjustments and react to many situations rather semi-consciously, without really thinking about them. With practice and repetition these considerations and actions become ingrained and I just do them.

In many ways our thinking and reactions with the myriad messages sent to us become the same. With repetition and practice we build patterns of thought and action or take on the patterns that others provide us. We begin to operate in ways that have become ingrained and we tend to think less consciously about the specific messages, how they influence our self-talk and attitudes, and what we finally do with them.

What I am pointing to here is rather automated, and potentially blinded and dulled mental operations inside the box. As described below and as Larry teaches, critical thinking instructs us to look more closely at the particular box – the messages we receive in differing situations, their validity and purpose, and how they affect us.

It teaches us to work more consciously outside of the box, to scrutinize the box, turn the box upside down and backwards and ascertain if the messages inside it are really true. From this we can better determine if the direction in which those messages are seeking to lead us agrees with what we believe in and is where we want to go. We can then choose whether or not to accept the invitation.

And I cannot emphasize enough how important belief is. For without a strong center populated with an actively operating set of values, principles and procedures for discerning and acting we will at best become confused and at worst lost and even deceived in attempting to navigate through the sea of messages and influences that seek to grab and steer us.

But more than simply learning these understandings for ourselves, I believe it is so important to instill in our children a capability with critical thinking and a strong center of belief from which to operate in it. With this in mind I provide you with the following article toward stimulating your thinking outside of the box.

Enjoy!

-- John Borland --


Some Thoughts on Thinking
By John Borland

In the fourth session of the Parent Seminar on the subject of expectations Larry Evans teaches us that advertisers depend greatly on the fact that we human beings do not think about what we think about.

Because this is true advertisers are able to use (or more rightly we allow them to use) techniques to control our minds. These powerful methods work on us subconsciously, usually through patterned repetitions, generated feelings and suggestive claims, to play on our choices and ask us to change within us our self-talk. If successful, these changes to our own internal language cause us to incline our attitudes towards that of the advertiser’s message and, thereby, alter our ensuing actions.

The end result often is that we become more attracted to the advertiser's products for whatever the provided reasons and very often purchase what the advertiser is selling. In short, the advertiser convinces us (and sometimes deludes us) internally that buying what he has to sell is in our best interest.

Does the advertiser make us buy his product? No! But the advertiser provides us with a strong invitation crafted in such a manner that we are more inclined to accept it. From there we do the rest.

This process appears to be rather well understood by us when we relate it to traditional advertising, but stop and think about this for a minute. What exactly is advertising and how many different forms does it really take in our lives?

I submit to you that advertising – or more precisely the techniques of advertising – are with us continually and in virtually every form of communication.

We are being told constantly what to think.

Television, newspapers and radio provide us with facts about our neighbors, our communities, our country and our world, but these facts are also constructed, arranged and packaged so as to convey to us particular messages. In the same vein, books and magazines, by their content and formatting, emphasize to us certain points or slants on information while diminishing or negating others.

Obviously our chosen leaders and regarded experts influence us strongly in what to think, but consider that our co-workers, friends and family members also sell to us regularly their individual opinions and interpretations of facts and events over and above others.

Lest you begin to feel in this that I am building a conspiracy, let me quickly say that this structuring and directing of how information is transferred is a very normal and universal function of life and an indivisible component of our communications. And while, as with traditional advertising, some of this crafting of information may be calculated to achieve a particular end, much of it is innocent and simply reflects the impressions or biases of its senders.

Still, this doesn’t change the fact that we are being challenged strongly and continually in how we should think. And the influence of these invitations on the process within us – our choosing of what we listen to, leading to our developed attitudes and finally to our actions – is often very difficult for us to discern.

Through my workplace activities I have had some involvement with educational curriculums speaking to the subject of critical thinking. Simply put, critical thinking teaches people to break down and analyze what is actually being communicated to them.

While it does make up a part, this technique with critical thinking does not deal with simply finding the lies or falsities within delivered messages. This is because relatively few messages contain obvious lies. Rather, and more importantly, critical thinking teaches the practitioner to look at how messages structure, align, emphasize and hide pieces of even factual information towards reaching or inferring particular ends. The goal of critical thinking is to look at what the facts in a given message are actually saying and how well the construction of those facts really supports the conclusion being drawn.

Critical thinking is a good technique to learn, but it doesn’t take special training to begin in this process. If nothing else sit down in front of your television or with a magazine and listen to and look at the advertising.

Record and go over the words of an advertisement carefully. Often times what you will find is that an ad contains a number of words and phrases which by themselves mean little or nothing concerning the product, but, when placed together, work to provide, not facts, but an inference to the conclusion that the advertiser is aiming for.

Very often words are arranged as catchy slogans or jingles. They again may say very little about the product itself, but these word bytes tend to stick with us. This popular approach breeds within us a repetition of the message and, thereby, a certain feeling of familiarity with the product. The end result can be to generate a strong appeal for the product in lieu of providing real facts.

Images and sounds work in much the same way. Smiling faces; friendly, beckoning, funny or sensual gestures; upbeat or dramatic music; or suggestions of comfort, power, control or acceptance draw us in, hold our attention and help us to transfer what we are feeling to the product we see.

And all of it leads to a desired result for the advertiser that he has stimulated but which in fact we ourselves execute.

Armed with this experience in critical thinking, spend some time in the same way with the evening news, political coverage, magazine articles, books, civic meetings, casual conversations and what have you. Carefully study these communications, what they are actually saying as well as how they are saying it, and you may begin to see something very different than what you saw before.

My idea in writing this is not to prove that people are liars or that the world is a terrible place. It is not to produce in you a cynic or to have you go and upbraid your neighbor. Conclusions such as this are strictly your choice and not what I am intending to invite.

What I am attempting to show is that this is how people are and the world is. There are all kinds of messages being delivered to us all the time, some quite correct and many less so, from multitudes of sources and all with the power potentially to influence our thinking.

It has always been so and will continue to be. But unless we are aware of the power of these messages and can understand their real content we very easily can become unwitting participants in following blindly where the messages want to lead us. And in our modern fast-paced world where schedules are so hectic and there is never enough time, it is all too common and easy for us to ignore thinking critically about what we see and hear and simply follow the message.

An interesting point to me is that the deliverers of leading, erroneous or deceptive messages are very often innocent, well-meaning individuals who themselves are unknowing and accepting victims of the messages that have been delivered to them. This very much includes me and likely also includes you.

This article began with the idea that we do not think about what we think about. Well, perhaps now we are thinking. The question then becomes, what do we now do with what it is we are thinking about?

Three things come to mind for me:

First, don't be taken in. I believe it behooves us to take some time to look closely at the messages being brought every day to us, to think about them carefully, to understand how and why these messages influence us, and then pick and choose appropriately how we will react.

Second, don't condemn the messenger. It is important, I think, to separate the messenger from the message and seek to understand each individually. If a delivered message is inappropriate or colored, I would rather work to accept the messenger, better understand where this message is coming from in him and see if I can be of help. It aids me in this to know that far too often the negative messenger can be me.

Third, what do I teach my kids? Children today are absolutely bombarded by messages of all kinds, from all over. Tragically, our kids are often completely ill equipped to understand the real content of these messages, the motives of their providers and the impact of the invitation being made upon them. Rather, children tend very much to believe and openly trust what they are told, especially by adults.

I can't make all the messages go away or change them all to be messages that advantage my kids. I can, however, teach my kids how to think.

I can teach them to understand what a message is, how to look at and think more carefully about the messages they receive and about themselves, how to surround themselves with messages that are better for them and how to walk away from messages and messages sources that are not.

I believe that, if we take more time to think about and understand the messages being brought to us – which to accept, which to reject and why – and if we teach our kids to do the same, over time the messages will get better.

The messages will get better because we ourselves have gotten better.

Something to think about, huh?


Maybe It's Time for PEG
It has been a while now since the Parent Exploratory Group (PEG) has met. Much of this is due to the fact that I have been dealing with a pinched nerve in my back and sciatica since Christmas. Because of the pain and the different schedules for exercises and other remedies meant to ease and reverse the condition I simply have not had the time or inclination for extracurricular activities.

Well, I still have the back pain and sciatica, but I think it is perhaps time to go forward anyway. We are planning a meeting of PEG for Thursday, May 20, 2004 from 6:30pm to 8:00pm in the Dauphin County Technical School auditorium. DCTS is familiar to everyone, including our 2004 Parent Seminar attendees, and so it is a good place to get together again.

For those of you who haven’t been to a PEG meeting our gatherings (for that is what they are) are pretty informal and the agendas are rather open. Larry has expressed an interest for this meeting of showing the video from the PBS special, "Inside the Teenage Brain." The PEG meeting summaries at: http://www.affectiveskill.com/Peg.htm will give you a good idea of how PEG operates. We welcome you warmly and hope you will be able to attend. Thanks. -- John Borland --

YOU MAKE THE DIFFERENCE IN WHAT WE CAN DO TOGETHER!

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Last Modified: May 09, 2004