The Importance Of Cognitive Ability 3-Fluid Thinking

Cognitive Ability 3 - Fluid Thinking – refers to the ability to analyze novel problems, identify patterns and relationships that underpin these problems and solve them by using logical reasoning, combined with analogies and conceptual metaphor. It allows us to fluidly and seamlessly transit across different modes of thinking and areas of knowledge, bearing our competence to use our natural intellectual plasticity, flexibility and adaptation.

Fluid thinking is the next step once you have developed your metaphorical thinking up to a conceptual point. That’s when you activate both the undirected and directed modes of thinking. That means, once you have better understood the initially “foggy” idea that you came up with, you are in position to

Therefore, most of the time we don’t need to create a fully new idea from scratch if we are to be innovative. What we more often do is to further develop a previously existing idea to a better stand – in other words, we innovate by improving existing patterns, ideas, concepts, behaviours, events. All we have to do is to leverage our cumulative cultural evolution.

Cognitive Ability 5 - Emergent Properties - where a wide range of constructs that operate on human cognition are seen as emergent consequences of collaborative processes. The greatest achievements of human cognition may be largely emergent phenomena. Emergent properties do not naturally pertain to any individual member of a group, and hence can only come to existence through collaboration.

Emergent properties can happen at a micro (individual) or macro (organizational) level. At an individual level, as the neurons of our brains work collaboratively, larger entities, regularities, new patterns arise as a result of that cooperation. These new patterns are pregnant of meaning and represent new perspectives, ideas and

These 5 key cognitive abilities are natural to us, and are constantly and trivially being used by our brains. However, this constant exercise happens almost entirely at an unconscious level. Research shows it is difficult to detect unconscious subtleties and it is harder to take action on something you don’t detect.

What CIC is proposing then is for us to train ourselves to increase a conscious practice of these 5 key cognitive abilities. Make a habit out of it, constantly analyzing the world and its events through the lenses and perspectives of these 5 key abilities, working together. We will then experience an enhanced intellectual capability, an enhanced ingenuity, and increased collaborative, innovative and creative abilities.

Furthermore, imagine if our species did that as one group. Imagine the improvements we would be able to make in solving complex issues that jeopardize the future of our species. The collective ingenuity gain would be of such magnitude that we would more likely emerge, evolve into a new species - a more ethical, collaborative, intelligent, ingenious, innovative and creative species.

Transformation happens when we all engage in the same