Mental Attitude / Mindset

Research has shown that having the right mindset can foster more effective goal setting and attainment, a more positive attitude toward practice and learning, a desire for feedback, a greater ability to deal with setbacks, and significantly better performance over time.

Mental Attitude: Definition & Examples

Mental attitude is defined as:

Your ‘mindset’ – your beliefs, values, attitudes and motivations about your own mental capabilities

Do you want to solve a problem, or would you rather let it remain as it is – or avoid it? Do you have the confidence to believe in your own ability to solve a problem or understand a situation? Do you withstand challenges and setbacks to persevere toward your goals, or tend to give up? Do you have the diligence to weigh up different explanations or options and their consequences, or do you generally commit to the first one that comes to mind? Do you want to be proactive and take responsibility for a situation or issue- or just go with the flow? Do you accept failures as a means to learning from them – or do you prefer to not experience failure since it indicates personal inadequacy?

HighIQPro’s Mindware Architecture

In this tutorial I will review the overarching IQ Mindware framework for augmented intelligence.

The framework is represented as ‘mindware architecture’ – a scheme representing the super-structure of how to augment IQ in real-world settings. We will use it in all the HighIQPro tutorials in the program.

Mindware Architecture: The Concept

The term ‘mindware‘ was first coined by Perkins in his book Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence. Mindware refers to the rules, knowledge, and strategies that aid decision-making and problem solving. Mindware is a term for the knowledge you draw on to tackle target situations intelligently: your cognitive toolkit.

There are three types of mindware: architecture, models and methods. Architecture is a broad, comprehensive framework; models are helpful theories or schemes, and methods are procedures, rules, heuristics, strategies and so on, that aid information processing.

The exercises in the HighIQPro tutorials will build the store of mindware you can utilize for a range of different cognitive functions – for strategizing, problem solving, decision-making, comprehending and so on.

The evidence-based mindware architecture that underlies all that you learn in the HighIQPro tutorials is shown in the figure below. This is the broadest, most generally applied, mindware framework that you will constantly use as you build your cognitive toolkit for being smarter. It is called the IQ Mindware Architecture (IQMA) framework.

Intelligence augmentation benefits from the joint development of (1) meta-awareness/mindfulness, (2) mindware strategies, and (3) cognitive capacity. At the core of this process are the thinking skills of imagining possibilities, thinking logically (using reason), being evidence-bound (tracking truth), and knowing how to evaluate and be guided by values and preferences. This is all shown in the upper triad of the model.

This upper CONSCIOUS COGNITION triad works synergistically with different strategies for UNCONSCIOUS INCUBATION – the lower circle. Incubation is needed for maturing your intuitions for insights in our understanding, for creative problem solving, for intuitive decision-making.

“Intuition: the direct knowing or learning of something without the conscious use of reasoning; immediate understanding.”

Mindfulness/Meta-awareness

You need to be aware of when to use mindware in different situations. Much of what we process cognitive is done on automatic pilot, and this often leads to cognitive biases, errors, sub-optimal non-smart outcomes! Meta-awareness is needed to recognize our cognitive biases and automatic defaults that lead us astray, so we can substitute useful mindware in their place.

An augmented type of self-awareness is non-judgemental mindfulness of our mental processes and behaviors. This kind of awareness involves emotional intelligence and helps us learn systematically from mistakes and failures. Mindfulness can help us be more objective about our abilities without being defensive through a sensitive ego, and help us tackle situations we might avoid through fear of negative judgements or self-censure. It can also enhance meta-awareness and our ability to pick out habitual thought patterns more generally.

Cognitive Capacity

Your general cognitive capacity is the raw processing power of your brain. It is trained directly by HighIQPro. It incorporates:

The bandwidth of the amount of information you can process while thinking something through ‘off line’. (Working memory capacity).
The efficiency of deploying your problem solving, decision-making, comprehension, etc.
Your ability to override automatic, reactive processes in your mind and think problems through ‘offline’.
Your ability to control your attention.

Mindware

Mindware in the HighIQPro tutorials centres on a series of evidence-based, tried and tested mental models that can help in processing information more intelligently in our everyday, sports and professional lives.

The systems scientist Jay Wright Forrester defined general mental models as:

The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system (Forrester, 1971).

Mental models are a type of mindware:

A mental model is an explanation of how something works. It is a concept, framework, or worldview that you carry around in your mind to help you interpret the world and understand the relationship between things. ….For example, supply and demand is a mental model that helps you understand how the economy works. Game theory is a mental model that helps you understand how relationships and trust work. Entropy is a mental model that helps you understand how disorder and decay work. (James Clear)

Learning and applying mental models works synergistically with meta-awareness and cognitive capacity. With greater cognitive capacity it is easier to learn and apply mental models

Thinking Skills

In the IQMA framework, there are 5 core thinking skills that need to be exercised each time you use mindware to process information relating to a topic intelligently.

Possibilities

Possibilities covers our ability to imagine different scenarios or hypotheticals under the constraints we’re working under. This skill includes coming up with working models and ‘run-through’ examples. If we’re making a decision, this skill underlies the ability to generate possible choices and their imagined consequences, given constraints of resources, time, abilities and so on. If we are looking for explanations, this skill underlies coming up with different possible scenarios that could account for the facts. This skill also covers our ability to imagine ourselves in different times and places – e.g. our ‘future selves’ when we are strategizing or committing to something.

Reason

This is the label the IQMA uses for our reasoning skills – deductive logic, inductive logic, analogical reasoning, causal reasoning, and probabilistic reasoning. Often we don’t actively reason things through to plan, solve problems, find explanations or make decisions, but we take quick short-cuts based on what ‘leaps to mind’. Reasoning is very powerful because we can arrive at new knowledge or ideas from what we already know to be true or what is already familiar to us: reasoning is often like following a path that we haven’t seen the end of before. We can also assess the truth of claims through reasoning by – e.g. working on the assumption the claims are true, would follow from them? What would follow can often be checked that against the actual facts and if they contradict what follows, we can reject the assumptions.

Evidence

This thinking skill relates to how we determine levels of support (warrant) for beliefs, claims, etc. What beliefs do you hold that you have no evidence to support them? What facts does X take for granted based on external authorities? What opinions do you express that you have not opened up for scrutiny? What evidence could be presented that would cause you to change your mind?

Evaluation

Making decisions requires weighing up the subjective values of costs and benefits;we need to be in touch with our preferences and values to do this fluidly. Our ability to prioritize also requires that we evaluate the relative importance of different options. Reasoning with trade-offs is a very important thinking skill, and it requires that we are anchored in our values. And in our overarching life-plans and strategies it is critical to be grounded in personal values that give direction and inspiration to those life projects.

Search

Search is your ability to actively seek out relevant information and data for the target topic. This could involve internet searches, RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, library searches, brain storming with others, and so on.

Incubation: Effortless Work

Making good decisions, problem solving, coming up with strategies, understanding new material and learning new skills – benefits from a conscious-unconscious synergy.

Thinking through a problem – deliberate, effortful rational thought applying useful mindware – is needed for many of the more complex situations that we deal with. But to get the smartest results often requires that we let the target problem incubate for a while. Remarkably, the brain unconsciously works on our target problem, forming new connections, loosening unproductive lines of thought, and laying the groundwork for intuitive insight in our cognition. This is well documented in the literature.

This unconscious and effortless process and its emergence in intuition is also central to the IQMA framework, and plays an important role in the HighIQPro program.

What conditions best induce incubation and cultivate intuition?

Sleep and dreaming for one. Hence the common wisdom of ‘sleeping on it’ before deciding something. Daydreaming is another. Distracting yourself for periods of time while working on a problem or grappling with a decision can also help. The distraction may only be possible if you temporarily switch off in a leisure activity or absorb yourself in other goals. And open monitoring meditation is another – particularly effective – strategy. A tutorial on open monitoring meditation and these other techniques is available in the Tutorials.

Tutorial 1: Mindware Architecture & Mental Attitude 1