Comprehension: Definition
We define comprehension as:
The ability to understand something – to grasp the relevant structure and significance/meaning of some subject-matter or situation.
Mental Models
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
As James Clear explains in this article on mental models:
We all have our favorite mental models, the ones we naturally default to as an explanation for how or why something happened. As you grow older and develop expertise in a certain area, you tend to favor the mental models that are most familiar to you.
Here’s the problem: when a certain worldview dominates your thinking, you’ll try to explain every problem you face through that worldview.
For this reason, we need to work on expanding our latticework of mental models:
This means reading widely from good books, studying the fundamentals of seemingly unrelated fields, and learning from people with wildly different life experiences.
The mind’s eye needs a variety of mental models to piece together a complete picture of how the world works. The more sources you have to draw upon, the clearer your thinking becomes. As the philosopher Alain de Botton notes, “The chief enemy of good decisions is a lack of sufficient perspectives on a problem.”
Charlie Munger the billionaire investor conveys has the same advice:
And the models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines. (ref)
But it also involves actively thinking through them – evaluating them, assessing their validity, and working through their logic.