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>> Thanks for coming out today.
My name is Art Markman and I'm a Professor in the Psychology Department here at the University of Texas,
and also the Director of the new program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations.
Our program is designed to bring the humanities and the social and behavioral sciences to a broad audience,
particularly people in business and non-profits in the military.
And really, the aim of that program which is consistent with a lot of the research I've done over the years, is to really try to take basic research that comes
out of universities, and then to apply it in real situations.
So what I want to do today is to share with you a little bit of work that I've done to think about how all of you can become smarter thinkers.
Most of us would like to become smarter thinkers.
Most of us, in fact, are asked to think for a living, and yet very few of us are taught much about the way that our minds work.
Now to really make clear what I mean by smart thinking, I want to start by talking about adequate thinking.
Very briefly, adequate thinking was what I did back in high school.
One of the things that I did was I used to clean an office building, and when I cleaned the office building, I'd vacuum a carpet and the bag would fill up,
and eventually the vacuum wouldn't work so well anymore, and so I would do something very adequate.
I would solve the bag problem.
And the way you solve the bag problem is that you take a little big clip off the back of the bag, and then you'd dump this fine stream of dust into a bin,
and get covered with it, and that solves the bag problem.
Now at about the same time that I was involved in adequate thinking, there was someone else by the name of James Dyson who did something more
than adequate thinking, he did what I called smart thinking.
What Dyson did was he realized that vacuums are solving a particular problem.
They suck in a mixture of dirt and air, and they have to separate that dirt from the air, and the bag does that by filtering the dirt, and what happens is the reason
that the vacuum gets less effective is because the dirt starts to clog the pores of the bag, and it won't suck in as well.
And most people who tried to redesign vacuums really tried to solve the bag problem more efficiently.
What Dyson did was to realize that this problem of separating dirt from air is actually the same problem that has to be solved by a sawmill,
which actually meant he had to know a lot about how sawmills worked.
Most of us don't see sawmills very often except perhaps in cartoons.
Usually there's someone strapped to the top.
[Laughter] And the log comes towards the sawmill, there's a big saw blade, it generates tremendous amounts of sawdust.
That sawdust has to be sucked out of the air.
The sawmill does not have a giant bag.
What it has instead is what's called an industrial cyclone.
The industrial cyclone is a cone.
The air passes through it.
It creates a cyclone.
The sawdust is thrown to the sides.
It drops down into a receptacle that gets carted off.
Dyson's insight was you could take that industrial cyclone, build a very small one inside of a vacuum cleaner, and you wouldn't need a bag anymore.
He then spent several years designing a prototype for that.
And his much smarter thinking netted him a company that yields hundreds of millions of dollars a year, whereas I was continuing to make $125 a month solving the bag problem.
Now it is possible that Dyson was able to do the smart thinking simply because he's a smarter person that I am, or you are, or anyone else.
But that's really not the case.
It turns out that while there are definitely differences in how people do on tests like IQ tests and SAT's and things like that,
the scores on those tests predict very little about people's performance.
Overall, maybe 10% of the differences between people really have to do with their scores on IQ tests.
That means that the rest of this has to do with many other factors.
Some of which may have to do with nutrition, and education, but many of which have to do with the amount of effort that you put in to become smarter.
And what that means is that each of us has the capacity to get smarter starting today.
But in order to be able to do that, we have to make use of some principles of psychology.
You've all been asked to think for a living.
You haven't learned the way your minds work.
We wouldn't let you build a bridge without learning physics.
We wouldn't let you practice medicine without learning biology.
Why are we letting you think without learning how your mind works?
And so what I want to do in the rest of this talk today is to give you a formula for thinking more effectively.
And that formula has three parts.
You have to develop smarter habits.
Those smarter habits have to help you to acquire high quality knowledge.
And then you need to be able to use that knowledge when you need it.
And if you can do those three things, then you'll be smarter, and we'll pick up with the first of those smart thinking after a short break.
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