For deep understanding you need to appreciate similarities and differences.
Categorisation is one tool that helps you build this appreciation.
One important aspect of deep thinking is to know what sets one thing apart from another thing,
but also where they share common features.
This requires, but also builds, an understanding on a deeper level.
Most people who look at these two pictures, for instance, would only see two sheeps.
But if a shepherd were to look at them, they not only could see that the sheep belong to
different breeds but also whether the sheep are healthy or not.
If, on the other hand, you show the image of a sheep, a giraffe and an orca to a biologist,
they could tell you that they all belong to the order of even-toed ungulates.
Biologist had to study the anatomy of these animals very carefully before they could arrive
at this deep level of understanding.
To build the understanding takes time.
And one way to do this is repeated categorising or grouping.
When we categorise, we’re forced to notice similarities and differences and to weigh
them off against one another, to be able to place things into a specific box.
So we’re forced to think in a very specific way.
We start with a list of words, a list of images or a collection of real items.
Next we go through the list and we compare and contrast the items with one another.
The goal is to find a set of categories so that every item fits into one of them.
Ideally, no category should be called “miscellaneous” and you usually want to keep the number of
categories to a minimum.
Let’s look at an example!
Here we got a list with the elements: roof, gift, Italian wine, hedgehog, elephant, needle,
Garden Eden, pear, portal, check, out as in football, dock, lost properties office, mistake
and lux.
How can we categorise them?
Let’s see… some of them are animals: elephant and hedgehog.
A pear and a wine are plants.
So maybe we can put those into one category.
Actually, lots of the other ones are human made.
A roof is built.
A dock is also built.
Well maybe let’s say we have human-made objects, natural objects and then we have
more abstract things.
Human made objects are roof, needle, portal, check and dock.
Natural objects are: Italian wine, hedgehog, elephant, pear.
Abstract things are: gift, Garden Eden, out as in football, lost property office and mistake.
What’s still open is lux…
Now lux is Latin for light.
Actually, if instead of
If we think of the natural category of anything that is concrete
but not human made, light can go into natural.
Hang on; I was originally thinking of the natural category as something related to
living beings.
But if I now put light in there and say natural means non-human-made, I’ve got a problem
with my wine.
It is a human product, so I have to rearrange that and put it into the human category.
And now that I think about it, the pear as we eat it today is also not a natural product.
It is the result of many generations of humans tampering with pear trees.
But there must have been a wild ancestor species at some point.
So if I take pear as referring to that, it still makes sense in the natural category.
As you can see, even with such a simple list of words, I really need to think in order
to put them into the right categories.
And I had to revise categories and classification scheme as I went along.
And that’s it, what makes categorisation such a powerful thinking tool.
The categories I found are not the only ones, by the way.
There are others which are also justified.
If you can think of any, share them in the comments, so that we all can learn something.
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on how to think deeply and creatively.
And I see you in my next video.