three important mind tools

The age of science is sometimes called the age of analysis.  Teachers make use of a classification system that organizes educational goals and questions and test items into basic classes (often called Bloom's taxonomy)

1. memory - what does our text say?
2. comprehension - state the text's point in different words
3. application - How is this knowledge used?
4. analysis - take apart something into its components
5. synthesis - put things together to make something
6. evaluation - judge whether an idea or theory or something is any good

Those 3rd and 4th sections, analysis and synthesis, are two historically important tools that human minds have used over the centuries.  Modern physical science has been very successful at taking things apart and then taking those things apart, all the while studying the components.  Analysis is very important and is used all the time in all sorts of thinking, research and investigation.

As thinkers have looked over the recent 1000 years, the importance of analysis has stood out.  I read, probably in that very wide-ranging book, Brian Christian's "The Most Human Human", that Chinese physicians and medical scientists were deeply impressed when they watched a human body being dissected.  As the structure inside the body was revealed and compared to a Dutch textbook of the time. the drawings matched the body perfectly while a comparable Chinese text bore no resemblance to the actual structure.  Analysis of the body was a tricky and legally dangerous thing to do for several centuries.

Putting things together is certainly important for human activity and progress.  Often, a new component is created and immediately recognized for what it can do when inserted into a computer or a camera.  One fundamental aspect of synthesis is drawing a loop around an era, a plan, a planet and declaring "That's one", one era, one plan, one planet and looking at that whole or at alternatives to what has been labeled One.

A third major tool that doesn't appear explicitly in the Benjamin Bloom taxonomy is the "re-start", the do-over, the fresh start, the new beginning.  We all know that power when working on a puzzle or a computer problem or an essay in simply declaring "time for a re-try."  Jane Gardam's hero is named "Old Filth", after the British slogan applied to the late 1800's and early 1900's in London: "Failed in London, Try Hongkong" (FILTH).  If you make a try in London that doesn't succeed, move to Hong Kong and make a new try.

Our country's non-Native American population was mostly people who wanted to move to a new place and try again.  Even the Indians who walked across the Bering Strait from Russia to Alaska were on the move to something new.  Sure, tenacity and perseverance pay and maybe that manuscript needs more editing and sharpening.  But there is always the possibility of a new start.  It is very modern. 

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety