First point: this is not another book about how adopting a positive attitude will make you rich and / or President of the United States. The author, Art Markman is a well respected cognitive scientist as well as Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas, Austin.
I wouldn’t normally make such a point of the author’s qualifications, but since there’s no mention of them in this paperback original, you might be left in some doubt. Don’t be. He’s the real thing.
That said, he also knows how to make things nice and simple for folks such as ourselves, who have bought the book at the airport and haven’t got time to read the latest research on cognitive psychology. He knows we are time-pressed multitaskers (which he disapproves of), and so each chapter starts with a quick summary of what you can hope to learn from it, and finishes with a summary of what you’ve just read.
Markman is a little like a magician who keeps telling you how he does his tricks, not least since he tells us that research shows that people have a lot of trouble remembering more than three things from any presentation. Handily, his aim in the book is to “teach you about the three core aspects of thinking: Smart Habits, High-Quality Knowledge, and Applying Knowledge.”
On his way to doing this he makes a lot of points that will chime with travellers, such as the difference between waking up in your own bed and driving to work, and waking up in a hotel room while on a business trip, negotiating a new bedroom and bathroom, finding the rental car in the car park and then driving to wherever your first appointment is. Examples such as these are used to explain quite complicated ideas about how we form habits and why they are useful, but also how they can work against us.
Since I spend a lot of my day typing, I enjoyed the history of how the QWERTY keyboard came about, how it was good for stopping mechanical typewriters from jamming but isn’t actually the best layout, yet will probably survive for a few years more simply because we’ve all got used to it (“path dependence”).
He also describes well something I have found numerous times when forced to use the keyboards of computers in hotel business centres abroad. A few key differences and you can spend hours trying to work out how to find the @ on a keyboard, or in Germany, the Z and Y keys are swopped, which can make for some pretty interesting words.
The Creating Smart Habits is useful, since it explains how to beat bad habits by not only changing the environment which creates the habit, but replacing the habit with a good one (rather than nothing). Promoting Quality Learning has good tips on presentations (start with an advance organizer, stay focused on three key points, and summarise them at the end). He also has good commonsense ways of increasing the chance that you remember what went on in a meeting, how to remember people’s names, and the Rule of Three.
Understanding How Things Work, the next section, is made memorable because Markman concentrates on the mechanism which causes a toilet to flush and invites us to see if we can describe the process, from start to finish (the toilet bit, not our part in it).
This illustrates what he calls the illusion of explanatory depth, which is that common phenomenon when you think you understand something until you try and explain it to someone, and then discover you don’t. To improve causal knowledge, the trick is to try and explaining things to yourself as you go along. In this way you teach yourself, make yourself smarter and also ensure that the knowledge is truly understood. He also says you should demand this level of understanding from the people around you, and so create a Culture of Smart among co-workers.
You’ll also find chapters on the power of analogies, and how they help you and others understand complicated concepts. Markman advises finding new ways to describe problems to find solutions to them, and is persuasive in his examples.
I could go on, but then, the book is an easy read, though rewards re-reading. Unlike many of these “Think yourself smarter” books, this one has lots of good advice, and feels like it relies on primary sources more than secondary. In fact, I bet I end up reading a lot of what is in this book, taken out of context by “Think yourself successful” gurus. Save time, read it here, at the source.
Tom Otley First point: this is not another book about how adopting a positive attitude will make you rich and / or President of the United States. The author, Art Markman is a well respected cognitive scientist as well as Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas, Austin.
I wouldn’t normally make such a point of the author’s qualifications, but since there’s no mention of them in this paperback original, you might be left in some doubt. Don’t be. He’s the real thing.
That said, he also knows how to make things nice and simple for folks such as ourselves, who have bought the book at the airport and haven’t got time to read the latest research on cognitive psychology. He knows we are time-pressed multitaskers (which he disapproves of), and so each chapter starts with a quick summary of what you can hope to learn from it, and finishes with a summary of what you’ve just read.
Markman is a little like a magician who keeps telling you how he does his tricks, not least since he tells us that research shows that people have a lot of trouble remembering more than three things from any presentation. Handily, his aim in the book is to “teach you about the three core aspects of thinking: Smart Habits, High-Quality Knowledge, and Applying Knowledge.”
On his way to doing this he makes a lot of points that will chime with travellers, such as the difference between waking up in your own bed and driving to work, and waking up in a hotel room while on a business trip, negotiating a new bedroom and bathroom, finding the rental car in the car park and then driving to wherever your first appointment is. Examples such as these are used to explain quite complicated ideas about how we form habits and why they are useful, but also how they can work against us.
Since I spend a lot of my day typing, I enjoyed the history of how the QWERTY keyboard came about, how it was good for stopping mechanical typewriters from jamming but isn’t actually the best layout, yet will probably survive for a few years more simply because we’ve all got used to it (“path dependence”).
He also describes well something I have found numerous times when forced to use the keyboards of computers in hotel business centres abroad. A few key differences and you can spend hours trying to work out how to find the @ on a keyboard, or in Germany, the Z and Y keys are swopped, which can make for some pretty interesting words.
The Creating Smart Habits is useful, since it explains how to beat bad habits by not only changing the environment which creates the habit, but replacing the habit with a good one (rather than nothing). Promoting Quality Learning has good tips on presentations (start with an advance organizer, stay focused on three key points, and summarise them at the end). He also has good commonsense ways of increasing the chance that you remember what went on in a meeting, how to remember people’s names, and the Rule of Three.
Understanding How Things Work, the next section, is made memorable because Markman concentrates on the mechanism which causes a toilet to flush and invites us to see if we can describe the process, from start to finish (the toilet bit, not our part in it).
This illustrates what he calls the illusion of explanatory depth, which is that common phenomenon when you think you understand something until you try and explain it to someone, and then discover you don’t. To improve causal knowledge, the trick is to try and explaining things to yourself as you go along. In this way you teach yourself, make yourself smarter and also ensure that the knowledge is truly understood. He also says you should demand this level of understanding from the people around you, and so create a Culture of Smart among co-workers.
You’ll also find chapters on the power of analogies, and how they help you and others understand complicated concepts. Markman advises finding new ways to describe problems to find solutions to them, and is persuasive in his examples.
I could go on, but then, the book is an easy read, though rewards re-reading. Unlike many of these “Think yourself smarter” books, this one has lots of good advice, and feels like it relies on primary sources more than secondary. In fact, I bet I end up reading a lot of what is in this book, taken out of context by “Think yourself successful” gurus. Save time, read it here, at the source.
Tom Otley 
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