How to Develop Better Mental Models

How to Develop Better Mental Models

Developing good mental models is not the same as refining your personal worldview or arriving at a workable philosophy for life that you are happy with. Rather, it’s about learning to use your own brain as the primary instrument and reminding yourself constantly that the best way to think is the way that allows you to best understand what you are seeking to understand. Many people are surprised to learn that the idea of an ecosystem is just a model and not truly the way that the natural world works. Likewise most things they are taught in high school physics is a model—not actually what is happening. To develop your ability to use and create better models, try the following:

Expose Yourself to a Variety of Ideas

The key is variety. Read things that are not on the ordinary prescribed reading list. If you process only that information that everyone else processes, you will end up with a mental model much like theirs. Read little known material within your field, but also read material from other fields. Try to expand the depth and breadth of what you consider your field in the first place. If you are studying science, study also the history and philosophy of science. Look at how your topics of interest overlap with other disciplines, with politics, with culture, and over time.

Always Connect

Your brain is a pattern-finding machine. Every time you learn something new, ask how it fits into the web of meaning you already have. Look for links and connections (though, don’t force them!). Switch your perspective and look at the same problem through another expert’s eyes—what do they see that you didn’t notice before? Intelligent people are always cross-referencing ideas this way, but it’s something you can teach yourself to do. The real world is not like school, where each “subject” is cut into neat, separate chunks. Everything is happening all at once!

Cultivate Metacognition

Get into the habit of thinking about your thinking. Ask questions about the questions you are asking. Think about Feynman’s response to the question about magnets; he didn’t just talk about magnets on the level the question was asked. He pointed to the different ways one might look at magnets, and the different ways one might evaluate those ways. He pointed to the act of questioning itself as an object for deeper understanding. To the degree that you can think reflexively in this way, you will be able to think in, under, around, about, without, and outside the box, and spare yourself from becoming one of those people who don’t know they’re in a box at all.

Consider this (admittedly simplified) example. Johnny has come to make the following observation: Every time he drinks a single alcoholic drink, he feels completely and utterly ruined—he gets a fearsome headache, he feels on the brink of fainting, and it takes him two days to recover. He starts with a natural question: Why?

You might have a few suggestions after making the same observation, but from within Johnny’s map of the world, he comes to this conclusion: You are becoming very healthy and strong, and that means your body is more intolerant to toxins and poisons than ever before. This is a good thing. Johnny goes a bit further and starts to frame his alcohol intolerance as a subtle sign of his moral and spiritual development, too. It’s as though the very cells of his body are rejecting what is bad!

But Johnny could have thought about the problem in many different ways. He could have asked why can’t I process alcohol? and then investigated the properties of alcohol itself, trying to deduce its effect on him. Or, he could have concluded that there was a psychological reason—perhaps he has some deep, unconscious guilt and shame around alcohol and what it represents, and his intolerance is really a psychosomatic manifestation of his unresolved anger at his father, an alcoholic.

Perhaps he becomes curious about his belief that there is a problem at all. Is the issue that he is only perceiving that he is unwell after alcohol, but isn’t in reality? Or perhaps he takes a completely different approach again and says that his inability to tolerate alcohol is a sign that his body is weak, and the only way forward is to toughen up a bit and drink more regularly. And on and on . . .

One day, purely by accident, a blood test reveals that Johnny has a very common and harmless genetic mutation that means his liver doesn’t process alcohol quite as efficiently as normal, and this is why alcohol is especially hard on his system. He realizes all at once that he never considered this pretty obvious mental model—the medical one.

Now, the question is, which mental model was the “right” one? In Johnny’s case, the problem is an arbitrary one, and he can solve it without necessarily understanding why it happens (i.e., just stop drinking alcohol). In this case, it doesn’t really matter which mental model he uses. But if the substance was not alcohol but instead some common food item that he was deathly allergic to, then it definitely would matter which model he used, since it would heavily inform how he chose to “solve” the problem!

Get into the habit of stepping back, looking at your mental models as tools, and asking yourself, “Is this way of thinking actually helping me understand the problem? Is this really useful?” Once you’ve done that, you can begin to ask, “If this doesn’t help, then what kind of mental model would? How do I have to think if I wish to understand what’s in front of me?” It’s only then that things start to get interesting . . .