Cognition and Metacognition

Thinking &
Metacognition
Dr Usman Amin Hotiana
HOD , Behavioural Sciences & Psychiatry Deptt.
RLMC

• Simple shifts in points of view can open doors to expansions of
consciousness as easily as rigid dispositions can close hearts and minds
to such elevated awareness. It generally depends on whether you allow
fear and violence to rule your actions or whether you give wisdom,
courage, and compassion the authority to do so.”
• The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all
other things, takes no notice of itself: and it requires art and pains to
set it at a distance and make it its own object....

• If by this inquiry into the nature of the understanding, I can
discover the powers thereof; how far they reach; to what things
they are in any degree proportionate; and where they fail us, I
suppose it may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man to
be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its
comprehension; to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its
tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things
which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our
capacities.”
• ― John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Objectives
• Understanding psychological principles underlying the
process of thinking
• Learning about Metacognition (Effective Studying)
• Relevance of these concepts as a Medical Student & Doctor
• Examination Keys

Emotional Barriers
• Inhibitions
• Fear of failure
• Inability to tolerate
• Ambiguity
• Excessive self criticism

Cultural Barriers
• Value systems that consider fantasy and imagination a waste
of time
• Being taught that playfulness is exclusive domain of
children
• Categorization of reason and logic as good but
• Feelings , intuition, pleasure and humour as bad

Think about the process of Creativity
• What was it ?
• What did you do ?
• How can you break into stages?
• Anyone wants to share their experience?
• Can unmute and share ……

Stages of Creative Thinking
• Orientation
• Preparation
• Incubation
• Illumination
• Verification

Think of a creative person around you

How CREATIVE Are you ???
• Unusual awareness of people, events, and problems
• High degree of verbal fluency
• Flexibility with numbers and concepts
• Originality ofideas and expression
• Sense of humour
• Ability to abstract, organise and synthesize
• High energy and activity level
• Persistence in tasks of interest
• Willingness to take risks
• Vivid and spontaneous imagination

• Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey defines
a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire.
• Knowledge is the “what to do.” Skill is the
“how to do.” And desire is the “want to do.”

Thinking & Habit
• Habits are powerful forces because the ways of
thinking and acting
• they engender tend to operate on a subconscious level. When this
happens, knowledge and skill often become second nature and the
person is regarded as an expert. As long as the knowledge and
the skills remain relevant, the related habits are valuable and
useful.
• yesterday’s expertise can suddenly become today’s folly,
especially when the experts resist the new realities and insist on
the old ways.

Plan and Control :
• Since Frederick Taylor first codified the nineteenth
century top-down hierarchical management model that is
still practiced by most companies today, the basic formula
of management has been “plan and control.”

Thinking in 21st Century
• Planning has been the foundation of strategy, and control
has served as the platform for execution. Today this basic
formula no longer works because, in a rapidly changing world,
strategies are not planned; they’re discovered. The new
formula for twenty-first century business is
•“explore, experiment, and execute.”

• In his seminal book, The Wisdom of Crowds, James
Surowiecki challenges this notion by documenting that there
are many times when the crowd is smarter than
any individual expert. He demonstrates that when
there is a diversity of experts, nonexperts, and even
eccentrics who are free to express their opinions without
fear of any retaliation, and when there is some type of
aggregation mechanism to collate the individual observations
into a collective intelligence, this is often a smarter and
faster path to knowledge.

Unveiling the secret
• At its core, critical thinking comes down to questioning the
source. For example, if I look at a performance
report, I immediately want to know:
• What are the primary metrics being looked at?
• How is success defined?
• How is the data being collected?
• Does the data give me enough information to make
decisions?

Strategy
• Define
• Determining the problem before looking for solution
• Engage in discussion
• Conclusion

Believer, gullible or skeptic !!!
• Don't always believe what scientists and other authorities
tell you! Be skeptical! Think critically! That's what I tell my
students, ad nauseam. And some learn the lesson too well.
• I want to give my students the benefit of my hard-won
knowledge of science's fallibility. Early in my career, I was a
conventional science writer, easily impressed by scientists'
claims. Fields such as physics, neuroscience, genetics and
artificial intelligence seemed to be bearing us toward a
future in which bionic superhumans would zoom around the
cosmos in warp-drive spaceships. Science was an "endless
frontier," as physicist Vannevar Bush, a founder of the
National Science Foundation, put it in 1945.

Claims of Physics
• Now, I urge my students to doubt the claims of physicists
that they are on the verge of explaining the origin and
structure of the cosmos. Some of these optimists
favor string and multiverse theories, which cannot be
confirmed by any conceivable experiment. This isn't physics
any more, I declare in class, it's science fiction with
equations!
• .

Claims
• I give the same treatment to theories of consciousness,
which attempt to explain how a three-pound lump of tissue—
the brain—generates perceptions, thoughts, memories,
emotions and self-awareness. Some enthusiasts assert that
scientists will soon reverse-engineer the brain so thoroughly
that they will be able to build artificial brains much more
powerful than our own

Claims about storage
• Scientists have proposed countless theories about how the
brain absorbs, stores and processes information, but
researchers really have no idea how the brain works. And
artificial-intelligence advocates have been promising for
decades that robots will soon be as smart as HAL or R2-D2.
Why should we believe them now?

Skepticism
• To drive this point home, I assign articles by John Ioannidis,
an epidemiologist who has exposed the flimsiness of most
peer-reviewed research. In a 2005 study, he concluded that
"most published research findings are false." He and his
colleagues contend that "the more extreme, spectacular
results (the largest treatment effects, the strongest
associations, or the most unusually novel and exciting
biological stories) may be preferentially published." These
sorts of dramatic claims are also more likely to be wrong.

Expert Predictions
• doubt is a critique by psychologist Philip Tetlock of
expertise in soft sciences, such as politics, history, and
economics. In his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment,
Tetlock presents the results of his 20-year study of the
ability of 284 "experts" in politics and economics to make
predictions about current affairs. The experts did worse
than random guessing, or "dart-throwing monkeys," as
Tetlock puts it.

Thinking
•
• What is Thinking?
• Role of Long term Memory and Imagination
• Problem solving based on HEURISTICS (Efficiency system)
and ALGORITHMS ( on chess wont be applicable)
• Imagination is our Newness….. Part of Evolution …. New
latest fuel.

Japan
• Give up the clutter
• Mess creates stress.
• There’s a strong link between your physical space and your
mental space.
• Clutter is bad for your mind and health. It can create long-
term, low-level anxiety.
• When the book, The Japanese Art of Reorganizing and
Decluttering, by Marie Condo became a best-seller, it wasn’t
too surprising.

Choose the right answer:
Using manual gear in an automatic car is an example of which
kind of obstacles to thinking :
1. Mental Set
2. Functional Fixedness
3. Misleading information
4. Assumptions
5. Negative Transfer

Explanation
• NEGATIVE TRANSFER -Manual gear for automatic car
• Assumption ( of a solution)
• Misleading information ( Right kind of information ,
relevance
• Hanger can be used to open a locked door ( Functional
Fixedness – Solution)
• Particular strategy about a problem ( Mental Set)

Splitting
• The official psychological term for black and white thinking
is “splitting.” At its extremes, splitting can be a symptom of
mental illness like Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). In
everyday settings, it can simply hold us back from
experiencing some of the richness of our lives and
relationships.

Is it DANGEROUS?
• 1. Black and white thinking can negatively impact your
relationships
• 2. It can hurt your self-image
• 3. It can hold you back from success
• 4. It can literally change how you feel
• 5. It can signal a deeper problem

QUICK SPLITTING CHECK
• A simple exercise involves thinking of binary or extreme
words you might use to describe a person, relationship, or
situation (bad/good; ugly/beautiful) and then imagine more
nuanced ways to describe situations. It can also help to
actively cultivate empathy.

Nurture your own CREATIVE SKILLS
• Suspending advocacy of your own idea o push for another persons
concept
• Putting your own idea to same test you apply to an idea from someone
else
• Combining two different ideas and making them better as one idea
• Let someone else take ownership of your idea in order to build support
for it
• Displaying the patience to wait for someone else to say what needs to
be said so all you have to do is agree
• Sticking to your guns amid challenges to a creative idea which makes
solid strategic sense
• Always looking for new creative skills to develop in yourself and those
around you

• OBSTACLES: Culture/ Ourselves.. … Putting down
playfulness as what child do. Child is the only original
creator. That Child needs to survive.

• TYPES OF THINKING FISH: Fantasy , Imaginatory and
Rational . cf. Dil has mind with two eyes, rationality and
imagination … Avicenna?

• Qualities of a Creative Thinker: Imaginative, new solutions,
humour, lots of energy , risk taker…. Pushes his own
interests….

• METACOGNITION: Thinking about the process of
thinking… How do we learn ? How can we become more
efficient machines. How can we process knowledge at
advanced speed.

• ‫میٹاکوگناشن‬:‫سوچنا‬ ‫میں‬ ‫بارے‬ ‫کے‬ ‫عمل‬ ‫کے‬ ‫سوچ‬...‫ہم‬ ‫؟‬ ‫ہیں‬ ‫سکتے‬ ‫سیکھ‬ ‫کیسے‬ ‫ہم‬
‫ہیں‬ ‫سکتے‬ ‫بن‬ ‫مشینیں‬ ‫موثر‬ ‫زیادہ‬ ‫طرح‬ ‫کس‬.‫علم‬ ‫پر‬ ‫رفتار‬ ‫کی‬ ‫درجے‬ ‫اعلی‬ ‫طرح‬ ‫کس‬ ‫ہم‬
‫ہیں‬ ‫سکتے‬ ‫کر‬ ‫عمل‬ ‫پر‬

Super studying Techniques
Active reading
Contents &
Structure
Main points ,
summary
Scan for logic
Unlock difficult
terms
Highlighting
Understand and
then criticize –
Compare concepts

Phases of learning
Planning
phase
Monitoring
phase
Evaluating
phase

STAGES OF CREATIVITY
• Look at leisure thinking ….what you do is you enjoy ,think ,
gather more information, not the difficulty portions, finds
their solutions…. Formally five stages…. Initial, incubation ,,,
processing, illumination,..delivery …. ( can you suggest some
new stage of this making ) eg. … inspiration, pliagarism ….
Originality ….Exercise: Think about all new concepts ….how
could yhou have done something different. … Do it in reading
researches…

• ‫دیکھو‬ ‫سوچ‬ ‫پرسکون‬ ‫اور‬ ‫دہ‬ ‫آرام‬....‫معلومات‬ ‫مزید‬ ، ‫ہیں‬ ‫سوچتے‬ ، ‫ہیں‬ ‫کرتے‬ ‫کیا‬ ‫آپ‬
‫ہے‬ ‫ڈھونڈتا‬ ‫کو‬ ‫حل‬ ‫کے‬ ‫ان‬ ، ‫ہیں‬ ‫کرتے‬ ‫حاصل‬ ‫کو‬ ‫حصوں‬ ‫مشکل‬ ، ‫ہیں‬ ‫کرتے‬ ‫جمع‬....
‫مراحل‬ ‫پانچ‬ ‫باضابطہ‬....‫انکوباشن‬ ، ‫ابتدائی‬,,,‫روشنی‬ ، ‫پروسیسنگ‬,..‫حوالگی‬( ....‫کیا‬
‫ہیں‬ ‫سکتے‬ ‫کر‬ ‫تجویز‬ ‫کی‬ ‫مرحلے‬ ‫نئے‬ ‫کچھ‬ ‫کے‬ ‫سازی‬ ‫اس‬ ‫آپ‬)‫۔‬...، ‫افزائی‬ ‫حوصلہ‬
‫پلیاگارسم‬....‫مولکتا‬....‫ورزش‬:‫سوچو‬ ‫میں‬ ‫بارے‬ ‫کے‬ ‫تصورات‬ ‫نئے‬ ‫تمام‬....‫یہاوو‬
‫ہے‬ ‫گیا‬ ‫کیا‬ ‫مختلف‬ ‫کچھ‬ ‫کیسے‬... .‫کرو‬ ‫ایسا‬ ‫میں‬ ‫پڑھنے‬ ‫تحقیق‬...

• Advanced Learning techniques… Scanning, noting impotant
points, ….Visual imagery … ( football ground is one acre,
visualize patient : Exercise tell a description …. )

Some questions ?
• Difference btw critical and creative thinking?
• How negative people can be identified?
• How negative thoughts can be dealt?
Does overthinking effects physical health?
How much thinking is too much thinking ?

Thank you
• Any questions or feedback ?

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wimkqo8gDZ0 clouds

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