Answering a question isn’t complete until there is a thorough questioning of the near-term implications and the long-term consequences. Deep understanding requires cognitive harmony between explanations, answers, implications, and consequences.

The most powerful strategy for answering questions is asking questions. This query approach especially probes assumptions, ideas, and the relevant fact base. It sharpens thinking considerably and moves us toward deep understanding because we’ve come to know what our answer is based on.

In this episode I’ll show you how to use your point of view and a recognition of your motive—what you are trying to accomplish with your thinking—to craft big questions that provoke deep learning that leads to satisfying explanations.

Questions are the engines that drive thinking. Exploration through questioning is native learning mode—just remember your 4-year-old self—and you can go back!

Real thinking involves chewing on a compelling question. Powerful answers invoke cause and effect. Those answers have immediate implications as well as long-term consequences and both of those lead to actions.

Thinking is driven by questions. Questions are answered through the power of patterns recorded in our conceptual frameworks. Our concepts, in turn, are accountable to our assumptions and fact base.

The core of your thinking is the combination of point-of-view, motivation (what you are trying to accomplish with the thinking), and questions you think this perspective can help to answer.

Great conversations are driven by empathetic listening that results in good questions. Good questions encourage the other person to open up and share. Good questions give the questioner an opportunity to learn from another person’s life experience.

Principles are the power tools of thinking. Learn how to construct principles that satisfy your need for things to make sense. When something makes sense you won’t have to struggle to remember it or to use it in problem-solving.

Patterns don’t simply emerge on their own. They are the fruit of “creative scrabbling” through Subsidiary-Focal Integration (SFI). SFI is the model of knowing proposed and developed by physical chemist Michael Polanyi as a corrective to the positivism that pervades science. For Polanyi knowledge is a personal journey to reality, not an encounter with impersonal brute facts.

Creativity is just connecting things" was Steve Jobs summary. Learn how to create transformative patterns through connecting concepts.

Finding a pattern in a collection of specifics through induction is the essence of the transformative insight that we call the "aha" moment. Learn how to increase the frequency and wattage of your lightbulb moments.

The mind’s primary strength lies in its passionate pursuit of patterns. Pattern recognition is the basis for forming the categories in the brain that we call concepts. Concepts are formed through a process of logical justification that involves both inductive and deductive reasoning. Concept construction is the crucial prerequisite to all lasting learning.

Our inability to remember events from our first two or three years of life clarifies the basis for durable learning of anything.

A willingness to regularly explore new knowledge can be a source of delight as you invigorate your suppressed curiosity. Who knows? Exploration may even lead to solutions to your most difficult cognitive puzzles!

Focused exploration is using exploration to encounter additional ideas when you are trying to answer a question. The question proscribes the search.

This season we’re exploring how to develop a series of dispositions that lead to Learner’s Mind. Attention is the first manifestation of curiosity, but attention should lead inexorably to perception—an awareness of the nature of the thing.

The first disposition required for clear thinking is attention. The brain ignores the vast majority of sensory inputs but learning presupposes basic awareness. Attention devotes brain resources to an intentional selection of particular inputs. Attention is about taking the lid off your brain to allow more inputs, not focusing more intently on the task at hand.

The 7 C’s of Cognition reflect a logical sequence of processes that the brain is designed for. Learn how to extract patterns and formulate concepts even when presented with facts.

Conscious conceptualization as important as it is, is only the tip of the iceberg. Many of our cognitive breakthroughs occur through consolidation while we are asleep.