Patterns in the mind

We all have patterns of thought in our minds that we have been building all of our lives. For example we learn to recognise and name aspects of experience - both tangible aspects like 'car' or 'factory' and intangible aspects like 'passion' or 'development'. These patterns of experience also include non-nameable and sometimes extremely complex patterns, of which we are barely aware, but which may be vital to our wellbeing. For instance we may make decisions about investment in development without being able to put our finger on why we believe it is necessary or why it will work out well.

Many of the deeper patterns are fixed and forgotten – for instance, how to ride a bicycle. We forget why we behave in certain ways and sometimes the way we behave is more driven by forgotten patterns than by current circumstances. In other areas we are constantly shifting patterns and experimenting with re-arrangements – we continue to learn.

Mapping ideas

Just as early explorers made enormous strides by representing locational and environmental experience as pictorial maps of information (which revealed not only what was known but, more important, what was not known) so we can represent visually information in the terrain of our minds. It is not that we have pictures in our minds but that we can easily relate to visual representations of thought patterns. How often do you see someone gesturing or sketching to illustrate their thinking - we use the expression 'a picture is worth a thousand words' to describe the richness of pictorial representation. A map is a representation of the whole of what is known such that it can be comprehended also as a whole. There are many techniques for making thought maps and COGNIFY is one of the most powerful and intuitive tools available today.

When we try to communicate ideas we use pictures. We make pictures with our hands, we draw in the sand or we move objects around the table to help express our ideas. Even subtle nuances can be expressed by the relative position of the objects we use to communicate. Of course this is not surprising as we all have physical bodies through which we relate to the world and, indeed, through which we have discovered everything we know and experience.

These days in the computer world they speak of ‘object orientated programming’ which is the way computer environments are evolving to more closely match the inner world of our minds. COGNIFY is a tool which makes it very easy to extend the pattern recognition capability natural to your mind and to develop a fluency in visual thinking that can be used to structure your knowledge, to express your ideas, to solve problems and to communicate clearly through writing and speaking - anything from short presentations to theses and books.