Another thing to consider when trying to become perceptive is that the way you learn in school—where the material is sequenced in a curriculum so that you are first exposed to simple examples and later to more complex ones—tends to make you less perceptive. Following a curriculum, you build mental models by processing simple examples, and then... See more

To avoid knowledge shields the US military, when it does accelerated training programs, avoids sequential curriculums and instead exposes soldiers to complex simulations and case studies that overwhelm them. The unpredictable, messy nature of the input makes it hard for the soldiers to form stable and coherent mental models, so they filter less... See more

When Maslow showed his subjects paintings, people who struggled to self-actualize would typically label what they saw (“It is a Picasso”) whereas the self-actualized would describe the concrete details of the painting they had before them (“There is an interesting tension between the yellows and the blues here”).