The Consistency Principle The third principle for choosing constraints is perhaps the most obvious: consistency. Constraints should not be placed in direct contradiction to one another. As we envisage alternative realities, one constraint cannot go against another one; otherwise our counterfactuals would keep running into contradictions.

The minimal-change principle pushes us in a particular direction when picking counterfactuals: we tend to omit rather than add. It is easier for us to imagine a world without some features of reality than to introduce ones that do not yet exist. If you are asked to imagine a color you haven’t seen before, you likely will fail.

Einstein reframed physics by showing that time, long considered constant, is actually relative.

Frames help to do two tasks really well, which we outline in chapter 2. First, in novel situations or when circumstances change, our ability to choose a frame provides us with new options. Second, and at least as important, in situations that are familiar, frames focus our mind, thereby reducing our cognitive load. It’s an incredibly efficient way

The idea of agency provides that humans have choices and can exercise them. We are subjects, not objects, in the world. We have the capacity to act. Having agency hinges upon our ability to frame causally. This is not to say that “free will” exists objectively, nor that human choices aren’t influenced by social structures. Yet only if our actions h

Frames empower us because they focus our mind. When they work well, they highlight the essential things and let us disregard the rest.

The second element of our mental models is counterfactuals, which we examine in chapter 4. These are imagined alternatives to reality; hypotheses of a world in which one or several things are changed. As with causality, we think in counterfactuals all the time. They come naturally to us. Counterfactuals let us escape the cognitive here and now: we

Metaphors “reflect an ability of the human mind to readily connect abstract ideas with concrete scenarios,” he wrote in an academic paper in 2010 titled “The Cognitive Niche.” Metaphors can be considered expressions of human frames. They reflect causal relationships that capture a concrete situation and can be abstracted to apply to other domains.

Thomas Edison in the early 1900s believed motion pictures would replace classrooms—a vision only realized a century later when Zoom became the new schoolhouse.