How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?

The most interesting thinkers in these fields—the “first-rate intelligences”—have been the ones best able to “flicker” between alternative perspectives on the same problem, paying attention to the objective and subjective while recognizing that neither can be collapsed into the other.

So often, we assume that real thinking—serious thinking—is done alone, bent over a book or a notepad. But in fact, humans think best when they are interacting with others. Social activities like debating, storytelling, and teaching activate mental processes that remain

Two decades ago, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposed the concept of “flow” to describe the internal state of energized focus that characterizes the mind at its most productive. It’s a lovely metaphor, precisely because it suggests the essential fluidity that good ideas so often need. Flow is not the singular intensity of focusing “lik