It sounds like a bold claim, but this book really does explain how we learn, why learning, recognizing, understanding, eureka moments and humour, give us such an enjoyable neuro-chemical buzz, how our pre-conscious association-detecting experience-trapping model-making neural networks generalize and abstract from a stream of personal and cultural experiences, to construct our causal maps and models of reality, our value systems and our emotional associations. It explores the strengths and weaknesses of human thinking (our cognitive biases) and shows how we can take conscious control of our personal development, updating old and dysfunctional models of reality to take account of new experiences and changed circumstances. It opens up the possibility of rewriting the HOWs and WHYs that drive our behaviour and motivation, and presents a powerful Graphical Thinking Tool (based on thinking-in-triplets) that everyone can use, individually or in groups, to explore and understand the deep structure, and the dynamic behaviour patterns, of any problem, any system, and any 'body-of-knowledge'. Understanding may be unfashionable, but it is still 'the ultimate study skill', and the key to success in any field of endeavour. This book is an update of the 2007 edition - 'Understanding Thinking' which brings together important ideas from D. Kahneman's 'Thinking Fast and Slow', J. Haidt's excellent work on our evolved moral matrix, and Kegan's ideas about the 5 stages of our cognitive development. It also goes into more detail about the fundamental concepts and vocabulary needed for everyday pragmatic systems thinking and problem solving.

I hope you enjoy it.