Knowledge: A Cage of Context

Knowledge: A Cage of Context

December 15, 2008. By Peter Lloyd

This is the first in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to escaping the Four Cages of Context, the principal impediments to greater creativity, innovation, invention, problem solving, and human progress. Today we'll escape the cage of Knowledge.

I had no fixed idea derived from long-established practice
to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from
the too general belief that whatever is, is right.
—Henry Bessemer

All of us should have learned by now that everything we think we know remains open to correction, contradiction, even rejection. How many times have you learned that what you've learned no longer passes the test of truth? How many of the following statements do you think are true?

Bats are blind.

Humans use only 10% of their brains.

Marie Antoinette said, "Let them eat cake."

Your hair and fingernails continue to grow after you die.

The speed of light is an immutable constant.

Cold weather causes colds.

Man is the only animal that kills for sport.

Eskimos have more than a hundred words for snow.

Santa Claus wears a red suit.

Most of these statements are debunked in a book called Everything You Know Is Wrong. It humbles the reader, even if only half the author's research is correct. More importantly, it illustrates just how often what we accept as true turns out to be wrong. As anyone who keeps up with developments in science knows, even our most revered constants, like the speed of light, come under question.

Indeed every important discovery challenges something we thought was true. A few centuries ago, any fool could see that the ocean came to an end at the horizon. That "fact" kept early sea-going traders and explorers close to shore. Then Christopher Columbus escaped that knowledge cage only to lock himself into the mistaken conviction that he had discovered a new route to the East Indies.

Obviously knowledge becomes a cage when it prevents us from considering contradictory evidence. Einstein labored for years under various mistaken assumptions. He came to his breakthrough insights only after throwing out long-held scientific "facts." He got around some uncomfortable evidence by inserting a fudge-factor he called the cosmological constant. Later in life he found the counter-intuitive concepts of quantum mechanics too much to embrace.

Why do we cling to our convictions as if life depended on them? Because we need to know. Our big brain demands knowledge. Accumulating it and keeping it handy drives one of our principal survival mechanisms. We'd be lost without knowledge, even though it can cage our creativity.

To escape the cage of knowledge, we need to remain open to new evidence, no matter how disconcerting. But this is so much easier said than done. It would be easier to separate a bear cub from its mother than to tear ourselves away from our need to think we know.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest business problems.

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