One of surest ways to improve your thinking is to expand awareness and unearth the scaffolding of your internal reasoning process. Achieving a higher level of self awareness of your thinking process is easy once you understand the idea of mental models in general and gain an insight into your own mental models in particular.

Learning about mental models can help interpret reality more accurately, understand life situations, help make fundamentally better decisions and improve problem solving chops.

In the last three years, I have invested a significant amount of time exploring and experimenting with cognitive biases and mental models. This piece is a distillation of some of the highlights, epiphanies and paradoxes that have been excavated in this journey.

It is a personal mission to keep pushing the envelope of this conversation and you are welcome to partake and contribute to it.

Mental models are deeply held – and mostly invisible – beliefs and assumptions about how the world works. A set of heuristics, thumb rules and pattern recognition hacks that we develop subconsciously while immersed in the business of living. A mental model is what we believe or have been taught to believe about which cause leads to what effect. It can be a result of your own first hand experiences or a function of the conditioning bequeathed to you when you were not watching. It constitutes our expectations, our predictions and our assumptions about how something will or will not work.

An example of a common mental model is the belief that to scale a business up, it takes a lot of effort and resources. This was true at a time when scaling up was more physical in nature and it may be true in some cases, even today. Even so, the fact is that scaling an app digitally and making it available to everyone is relatively simple. This goes against everything that we were taught or knew about business.

A second example is the frequently unexamined and subliminally believed tenet – that there is no gain without pain. While this may be true in some instances, this lens frequently gets hardwired into our brains. Subsequently, it changes how we frame situations and events and choices in our life. We may for instance, reject an option because on the face of it, it does not match our mental model of pain and gain – of our reality. The fact remains that there can be gain without pain. Or pain without gain.

Another example of a pervasive mental model that all of us have is that everything must have an ‘opposite’. i.e Hot – Cold. And yet, there is no such obligation in reality. Life has no opposite. Death is the opposite of birth, but not of life. Death is subsumed as part of life.

Mental models are instantiated in our neurons and synapses and influence of the structure of our thinking in the long run.

Mental models guide perception and behavior. It resembles a personal algorithm that fundamentally fashions how we interact with the world – a perceived internal map of an external reality. One which is not always informed by reality itself or its changing, dynamic nature. Our mental models decide what we pay attention to and what we ignore.

Fun fact: All mental models are wrong. This co-exists with the fact that good mental models are extremely useful and worth their weight in gold.

A model or theory can never be 100 percent accurate because ultimately it is an human imposition on nature. Some like the Pareto principle may be more valid than others but nearly all will have exceptions to the rule.

By definition, a model is a representation and simplification of reality rather than reality itself. When we attempt to straight jacket complexity into first principles, collateral damage is par for the course. There are always going to anomalies and exceptions to the mental systems you have built.

City maps are often riddled with errors and missing streets, even so it is an invaluable tool if you want to navigate a new city efficiently and effectively. So long as you prize utility and functionality over consistency, you are good.

Reality is integrated. The business of dividing knowledge into narrow domestic disciplines is entirely a human predilection.
The boundaries that we have created between subjects are man made for our convenience and exist only in our minds. In nature, science rolls in the bed with math. Literature and behavioural science are natural partners. Marketing can have a one night stand with nearly other subject. There are more preposterous vicissitudes to life than what any one single philosophy can account for.

A readily clarifying example of this comes from one of my favourite thinkers, the Stanford biologist, Robert Sapolsky.
He posits the classic existential question “Why did the chicken cross the road?’ and goes on to frame the responses as follows:

* If you ask an evolutionary biologist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because they saw a potential mate on the other side.”

* If you ask a kinesiologist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because the muscles in the leg contracted and pulled the leg bone forward during each step.”

* If you ask a neuroscientist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because the neurons in the chicken’s brain fired and triggered the movement.”

Strictly speaking, none of these explanations are wrong. Even so, an individual mental model is just one view of reality. The challenges and situations we face in life are generally multi – factorial, i.e have more than a single cause – effect underpinnings.

The magical sweet spot is to inhabit the space of intersectionality. You don’t need to be an expert at everything but you need a working knowledge of more than one subject if you want to optimise your thinking. By spotting the links between various mental models, you can identify solutions that most people overlook. A broad base of mental models is critical for cogent, critical and clear thinking.

We extrapolate our mental models without any conscious effort or knowledge and therefore teasing them out is a gigantic task. The mental models we use the most are also invariably the ones that are most deep seated and the ones that we are likely to be blind about and blindsided by.

That said, it is an entirely worthwhile undertaking. Diving into the deepest recesses of your mind and illuminating it with an unerring spotlight is almost always a rewarding and energizing experience.