Some Thoughts on Thinking

Some years ago, my father was diagnosed with a tumor in one of his kidneys. It was a small cyst, discovered early enough and not lethal yet. All the doctors we consulted seemed to agree that they must remove the cyst. My father traveled to Kerala for the procedure. The first doctor he met was someone with a lot of fame and many years of experience. He looked at the scan reports and said he would remove the kidney.

I was working in Bangalore at the time, and until my father had reached the hospital, I had not fathomed the seriousness of the whole thing. I panicked when I heard about the nephrectomy and called a few doctors I knew. One of them, a senior doctor, bluntly told me that he has seen this sort of thing several times before and that there is no point in delaying it further: “just have the kidney removed, and he should be alright.”

Another doctor I telephoned put it a little differently: “The doctor your father consulted is one of the best in the region, and if he thinks this is the right procedure, it must be. But if you feel the need for a second opinion, you should see Dr. so-and-so in Mangalore.” And so it was that we reserved an appointment with the doctor in Mangalore for the day after.

I visited Mangalore, accompanying my father. The doctor looked at the reports in detail and pointed out that, fortunately, the cyst was at the bottom of the kidney. The doctor recommended a partial nephrectomy, which meant that he would only remove a small part of the kidney surrounding the cyst. The doctor reasoned that my father, who was only in his mid-fifties then, would still need the remaining portion of his kidney, which was functioning well otherwise. He also added: “If this had happened about fifteen or twenty years ago, we might have had to remove the kidney.”

We went forward with the procedure. It’s been more than a decade since that day. There have been other medical emergencies in my father’s life after that. Yet, I mostly remember that one instance with his kidney, not just because of the anxiety we dealt with then. Every time I hear someone say that their experience has taught them something, I remember the doctor who didn’t have one iota of doubt about the course of action he prescribed. It was a lesson for me, for life. I still wonder how many of our everyday decisions we make upon an exaggerated assumption of experience.

I first started pondering seriously about the act of thinking when I started reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. There were a lot of books on thinking that I had stumbled upon in my growing-up years. None got me thinking the way Kahneman’s book did. Kahneman drew our attention to biases and their effect on our thoughts. Earlier this year, I read another book on thinking, “Think Again” by Adam Grant. Together, these books have greatly influenced how I think about thinking. I do not claim to have figured out some magical art of decision-making by reading any of these books. I know now that I have probably little to no control over some biases that shadow my thoughts. But, I can say without a doubt that these books have helped me to identify specific patterns in my thinking, patterns I could do without. Sometimes I recognize the patterns after an act, and sometimes I catch myself in the act of following the pattern.

We all have deeply wired opinions and ideas that we have formed over a lifetime of watching, listening, and reading. When the pandemic first hit us, many were confused and uncomfortable with the new reality. We were not sure how to handle the news, how to prepare. Once the initial frenzy was over, we started forming ideas on subjects as vast as virology and vaccinology, which are strange enough even for doctors who have had many years of training and exposure. When we have learned enough to talk about a subject at our dining table, we also think we have the knowledge to tweet about it with authority. This phenomenon of people brimming with overconfidence in subjects they lack any competence in is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It is just one of the many phenomena that affect people who do not think before they act, speak, or er... tweet.

Grant draws upon the research of countless others before him and thereby emphasizes the most integral point of his book: to hold a scientific frame of mind in one’s approach towards any problem. Regardless of what profession one is in, a person with a scientific mind must doubt what they know, approach anything they don’t know with curiosity, and update their views whenever new information is available. Why does this become difficult for so many of us?

“Questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable. It requires us to admit that the facts may have changed, that what was once right may now be wrong. Reconsidering something we believed deeply can threaten our identities, making it feel as if we were losing a part of ourselves,” Grant writes.

The doctor who first saw my father had more experience as a surgeon than the doctor in Mangalore had. At the time, he was a septuagenarian and an active surgeon still known to be among the best in his discipline. Experience and renown can be distracting, though. And in the field of medicine, these mistakes could be costly. Where a small excision from the organ would have been enough, the doctor prescribed excising the whole organ itself, a procedure that was at least a couple of decades old. Not for once did the doctor give thought to what other solutions were possible in the light of more recent developments in medical science.

Adam Grant’s Think Again packs so much power and insight in each of its pages for a book of only three hundred and odd pages. It is a book not just for people starting off in any industry. Think Again is also a reminder for the people at the top, the experts, the leading authorities of their respective fields, be they doctors, engineers, lawyers, educators, or chefs. Questioning every assumption, unlearning them, rethinking, relearning: these are the most critical skills we need today, whether you’re building a kitchen for a restaurant or you are developing a vaccine against one of the worst pandemics history has known. In that sense, today, we compete with ourselves, versions of us from yesterday more than with anyone else.