Introduction
You often struggle to solve familiar problems because your brain relies on rigid, automatic patterns that resist new perspectives. When you face complex situations, logical analysis alone fails to break old habits and generate truly original ideas.
Edward de Bono examines the physical and functional mechanics of the mind as an information-processing system. You will discover how a passive memory surface automatically organizes incoming data and why standard logic reinforces mental traps.
The book moves from basic memory mechanics and physical models to identity formation, mental faults, and creative tools.
You will find answers to several key questions:
- How does the brain store and retrieve information without a central computer?
- Why do clever people often fall into rigid thinking patterns?
- What physical mechanisms cause polarization and stubbornness?
- How can you deliberately restructure established concepts?
1. Systems and Memory Mechanics
A system is an arrangement of circumstances that makes things happen in a specific way. Knowing the nature of a system helps prevent mistakes caused by false assumptions, allows adjustments for inherent limitations, and enables purposeful exploitation of its traits.
A system is an arrangement of circumstances that produces specific results, and the brain operates as a physical memory-surface that stores traces to shape future information handling.
An Englishman leaves shoes outside a hotel room door in America, where they disappear as garbage. A drunken driver drinks from a hip-flask after a crash to alter the system requirements for blood alcohol intent.
Simplicity and Complexity
Complex structures and functions are formed by the elaboration of a few basic principles. When exploring a system, choosing a level that is too detailed hides overall functions, while a level that is too high provides only broad functional terms.
House building involves eight levels of organization, ranging from brick chemistry to town-planning. Two people travel toward each other on a road. Person A starts at 8 a.m. traveling at 6 m.p.h. toward person B, while person B starts at 10 a.m. traveling at 4 m.p.h. from 30 miles away. They meet at 11.48 a.m. at a distance of 7.2 miles from the starting place of B.
Models and Notation
Philosophical definitions often engage in tail-chasing without offering real explanations. Working models and notations act as tools that preserve relationships so that the observer can watch them function independently according to their own rules.
René Descartes invented coordinates, and Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz discovered calculus with different notations affecting progress. The alphabet uses 26 letters compared to thousands of Chinese characters.
The Bad Memory Surface
Memories do not require special places or complete informativeness. They include physical traces on surfaces, modifications in ongoing processes, or hidden facilitations that make a past event easier to repeat.
Examples include curry stains on a tablecloth, an open door, or a dislocated shoulder that makes future dislocations slightly easier.
A grid of simple units capable of changing between two states can represent a vast number of distinct patterns. Each time a unit or box with two possible states is added, the total number of distinct patterns doubles, yielding astronomical combinations capable of holding immense information.
A noughts-and-crosses grid with 9 boxes provides 512 total patterns. A 10-by-10 grid with 10 boxes along each side yields 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 total patterns, while the human brain contains approximately 1 trillion units.
While a good memory-surface only stores information passively, a bad memory-surface actively alters, distorts, and omits incoming data through its internal rules. This selection and processing makes it a complete computer without needing a separate processing unit.
A wrinkled photographic film or a corrugated surface alters the pattern of dropped marbles so that they no longer land in a straight line.
2. Models of Self-Organizing Surfaces
Physical models like pins, jelly, and bulbs demonstrate how passive memory surfaces automatically form definite patterns and establish contours from incoming data.
You can understand this self-organizing mechanism through the polythene and pins model. Spray colored water randomly over a polythene sheet supported by pins. Small initial differences cause the liquid to collect in depressions, deepening them and drawing in more water until a distinct pattern emerges without active processing by the surface.
Systems can operate either as explosive positive feedback loops that amplify change or stabilizing negative feedback loops that counteract it. Positive feedback loops cause initial changes to feed back and increase further change. Negative feedback loops reverse the effect upon return to keep the system stable.
- A weak car battery gets weaker with continued starter use.
- Rich people get wealthier due to better credit.
- The great Wall Street crash was driven by falling stock prices.
- A ballcock turns off water in a cistern.
Polythene and Pins
The preferability surface amplifies small input variations into bold, definite patterns. When an area becomes overcrowded or unstable due to positive attractions, negative factors force out moderate units. Undergraduates crowding into a river punt until the more sober and timid people leave provide an everyday illustration of this self-selecting system.
Circular Systems
An ordinary fruit jelly dish sculpted by hot water demonstrates how past patterns leave permanent traces that guide and interpret incoming information. Spoonfuls of hot water dolloped onto a flat fruit jelly surface create depressions, channels, and a backbone channel. Subsequent dollops flow into these channels, deepening them and forming a sculpted record of past events that forces new patterns to follow old contours.
The Jelly Model and Flow
Activation flows across the memory surface either smoothly and continuously or in a jerky, staccato fashion punctuated by pauses as units tire. Swift flow occurs when thresholds decrease continuously along a row, representing instant intuition or imageless thought. Staccato flow happens when a tiring factor raises the threshold of active units, causing activation to snap rapidly from one favored area to the next in a sequence of images.
A memory surface made of individual switches with thresholds can mimic neural networks when combined with an inhibiting mechanism to limit total activation. Advertising displays with hundreds of separate bulbs illustrate how pictures flow across the surface by lighting new bulbs and turning off old ones.
Because the memory surface has a strictly limited area of activation, it processes only a small part of a presented picture at a time. You might drive past traffic lights for years without noticing a metal tongue of flame on top of them because attention settles exclusively on the traffic light itself.
3. Identity and Thinking Behaviour
Equipping the memory surface with a body creates self-interest, while thinking flows passively along established d-line pathways shaped by short-term memory afterglows.
Freddie the small black sphere is designed as a space-age pet for modern living that moves around on its own when kicked or when hitting obstacles. Because it moves around on its own without obvious outside agency, observers naturally attribute an identity, self, and purpose to it, much like a moving disc of light on a wall.
Self and Identity
A pure memory-surface is completely selfless and treats all environmental features with total impartiality based solely on familiarity. By adding a body with internal needs like hunger and reactions like pain, internal patterns intrude and direct attention based on usefulness rather than pure information maximization, creating individuality and emotional bias.
A syringe causing a painful injection leaves a pattern that links with pain, so the sight of the syringe subsequently gives rise to fear.
Elaboration and D-Lines
Communication between the environment and the mind occurs through three basic types:
- Basic type 1: Communication by transfer
- Basic type 2: Communication by confusion
- Basic type 3: Communication by trigger
The North Atlantic cable carries telephone conversations under the ocean as communication by transfer, while modern art flings a bewilderment of sensations as communication by confusion.
D-lines connect units with low thresholds that tend to become activated as a whole, representing established patterns. Repetitions and overlaps are shown as parallel lines shifted slightly to the side to indicate relative degrees of familiarity and frequency without cluttering the diagram.
Passive Abstraction and Thinking
When successive spoonfuls of hot water are placed on a jelly model in one session, surface tension and wetness act as a short-term memory, causing water to flow into the existing wet area and form a single network of channels. If spread over several days so the surface dries, separate networks form instead. This afterglow mechanism allows the mind to synthesize fragmented attention areas back into a complete whole.
When a cat jumps down from your lap, you may still feel the cat sitting there for some time after it has gone, illustrating short-term memory as a lingering impression.
Unit excitability is altered by specific factors:
- Factor 1: direct falling pattern raises excitability
- Factor 2: connected units raise excitability
- Factor 3: repeated activation permanently raises excitability
- Factor 4: short-term memory afterglow raises excitability
- Factor 5: inhibiting influence decreases excitability
- Factor 6: tiring factor immediately lowers excitability
Established patterns can divert attention flow away from weaker inputs or force new patterns to be interpreted entirely through pre-existing ones via centering. The author failed to notice the peculiar metal tops on traffic light standards in Marylebone because attention was diverted by the stronger, dominant pattern of driving a car.
Abstraction requires no conscious effort. Common features occurring across multiple pictures occupy the same position on the memory-surface and are naturally reinforced and emphasized every time. Thinking is simply the passive flow of activation over these uneven ground contours, much like water flowing across a carpet with depressions.
4. Limitations and Faults of the Mind
The memory surface suffers from momentum errors, polarization, and self-perpetuating myths that make it resistant to new information and prone to extreme categories.
Thinking flows passively along established d-line pathways. This means your mind cannot easily establish new routes by itself. Instead, it relies on trigger communication where a single fragment makes the system supply the rest of a fixed pattern.
You can experience momentum errors when expectations diverge from reality. The Ames distorting room uses a tapered structure to make a rectangular space, which makes a person standing further away look much larger. Your brain reacts to what should be present rather than what is actually there.
Attention areas form artificial organizing frameworks called myths. A woman once believed she had a childhood fear of being sucked down the plug-hole with bathwater until discovering her family used tin baths without plug-holes. Some myths are self-perpetuating because they turn contradictions into supportive evidence. A paranoid person finds proof of persecution in events offered to prove there is none.
Polarization and Words
Words act as polarizing drains that channel meanings into fixed patterns. Medical students often imagine they suffer from diseases like cancer or tuberculosis after reading textbooks because definite names polarize vague symptoms into complete illnesses.
Divisions on the memory-surface can be static or mobile. The avant-garde magazine Oz was published as a single folded sheet, prompting tax authorities to categorize it as a poster rather than a magazine and propelling it into a distant administrative category. Creating a specific unit automatically implies an opposite pole. An author discussing low blood-pressure mentioned tilting patients upwards, and a colleague assumed the opposite was flat, completely missing the downward tilt.
Continuity and Bias
Continuity preserves established contours, making processing dependent on arrival sequence. People given five thin plastic pieces arranged in a specific sequence inevitably form rectangles at intermediate stages, making it nearly impossible to discover the square pattern.
Internal motivational patterns act as a bias that dominates the memory-surface. A hungry person driving through streets notices restaurants more readily than traffic signposts.
Notation and writing freeze patterns in time. You can use notation to alter natural thought sequences:
- Take a pattern out of the sequence by transferring it to paper through writing or notation.
- Arrange the notation in a spatial sequence that is unrelated to the natural flow sequence.
- Go over the notation according to the new spatial sequence to set up new idea pathways.
5. Lateral Thinking and PO
Natural thinking follows passive contours and emphasis without proportion, relying heavily on clichés, perceptual dominance, and categorical extremes. If one Irishman gets drunk and becomes a nuisance, natural thinking jumps to the conclusion that all Irishmen are always drunk. Dream thinking acts as a caricature of natural thinking where spontaneous items appear first and are linked by subsequent flow.
Lateral thinking and the generative tool PO deliberately disrupt entrenched patterns to allow fresh arrangements and insight restructuring.
Logical and Mathematical Thinking
Logical thinking restrains the excesses of natural thinking by selectively blocking established pathways through the management of the negative signal NO. Monkeys show severe distress and nausea when a familiar keeper wears a distorted mask, illustrating the physical discomfort associated with a visual mismatch.
Mathematical thinking uses pre-set algorithms and rules to process translated symbols, bypassing the inherent limitations of the special memory-surface. While a brilliant mathematician solved a complex bee and cyclist puzzle using a tricky diminishing series technique, schoolboys solved it instantly by shifting attention from distance to time taken. The distance between cyclists was thirty miles apart, the speed of cyclists was fifteen miles an hour, the speed of the bee was fifty miles an hour, there were one hundred and eleven entrants in a tennis tournament, and thirty-two pieces of chocolate were involved in these exercises.
Lateral Thinking Techniques
Lateral thinking is a generative process that rearranges available information to break out of established patterns and create better ones, operating like insight. Early photographers planned every detail of lighting and pose before taking a single picture to match expectations, while modern photographers take dozens of shots from random angles and lights afterward, picking the best unexpected result.
Problems are divided into three basic types, two of which require lateral thinking rather than logical processing:
- 1. Problems that require the processing of available information or the collection of more information.
- 2. The problem of no problem where acceptance of an adequate state precludes change.
- 3. Problems solved by restructuring information already processed into a pattern.
A motorist blocked by a slow flock of sheep completely filling a narrow walled lane was able to proceed when the shepherd turned the flock around and drove it past the stationary car, changing the perspective from moving the car to moving the sheep. You can apply lateral thinking deliberately through fixed techniques:
- Random input: expose the problem to an outside random stimulus, such as opening a dictionary to a random word, and oscillate attention between it and the problem.
- Quota: set a fixed quota of alternative approaches that must be found before following any single promising path.
- Rotation of attention: divide the situation into parts and require each part in rotation to become the center of attention.
- Reversal: take something and turn it upside down or reverse its defined direction.
- Cross-fertilization: provide formal opportunities for different minds and perspectives to interact and spark new ideas.
The Function of PO
PO is a tool for lateral thinking that allows unjustified information or the end point to be treated as true to enable insight restructuring. Faced with urban overcrowding, generating the nonsensical end point Po people should live inside one another leads directly to the practical idea of shift systems for high utilization of living and working spaces. You can use PO in several distinct ways:
- Use PO at the beginning of a statement to cover propositions not justified by experience or logic.
- Use PO as a link between two concepts to challenge divisions.
- Use PO in place of no or not to respond to statements.
- Use PO to counteract the effect of NO by rephrasing a blocked statement as a positive qualified by PO.
Andy Warhol painted a can of soup, breaking through the rigid artistic block that previously classified canned goods as non-art, after which a supporting context developed permanently. Unlike hypotheses or logical suppositions, PO is deliberately unreasonable, provocative, and designed to work against the established system.
10 Key Ideas
- While a good memory-surface only stores information passively, a bad memory-surface actively alters, distorts, and omits incoming data through its internal rules.
- Physical models like pins, jelly, and bulbs demonstrate how passive memory surfaces automatically form definite patterns and establish contours from incoming data.
- Activation flows across the memory surface either smoothly and continuously or in a jerky, staccato fashion punctuated by pauses as units tire.
- Equipping the memory surface with a body creates self-interest, while thinking flows passively along established d-line pathways shaped by short-term memory afterglows.
- Abstraction requires no conscious effort because common features occurring across multiple pictures occupy the same position on the memory-surface and are naturally reinforced and emphasized every time.
- The memory surface suffers from momentum errors, polarization, and self-perpetuating myths that make it resistant to new information and prone to extreme categories.
- Words act as polarizing drains that channel meanings into fixed patterns.
- Logical thinking restrains the excesses of natural thinking by selectively blocking established pathways through the management of the negative signal NO.
- Lateral thinking is a generative process that rearranges available information to break out of established patterns and create better ones, operating like insight.
- PO is a tool for lateral thinking that allows unjustified information or the end point to be treated as true to enable insight restructuring.