Dr. Edward de Bono is regarded as a leading international authority on creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking skills. He was born in Malta in 1933 and was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University where he read psychology, physiology, and medicine.
He has held faculty appointments at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London, and Harvard. He is an M.D. with a Ph.D. in psychology and physiology.
He was a lecturer in medicine at Cambridge University (1976-83), and is now involved with a number of organizations to promote the skills of thinking which break out of the trammels of the traditional (lateral thinking ). These include the Cognitive Research Trust, Cambridge (director since 1971), and the Supranational Independent Thinking Organization (secretary-general since 1983).
His books include The Use of Lateral Thinking (1967), Teaching Thinking (1976), and I Am Right, You Are Wrong (1990).
Humour is by far the most significant behaviour of the human mind.
You may find this surprising. If humour is so significant, why has it been so neglected by traditional philosophers, psychologists and information scientists?
Why humour is so significant and why it has been so neglected by traditional thinkers together form the key to this book.
Humour tells us more about how the brain works as mind, than does any other behaviour of the mind - including reason.
It indicates that our traditional thinking methods, and our thinking about these methods, have been based on the wrong model of information system.
It tells us something about perception which we have traditionally neglected in favour of logic.
It tells us directly about the possibility of changes in perception.
It shows us that these changes can be followed by instant changes in emotion - something that can never be achieved by logic.
If you are setting out to work in a new field you should thoroughly research that field. Right? Wrong! The traditional view is that you should read all that you can in order to get the base of existing knowledge and then move forward from this. There is a flaw in this argument and it is a flaw in the scientific method. We do not just get knowledge, we get knowledge packaged up as concepts and perceptions. ... Together these concepts and perceptions give what Thomas Kuhn called paradigms.
If you are interested in Knowledge Management, the
Knowledge Café
or the role of conversation in organizational life then you my be interested in this online book I am writing on
Conversational Leadership
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