The Power Of Thinking By Tim O ' Brien

I like to stay organized, and this is especially challenging mentally with the hectic life of a high school student today. I feel calmer when my life is orderly, especially in my thoughts.

　　In the essay “Reading and Thought”, Dwight MacDonlad talked about the kind of poor reading people are attached to in modern society. MacDonald believed reading materials such as Times and New York Times are too overwhelming for the readers. Readers tend to skim through the reading materials because most of the reading do not have any connections with their daily lives. Moreover, MacDoanld claimed that the readings people do these days are not thoughtful. The readings are rather irrelevant toward the readers. It is because the journalists to produce dull pieces of readings which are meant to be skimmed through without having too much thoughts involved. As the journalists do not have much consideration of the materials they produced. To the journalists the readings they produce are just a series of news that should be read driftly and left behind with no thoughful idea needed to be informed. These effects caused modern society to have a poor reading habits because people do not reflect and give time to think about the readings they did. Readers casually accept the readings even though they do not have provide any resourceful information for the readers.

Cognitive distortions are said to be the ways in which our brain convinces us of something that is not true. College students experience cognitive distortions more often than none. The cognitive distortions in which college students experience would include the feeling of being a failure per not doing as well as you thought you did on a test, the rules we mentally make for ourselves, or negative global labeling. Cognitive distortions are believed to make us believe that information presented to us is rational and accurate when its goal is to make us continue to feel bad about ourselves. In the article, “The coddling of the American mind”, the authors, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt examines what they believe in the fact that professors are protecting students’ minds through warnings of offensive materials, which they believe encourages students to believe that it is damaging and dangerous to discuss certain aspects of our history (2015). College students endure these and many other cognitive distortions, but we are often made to believe that these distortions are acceptable simply because students’ minds are allowed to become more open to new ideas and new people due to the toning down of the perceptual state of mind to outrage and discomfort (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015).

In my past experiences I have really struggled with reading certain types of texts and then understanding what it means. There's only a few kinds of writing that I struggle with that I have troubled reading and understanding but it would help me become more comfortable overall. Junior year I wrote a formal essay but I ended up writing it like a text messages. Instead of a formal essay to my teacher, the essay was written towards a friend.

Intelligence has a limit, geniuses have a threshold, and divergent thinkers are our future. Malcolm Gladwell addresses these issues in the chapter “The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1” and I have to agree with his reasoning. In the chapter, the Termites are a group of highly intelligent kids that Lewis Terman (hence the name Termites) keeps tabs on as they go through life. He believes that because these students have such high IQs that they will be boundlessly successful. However, it turns out that some are successful and some are not, and I believe the success of the Termites was partially based on personality.

Individuals do this when they are not even thinking about it. Individuals do this when meeting new people, walking down the street, looking for a new shampoo, or even choosing a restaurant. What is it that individuals are doing you might ask? They thin slice constantly throughout their life and they do not realize it while it is happening.

I am reading Thinking Out Loud by Anna Quindlen. This book is a collection of two to three page essays. The book is organized into topics representing what each essay is about, however, many of the essay could fall into numerous categories. The categories are; “Unsolicited Opinions”, “Kids and Animals”, and “On the News” and “Women’s Rights”. Unsolicited is the major controversies such as AIDs and gay marriage. “Kids and Animals” included issues of parents dealing with their children and how their decisions affect their them.” On the News” were similar topics to “Unsolicited Opinions and Kids and Animals”, however I assume they were more publicized accounts. Lastly “Women’s Rites” discussed exactly what it says, women’s rights. Specifically, women’s rights involving man superiority in society, women’s payment in the work field, and abortion.

In Dwight MacDonald’s Reading and Though, he disagrees with Henry Luce’s Idea of functional curiosity. Luce coined the term “functional curiosity,” meaning “the kind of searching, hungry interest in what is happening everywhere.” MacDonald’s opinion of functional curiosity is that it only encourages practice in reading rather than giving beneficial information. He considers today’s literature as flimsy and overwhelming. MacDonald assumes that all reading done in today’s society is “shallow thinking.” I agree with MacDonald that there is a great amount of mediocre literature floating around, but he does not take into account the technological advancements, the lifestyles of people today, and students.

The purpose of this article was to explain the sociological imagination, which in other words is a new perspective. The author, C.Wright Mills, wants the reader to look at things at a new perspective and he tells us that from the quote “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both”. I didn’t quite understand this quote so I went ahead and looked into it and found an article online called Thinking Outside The Box. The way that they explained this quote was “think yourself away from the familiar routines of everyday life”. Thats exactly what Mills wants us to do. People generally tend to look at things at one perspective but rather we should look at things at multiple perspectives

For me, writing is thinking, thinking is writing. That is, I came to appreciate that to think clearly means to write clearly (and vice versa) even when dealing with difficult and esoteric concepts. I also learned that verbosity and clever phrases cannot save you if you haven’t read or researched sufficiently. In that regard, I develop habit to read, write and study more deeply and efficiently. What’s more, I’m coming to appreciate that being too cute in writing is not only only inappropriate but defeats the purpose. Still, I find it difficult to resist a felicitous turn of phrase. Maybe next

Right brain? Left brain? Both sides are very different and have their own characteristics that help determine what a persons potential strengths and weaknesses will be. “The human brain is split into two halves, each with its own unique abilities. This phenomenon, discovered three decades ago by Nobel Prize winner Dr. Roger Sperry and his associates at the California Institute of Technology, is known as brain lateralization” (Raudsepp, 1992, p. 85). Certain characteristics of a person can go so much deeper then just hobbies that a person enjoys. Brain function can play a major role in how a person perceives their surroundings, such as if someone like to draw or do math. On the other side of that if a person is very analytical and good at subjects in school such as math it could be linked to which side of their brain is dominant.

This distinctive book called, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, is one of very few exquisite readings I’ve completed so far. Daniel Kahneman is a psychologist in Princeton University, and due to his research, he won a Nobel Prize in 2002 in economics. In the beginning of his book, he speaks of our cognitive System 1 and System 2 ways of thinking. System 1 generates feelings, impressions, and memory. It is very instinctive, automatic, and is considered quick thinking. System 2 on the other hand, is alert during complex problem solving, while dealing with facts and knowledge, and is attentive while working with difficult calculations. For example, a problem such as 24 x 13, this takes more time and knowledge to figure out (System 2), rather then recognizing an emotion from face expressions (System 1). When System 1 is strained, your System 2 steps in to help you process through that specific instant. Now aside from the psychological portion of this book, Mr. Kahneman divulges about a consolidated economic analysis with elemental intuitions from the psychological perspective; such as, luck and skill, overconfidence, risks in the stock market, factors of success and the decision making process. This book is overall concluded with the understanding of behavioral economics, which is the social and cognitive components on economic decisions that are defined by individuals and have consequences that reflect from making those decisions and taking those risks.

Thinking, fast and slow written by an empirical researcher and psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, The book tells us how we can afford to think while we’re not even paying attention. It offers us the paths to better understanding ourselves, how to think automatically and common, instead of difficult and rare.

I have a love-hate relationship with writing. One of the many reason I hate writing is because I worry so much about my punctuation. I could be writing an amazing paper, but when I go back and find a thousand punctuation errors, I try to switch up the writing to make it flow more. When the topic is relatable I excel in the assignment, but if it is not relatable it takes me some time to start or find a connection I can use as a building block. One of the many things I love about writing is the freedom to express my ideas without feeling self-conscious. For example, I love writing spoken word poems, but finding the courage to actually say them aloud in front of an audience scares me a bit. Another negative for me is that I have difficulty expounding on simple topics that the teacher wants me to write more on. I could write a few sort sentences and answer the

Writing has always been something I dread. It’s weird because I love talking and telling stories, but the moment I have to write it all down on paper, I become frantic. It’s almost as if a horse race just begun in my mind, with hundreds of horses, or words, running through my mind, unable to place them in chronological order. Because I struggle to form satisfying sentence structure, it takes me hours, sometimes even days, to write one paper. It’s not that I think I’m a “bad writer,” I just get discouraged easily. Needless to say, I don’t think highly of my writing skills. When I was little I loved to both read and write. I read just about any book I could get my hands on, and my journal was my go to for my daily adventures. Although it’s