How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

by Benedict Carey

To Plato, thinking was a dynamic interaction between observation and argument, which produced “forms,” or ideas, that are closer to reality than the ever-changing things we see, hear, and perceive. To this, Aristotle added the language of logic, a system for moving from one proposition to another—the jay is a bird, and birds have feathers; thus, the jay must have feathers—to discover the essential definitions of things and how they relate. He supplied the vocabulary for what we now call deduction (top-down reasoning, from first principles) and induction (bottom-up, making generalizations based on careful observations), the very foundation of scientific inquiry. In the seventeenth century, Descartes argued that creative problem solving required a retreat inward, to an intellectual realm beyond the senses, where truths could surface like mermaids from the deep.