# Metacognition and the Plumbing of the Mind [[livestreams/Critical Thinking, Dignity, and the Practice of Respect - Livestream|Livestream]] | [[collections/Livestreams Collection|Collection]] | [[collections/Livestream Lessons|Lessons]] | [[collections/Simple Reminders|Reminders]] | [[livestreams/comments/Critical Thinking, Dignity, and the Practice of Respect - Comments|2,154 Comments]] *From the livestream broadcast recorded September 4, 2018, in Brickell, Miami, Florida.* Think about a plumber for a moment, and then think about your own head. Over time, from childhood up, you have developed a set of pipes in there. Maybe you were slapped on the head every time you had a thought of your own, so you built a system of thinking that let you survive the house you were in. Maybe the lesson was subtler than that and arrived as a tone of voice. Either way the pipework got laid, and it got laid early, and it was laid in response to conditions that were real at the time. Then it ran for years. Pipes that run for years become solidified and entrenched, and what you end up with looks like the plumbing in an old building that has been renovated twenty times by twenty different people, each one working around whatever was already in the walls. That pipework is your brain. It is your neural pathways. It is the way that you think. And here is the part that matters more than anything else in this essay: it does not matter what idea you put into that set of pipeworks. Whatever goes in travels through the same tangled mess, and comes out the other end as Lord only knows what. If that description is starting to sound less like a sensible municipal system and more like a Rube Goldberg machine — the absurd contraption where a ball rolls down a ramp, tips a bucket, startles a bird, and eventually, nine steps later, wipes your chin for you — then the figure is doing its job. I say that with a grin, and it would not be the first time somebody looked at the human mind and reached for exactly that comparison; there is a serious literature arguing that evolution assembled us out of improvised workarounds rather than designing us, and the word it tends to use is *kluge*. The joke also carries a detail too good to leave out. Rube Goldberg was a trained engineer, and his first job out of university was with the Water and Sewers Department of the city of San Francisco. He lasted six months on real pipes before leaving to spend the rest of his life drawing ridiculous ones. ## Everybody Audits the Water and Nobody Audits the Pipes +Almost all of the effort a person spends on their own thinking goes into its contents rather than its machinery. They argue the topic. Democrats are terrible, Republicans are terrible, this policy is a disaster, that person is wrong. They accumulate positions, defend them, refine them, and swap them out for better ones when the old ones fail. What almost nobody does is step back and examine the apparatus the positions are running through. +Feeding new information into an old pattern of thinking is a category error, and its cost compounds rather than holding steady. New information never stops arriving, and in the present environment it arrives faster every year, so the obvious remedy is to improve what comes in. {{A settled pattern of thinking processes every arriving idea the same way, which is why improving the quality of what enters it changes so little.}} A brilliant idea entering a defensive mind comes out defensive. A generous idea entering a mind built for scarcity comes out as a calculation. People mistake the result for having complicated opinions, when what they actually have is one simple pathway handling a great deal of traffic. The entrenched route also runs cheaply, having been worn smooth by decades of use, while any replacement route runs expensively and feels artificial for as long as it takes to wear in. {{An old habit of thought feels true because it is cheap, and a better one feels false because it is expensive.}} So the useful move is the unfashionable one. Think about your pipeworks. Think about *how* you think, which is more important than thinking about *what* you think, because the how is operating on everything and the what is only operating on itself. > [!info] What the science says > The plumbing figure turns out to be close to the biology, and the relevant findings are old and well established. > > **Pathways strengthen with use.** Donald Hebb proposed in 1949 that neurons firing together strengthen their connection — the principle usually compressed to *cells that fire together wire together*. Bliss and Lømo demonstrated the physiological mechanism in 1973 as long-term potentiation, a durable increase in synaptic strength following repeated stimulation. A route used often becomes a route used easily. > > **Used pathways get physically faster.** Repeated activity increases myelination along active axons, and myelin raises conduction velocity. The pathway you travel most is not merely familiar; it conducts more quickly than its alternatives, which means it wins races it is not obviously winning. > > **The early wiring is pruned into permanence.** The young brain overproduces synapses dramatically and then eliminates the unused ones through experience-dependent synaptic pruning, continuing through adolescence. Connections that got traffic survive. Connections that did not were removed. This is why the routing installed in childhood is so difficult to find later — the alternatives were not merely neglected, they were cleared. > > **Practiced sequences become automatic and cheap.** As a sequence is repeated it migrates toward circuitry that executes it with less conscious supervision and lower metabolic cost. An entrenched habit of thought therefore feels effortless and correct, while a new route feels expensive and artificial — a difference in energy budget that most people experience as a difference in truth. > > **Metacognition is a measurable construct, not a figure of speech.** John Flavell named and formalized it in 1979, distinguishing knowledge about one's own cognition from active regulation of it, and the second half is the half that produces change. > > **The adult brain remains modifiable.** Structural and functional reorganization with sustained practice is documented across sensory, motor and cognitive domains. The pipes were laid early and they did not set permanently. Renovation is slower than installation and it is available. ## Thinking About Topics Is Not Thinking About Thinking There is an inward turn required here that most people will not make, and it is worth naming why they will not. Looking at your own routing is a form of introspection, and introspection is unpleasant in a specific way. {{Introspection offers no opponent, which is most of the reason people prefer an argument.}} Projecting an ideological position outward at least supplies the satisfaction of a target, a reply, a scoreboard. Examining your own pipework supplies nothing except the discovery that something you have treated as judgment has been running as reflex. The ontological framing is the honest one. This is thinking about thinking, and it sits underneath every topic rather than beside them. A person who becomes a vast reservoir of every factoid known to humankind has prepared to win a trivia game. A person who understands the mechanism by which their own conclusions get produced has prepared for anything that arrives, including the things nobody has thought of yet. And the practical payoff is larger than self-knowledge. Anyone accustomed to wielding unrighteous dominion over you will have a very difficult time of it once you can see your own reasoning operate. {{Most domination requires a person to process its input through reasoning it helped install, which is why someone who can inspect their own thinking is so difficult to rule.}} A person who can inspect the routing can decline the processing, which is a different and far more durable thing than winning the argument. ## The Renovation What all of this adds up to is a renovation rather than a diagnosis, and the distinction decides whether any of it is useful. +The pattern of thinking installed in a childhood was never a defect. It was a solution. A system of thinking that let a child survive a dangerous house was a competent piece of engineering under the conditions that produced it, and treating it as a personal failing gets both the history and the remedy wrong. What happened is only that the conditions changed and the plumbing did not. The building is still standing, the original problem is long gone, and the arrangement that solved it is still routing every drop. {{A reflex that was once a solution does not announce itself when the problem it solved disappears.}} So you renovate. You upgrade and maximize the existing pipework rather than condemning the building, and the first operation is inspection, because nothing can be re-routed until it has been traced. Read a book on critical thinking — a real one, the kind with exercises. Do it especially if you find yourself in fights with relatives, or at work, or feeling unable to express yourself, or feeling beaten down, or noticing your heart race and the urge to flee the moment a disagreement starts. That reaction is not a character trait. It is a pipe, and it was installed, and it can be replaced. The last thing I will say about it is that nobody should accept that feeling as the permanent weather of their life. It is debilitating and it is corrosive to self-esteem to live with it on a regular basis, and the reason it persists is almost never that the person lacks the capacity to think clearly. It is that nobody ever told them the plumbing was theirs to work on. --- [[about/About Bryant McGill|Bryant McGill]] is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author, systems architect, technologist, and strategic advisor, as well as a Congressionally Recognized Ambassador of Goodwill and United Nations–appointed Global Champion. His work spans naval intelligence systems, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and civilizational governance architecture. His forward analysis on U.S.–Israel Pax Silica frameworks has appeared in Jewish/Jerusalem News Syndicate (JNS). --- ## Related blogs - [[blog/20170712 - Move the Big Marble|Move the Big Marble]]: the next step after inspection, distinguishing the capacity to change from the leverage required to make an entire arrangement resettle. - [[blog/20190109 - Nobody Has to Be Thrown Away|Nobody Has to Be Thrown Away]]: graduated distance as an instrument, and the same principle that a reflex installed under old conditions can be revised under new ones. - [[blog/20261030 - Hacking a New Social and Psychological Firewall|Hacking a New Social and Psychological Firewall]]: the defensive layer that decides which ideas are admitted in the first place, upstream of the routing described here. ## Related Livestream Lessons **Directly related.** These broadcasts supplied the material cited in this piece and are documented with timestamps in the source notes below. - [[livestreams/Critical Thinking, Dignity, and the Practice of Respect - Livestream#Auditing the Routing Rather Than the Contents|Auditing the Routing Rather Than the Contents]] *(Sep 4, 2018)*: the pipework installed in childhood, entrenched through use, routing every later idea through the same path regardless of the idea's quality. **Indirectly related.** These broadcasts carry the same mechanisms without being cited in the body, and each one has its own developed lesson. - [[livestreams/The Power of One Positive Thought to Rewire Your Attention - Livestream#Self-Talk Is the Audible Output of the Routing|Self-Talk Is the Audible Output of the Routing]] *(Mar 8, 2016)*: decades-old self-criticism as the one part of the pipework a person can actually hear running, and the filter that reinforces it. - [[livestreams/Constructing Genius Through Metacognition and Deep Listening, Part 3 - Livestream#Inner Dialogue Is Held to the Same Standard as Speech|Inner Dialogue Is Held to the Same Standard as Speech]] *(Apr 2, 2016)*: the silent conversation inside a mind judged by the same criteria applied to poor outward speech. - [[livestreams/Metacognition, Flexible Identity, and Meeting Opportunity Halfway - Livestream#A Rut of Thinking Edits the Opportunities You Can See|A Rut of Thinking Edits the Opportunities You Can See]] *(Mar 28, 2019)*: a settled routing misinforming a person about what is available, so that two people standing in the same town inhabit different worlds. ## Related topics - [[wiki/Metacognition|Metacognition]]: thinking about the operation of one's own thinking, the inspection this piece is about. - [[wiki/Neuroplasticity|Neuroplasticity]]: the capacity that makes renovation possible rather than merely desirable. - [[wiki/Neural Plasticity|Neural Plasticity]]: the physiological side of the same capacity. - [[wiki/Synaptic Pathway|Synaptic Pathway]]: the pipe itself, in the vocabulary of the tissue. - [[wiki/Synaptogenesis|Synaptogenesis]]: the formation of new connections, which is what a new route costs. - [[wiki/Identity Pruning|Identity Pruning]]: elimination of unused connections, and why early routing is hard to locate later. - [[wiki/Habit Formation|Habit Formation]]: how a repeated sequence becomes the cheap default. - [[wiki/Habituation|Habituation]]: diminishing response to a repeated input, which is how a corrosive routing stops being noticed. - [[wiki/Introspection|Introspection]]: the inward turn the inspection requires, and the reason most people decline it. - [[wiki/Schema|Schema]]: the existing structure that incoming information gets assimilated into. - [[wiki/Rube Goldberg Machine|Rube Goldberg Machine]]: the comic figure for an accreted mechanism that performs a simple task through an absurd chain of dependencies. - [[wiki/Path Dependency|Path Dependency]]: why an arrangement adopted early keeps determining what is possible long after the conditions changed. - [[wiki/Predictive Processing|Predictive Processing]]: perception as prediction corrected by error, which is the modern account of why the routing dominates the input. - [[wiki/Cognitive Flexibility|Cognitive Flexibility]]: the capacity to switch routes rather than to run the one that is fastest. - [[wiki/Cognitive Agency|Cognitive Agency]]: ownership of one's own processing, which is what the renovation returns. - [[wiki/Cognitive Liberty|Cognitive Liberty]]: the political form of that ownership. - [[wiki/Confirmation Bias|Confirmation Bias]]: the mechanism by which a pathway collects its own evidence. - [[wiki/Selection Bias|Selection Bias]]: filtering that removes the disconfirming case before it is ever considered. - [[wiki/Classical Conditioning|Classical Conditioning]]: how a response gets attached to a cue without anyone deciding it should. - [[wiki/Fear Conditioning|Fear Conditioning]]: the specific case that installs the fastest and resists revision hardest. - [[wiki/Pattern Recognition|Pattern Recognition]]: the useful function that an entrenched routing is a degraded form of. - [[wiki/Intuition and Pattern Recognition|Intuition and Pattern Recognition]]: why a fast pathway feels like knowing. - [[wiki/Human Dignity|Human Dignity]]: the standing that makes an audit of one's own reasoning an act of self-respect rather than self-attack. - [[wiki/Respect|Respect]]: the conduct the broadcast paired with the instruction. > [!quote]- Broadcast source notes > **Primary broadcast: [[livestreams/Critical Thinking, Dignity, and the Practice of Respect - Livestream|Critical Thinking, Dignity, and the Practice of Respect]] (September 4, 2018).** The plumbing passage arrives inside a broadcast about argumentation and respect, after a long stretch on agreeableness, dinner-table debate, and the difference between arguing and fighting. Bryant had been recommending a book on critical thinking to people who find themselves on their heels, and the pipework figure is how he explains what such a book is actually for. > > 1. **25:23–25:51:** Bryant presses the book recommendation, aimed at anyone who finds themselves in the agreeable position on their heels a lot, and states the payoff: whoever is giving you a hard time "will have a very, very, very difficult time wielding unrighteous dominion over you if you develop these skills." > 2. **25:54–26:39:** He names the category. The skills are "ontological in nature," which he glosses as "this meta-thinking, which is thinking about the way you're thinking," and then gives the term directly — "so, metacognition, thinking about how you think." He rejects the alternative in passing: becoming "a vast reservoir of every factoid known to humankind" and going on Jeopardy is not practical. > 3. **26:39–27:22:** The diagnosis. Most people spend their time arguing a point — "Democrats are terrible, Republicans are terrible, et cetera" — while not knowing how to set the stage for proper argumentation, and "they spend most of their time thinking about topics instead of metacognition of thinking about how they're thinking." He frames the remedy as looking inward, a form of introspection, rather than "an outward projectile vomiting out your ideological viewpoint." > 4. **27:22–28:14:** The figure itself. "Thinking about how you're thinking is like this. It's like imagine that there's a set of pipes — think about a plumber. Over time, you've developed a set of pipes in your brain from childhood up." He supplies the origin without sentiment — "maybe you were slapped on the head every time you had a thought of your own, and so you develop a system of thinking which allows you to survive" — then the entrenchment, with the pipes becoming "more and more solidified" like "an old building that has been renovated 20 times." And the identification: "this pipework is your brain. It's the way that you think. It's your neural pathways. It's your metacognition." > 5. **28:14–28:57:** The claim the essay turns on, and the instruction that follows it. "It doesn't matter what idea you put in that set of pipe works. It is going to go through the same tangled mess, which is going to end out, Lord only knows what." Therefore: "think about your pipeworks and think about how you think. This is actually more important than thinking about what you think, because you're always going to be putting in new information. But what if you're constantly putting new information into an old antiquated system. You need to renovate and upgrade and maximize your existing pipe work." > 6. **28:57–29:28:** The prescription and its indications. Go get a book on critical thinking, especially if you end up in fights with relatives or at work, or feel unable to express yourself, or feel beaten down — "get that heart racing, that panic that you want to flee and there's a little bit of conflict. That sucks." Bryant tells the audience plainly that they should not feel that way, and that living with it regularly is "very debilitating and corrosive to your self-esteem."