Barbara Oakley: Get unstuck from a thinking rut

(soft music) - It turns out that it's all too easy for us to fall into a sort of rut in our thinking, and it can feel so comfortable, so good. We can feel so certain that it's right, that we can't even realize that we're stuck in a rut. Part of this is called einstellung, right? This kind of effect. You seem one approach to do things, and you are convinced it's right, and even if it isn't the best approach, you just can't see other approaches because you've already locked in that first approach. To some extent, we do that in everything we do in life, because as we grow, as we grow from infants, our earliest years, we have lots of synoptic connections. And as we don't use some of them, they just wither away in die. So even by six months of age, what happens is, you've lost the ability to even hear certain sounds of other languages, because you haven't actually used those circuits yourself. So what you want to do in your…