The expression “think twice” is simply a reminder to fully consider things before assuming that your first conclusion is the correct one. It reminds me of the carpenter’s rule: “measure twice, cut once.” Measuring twice is a rule that prevents a lot of mistakes in carpentry. In intellectual pursuits, thinking twice does the same thing - it prevents errors.

Of course, getting familiar with some of the common thinking errors also helps you avoid them. Here is a look at one to watch out for.

Think Twice About Straight-Line Projections

Upon his first visit to the ocean, a scientist noticed that the level of the water in the sea was rising. In fact, after carefully measuring it for a few hours, he noted that it was rising at the rate of more than a foot per hour. He took out his pen and paper, and quickly calculated that at this rate the ocean would be 700 feet higher in less than a month, drowning most of the major cities of the world. Within a year only the highest mountain tops would be above the water.

Fortunately, when he ran off to sound the alarm and show his calculations to others, they corrected his error. The ocean came up every day the people explained, and then went down again. He somehow hadn’t learned about tides, but soon saw that the people were right.

Now, you might think that this is nothing more than a silly story, with no relevance to real science and scientists, or your own errors, but think twice! Examples of this thinking error are all around. A cooling trend in the 70s had some scientists proclaiming that Florida would be too cold to grow oranges by 1985. Some of todays more extreme projections of global warming may be based on the same error (but they could be wrong in either direction).

I remember other examples from my own childhood. Sitting in the classroom in 1975, for example, my very serious science teacher showed us a very serious film which proved oil supplies would be depleted by 1990. The mathematics was undoubtedly correct. There was just so much oil in the earth, and our use of it was growing at a rate that showed we would clearly run out soon.

Of course, we didn’t run out in 1990, nor in the seventeen years since then. These kinds of projections often seem to ignore everything other than those lines on a chart. Or to the extent that other factors are considered, they are used to confirm those projections. Good math may be used, and the people using it may be very intelligent, but the error is in assuming we can reduce complex interactions to simple formulas that can then be used to predict the future.

As the price of oil rises, there is incentive for producers to find more. This was apparently ignored in the predictions of the scientists. If they had thought twice, it was easy to imagine that we hadn’t yet found all the oil in the planet.

High prices would also motivate people to use less at some point. It again takes only a bit of thought to imagine that people would use less gas when the price went from 50 cents-per-gallon to $4 or $15 per gallon. Demand might not be as great. This was also apparently ignored.

Of course, those high prices would cause people to buy cars that used less gasoline, as well as to look at alternative energy sources. Isn’t it reasonable to assume that many alternatives start to look attractive when oil prices are ten times as high? This too was ignored. In fact, in hindsight, the assumption in that “scientific” film that we would just keep using oil in the same way until one week it was gone - well, it seems almost silly now.

Many systems, whether economic, biological, psychological, political, or ecological, are self-correcting. That is, they have trends that look like they will continue to head in one direction, but there are other factors that will prevent this from going too far. Things won’t always return to some norm, or in a statistician’s terms, “revert to the mean.” But at the very least, the interactions of the various factors are complex enough that predicting the future based on a chart or trend isn’t too likely to succeed.

It would be nice if predicting the future was as simple as collecting data, charting it and assuming that any trends will continue in the same direction. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), real life is more complicated than straight-line projections can account for. So before you assume you can see where the data is leading, look at all the other things that might affect that trend line. In other words, think twice.

At some point in our lives, most of us have experienced a sudden insight, a strong gut-feeling about something that seemed to come out of nowhere, with no rational basis to explain it. That was your intuition trying to communicate with you. Did you trust your intuition? Many people don’t. They’re uncomfortable with the idea of intuition, especially if they’re scientifically or technically oriented people. But just because people don’t trust their intuition doesn’t mean that they are doing the right thing. This begs the question, “Can I trust my intuition?”

For most people, in most situations, the answer is yes, you can trust your intuitive side. Throughout history, many of the most successful, most spiritual, most effective people have relied heavily on their intuitive self for big decisions. Even in corporate America, in the boardrooms of the largest and most sophisticated corporations, senior officials rely on their sense of intuition as much or more than they do upon the data and reports the data gives them.

Some people won’t trust their intuition because they don’t understand where it comes from. Some feel that intuition is nothing more than the results of their subconscious mind processing all the information available to you in ways that you are not conscious of. Others believe that intuition is something that emanates from an unknown source of information that’s beyond our science and technology. Still others believe that it is a spiritual force, emanating from whatever power it is that guides the universe.

Fortunately, it doesn’t matter where you believe your intuition comes from. All that matters is whether or not your intuition is something that you can rely on to help you. And the answer to that is clear. When they heed the the messages from their intuition, most people discover that most of the time, their intuitive answer was the right one. That makes intuition a potentially empowering factor in your life. All that’s left to do is develop that force to fully benefit from it.

Expanding your intuitive side was once a difficult and time-consuming process frequently taking many years of hard work and meditation. Now, with Aine Belton’s Intuition Zone program, you can empower your intuition faster and more efficiently than ever before. Go to http://IntuitionZone.info to learn more.

You may have heard of the loci mnemonic or memory system. The general idea is to “place” the things that are to be memorized in predetermined locations in your imagination, so you can “find” them there later. The origin of this memory system is generally attributed to a story told by Cicero, an ancient Roman orator.

According to the story, the poet Simonides stepped outside during a banquet. The roof of the hall collapsed, killing the people inside. Most were crushed beyond recognition. Simonides, however, knew the guests, and was able to identify the bodies by remembering where each had been sitting. This suggested to Simonides a system for memorizing things by associating mental images of them with locations.

Greek and Roman orators used this system to memorize speeches. Parts of the speech could be mentally placed in different places along a familiar path, for example. Then, while giving the speech, the speaker could walk the path in his or her mind and “see” the next part of the speech. This made it possible to stay on track in a speech - even a long one - without written notes. A speech could even be rehearsed and further memorized by repeatedly taking that walk in one’s mind.

A Memory System For Speeches

To explain further, suppose you’re going to give a speech about the need for better education for young children. Your system uses a stretch you have walked in the town where you live. You have selected twenty locations along that walk as your place-holders. These could be a tree, a store, a corner, a house, and anything else that will be easy for you to imagine and remember.

Now, let’s assume you are imagining this walk as you speak. You come to a mailbox that is along the route, and is one of your place-holders. In your imagination you see books spilling off the top of it. This is an image you created after rehearsing a part of your speech about the need for better textbooks in the schools. It immediately brings to mind that part of the speech, and you find it easy to continue speaking. As you finish that part, you have moved in your imagination to the next stop on the walk, of course, with another image that will help you recall the important points.

You can place more than one item in each location, as long as they are easily remembered together. For example, in the example given, as you reach a big tree that is along your way, you might have exams falling out of the tree and a huge cake underneath, to help you recall what you want to say about testing and rewards for good exam results. Strong associations help, and that usually means unusual associations, such as those examinations falling from the tree. More on that in a moment.

More Uses For The Loci Memory System

The loci memory system I relied on for years used ten locations in my home. They started with a window at the front of the house, followed by the microwave oven, the sink, and so on around the house. The locations were in order, starting at the front of the house and ending near the back, so it was easy to move from one “loci” to the next in my mind.

When I could remember to use the system (no joke intended), it worked very well for memorizing and recalling lists of things. For example, if I was on my way to the store and had six or seven things to remember, I would quickly place them in order in my system’s locations. Then, once at the store, I could easily walk through my house in my mind and recall everything on the list.

The key to making this work, is to make the mental images outrageous or unusual. For example, suppose the first three things on my list were bread, bananas and potato chips. I might imagine someone throwing slices of bread at that window, bananas dancing in the microwave, and I might see myself carefully washing potato chips in the kitchen sink. I could also have the potato chips dancing with the bananas in the microwave if I needed to fit more than ten items into my ten places.

With wild images like these, I have no problem recalling the list, even the next day. I just do a quick mental tour of the house. This is one of the easiest memory systems you can try, requiring only that you memorize ten or twenty locations along a route that  you can travel in your mind.