The Science Behind Your Thinking Profile
This model is built on decades of research in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. Each article below explains the theory, what the research found, and how we integrated it into the questionnaire.
23 articles · 6 dimensions · 100+ papers
Cognitive Channel
What you think with
The Silent Voice in Your Head: Inner Speech as a Thinking Tool
When you talk to yourself in your head — that silent voice narrating your thoughts, arguing both sides of a decision, rehearsing what you will say — t...
Thinking in Pictures: The Mind's Eye as a Cognitive Engine
Some people do not think in words at all — they think in pictures. When they reason about a problem, they see spatial arrangements, diagrams, and conf...
Thinking Through the Body: When Muscles Know Before Words Do
Your body is not just a vehicle for your brain — it thinks. When you get a gut feeling about a decision, when you gesture while explaining something a...
Thinking Without Pictures or Words: The Abstract Mind
What if you could think without any sensory support at all — no inner voice, no mental images, no bodily feelings? Just pure reasoning about relations...
Strategy & Dynamics
How you advance your thinking
Thinking by Fighting Yourself: The Power of Adversarial Reasoning
Some people advance their thinking by attacking it. They propose an idea and then immediately try to destroy it, like a boxer sparring with their own ...
The Art of the Right Question: Socratic Thinking in Everyday Life
Socrates never gave answers — he asked questions. And not random questions: each one was designed to expose an unexamined assumption, force you to art...
Draft, Revise, Repeat: Why First Attempts Are Supposed to Be Bad
The idea that you should get it right the first time is one of the most counterproductive myths in thinking. Iterative refinement works differently: y...
The Feynman Trick: Why Explaining Makes You Smarter
There is a strange paradox in learning: you often do not truly understand something until you try to explain it to someone else. The moment you attemp...
Taking Things Apart to Understand Them: The Reverse Engineer's Mind
Some people learn by building. Others learn by dismantling. The reverse engineer takes a working system — a piece of software, an organization, an arg...
Trained Intuition: How Experts See What Others Miss
A chess grandmaster looks at a board and "sees" the best move in seconds. A doctor glances at an X-ray and spots the anomaly. An experienced programme...
It's Like That Other Thing: How Analogy Powers Understanding
When someone says "the atom is like a tiny solar system" or "DNA is like a blueprint," they are not just making conversation — they are performing one...
Storytelling as Thinking: When Your Brain Runs Simulations
Humans are compulsive storytellers. Give us a sequence of events, and we automatically construct a narrative with causation, characters, and tension. ...
Direction
Where your thinking goes
Expanding and Narrowing: The Two Directions of Creative Thought
Every thinking process moves in one of two directions: outward or inward. Divergent thinking expands — it generates options, explores possibilities, a...
Breaking the Frame: Lateral Thinking and the Art of the Unexpected
Sometimes the answer to a problem is not harder thinking — it is different thinking. Lateral thinking, coined by De Bono, means deliberately introduci...
Zooming In and Out: Moving Between Abstract Principles and Concrete Examples
Think of a ladder. At the bottom are concrete, tangible things: a specific customer complaint, a particular bug in line 42, Tuesday's sales figures. A...
Less Is More: The Underused Power of Subtractive Thinking
When asked to improve something, almost everyone adds. Add a feature. Add a step. Add a clarification. But sometimes the best improvement is subtracti...
Externalization Medium
How you get thought out
Thinking Out Loud: When Your Voice Becomes Part of Your Mind
When you talk through a problem out loud — even if nobody is listening — something different happens compared to just thinking silently. The words bec...
Writing as Discovery: How the Page Thinks With You
There is a quote often attributed to E.M. Forster: "How do I know what I think until I see what I write?" This is not just a clever remark — it descri...
Beyond Words: Diagrams, Code, and the Power of Formal Thinking
Some thoughts do not fit into sentences. The relationship between five interacting components is hard to describe verbally but trivially clear in a di...
Logical Form
The structure of your reasoning
From Rules to Cases and Back: How Your Logic Actually Works
When someone says "all mammals are warm-blooded; a whale is a mammal; therefore a whale is warm-blooded," that is deduction — moving from a general ru...
Best Guesses and Borrowed Structures: Abductive and Analogical Reasoning
A doctor sees a patient with a fever, a rash, and joint pain. She does not deduce the diagnosis from first principles, and she does not need a thousan...
Facilitating Conditions
What influences thinking without being thinking
The Shower Insight: Why Breakthroughs Happen When You Stop Trying
You struggle with a problem for hours. Nothing works. You give up and go for a walk, take a shower, or sleep on it. And then — seemingly out of nowher...
Setting the Stage: How Rituals, Space, and Social Context Shape Thinking
The same brain thinks differently in a quiet library, a noisy cafe, a competitive meeting, or while meditating at dawn. Thinking does not happen in a ...