Changing Minds

This book is amazing!!! If only Galileo could have read it too. :)
I think that the act of changing minds is inversely proportional to the ‘centrisms’ (egocentrism, ethnocentrism, ‘cognitocentrism’ etc. ) humans gain through their lifetime in the context that: the more emphasized the ‘centrisms’ are in one individual the less is this individual prone to mind change for a specific issue.
What the7 levers of mind change (the 7 Rs: Reason, resonance, resistances, real world events etc.) described in Gardner’s book do, is combat these ‘centrisms’ each in its own original way. And the bigger the ‘centrism’ is, the harder it is to be fought .
Changing minds may be frustrating, stressful and sometimes wounding for most of the people because humans, like every other organism, are ‘neophobic’ in certain ways. In accordance with this Alain de Botton says: “I think that we live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by crises, by moments when what we thought we knew, about our lives, about our careers, comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality”.
However, parallel to that, I think that we live in an age when acquiring information isn’t the slowest step of the reaction anymore. Moreover it comes in abundance without leaving us any time to process and filter out the most beneficial bits and this may be the primary cause to excessive mind changes among people nowadays. This is a drawback in the sense that it will leave individuals wandering idea to idea without being able to stick only to a few, hence converting them to ’wanderers and gypsies’ with no identity.

S.K.

Saimir Kamberi