Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share What Is Critical Thinking?
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
What Is Critical Thinking?
Send us Fan Mail
What we currently call “critical thinking” is limited and inaccurate. It considers only one layer of intelligence. The cognitive, dissection-based process that breaks ideas into parts, checks logic, and evaluates claims. This definition misses the body’s connection-based intelligence’s incredible value in critical thinking. Which asks how our current focus connects with reality.
The salience network is important in this discussion because it explains how a person decides what matters. In a domesticated system, salience is trained toward external authority: grades, diagnoses, instructions, metrics, approval, productivity, and correct answers. Education conditions the mind to treat system-defined signals as important and not to trust their own experiential knowledge. Before domestication of intelligence the salience network included the environment and lived reality in critical thinking.
Schooling, medicine, mental health systems, workplace discipline, and now AI all participate in salience rerouting. They train people away from connection-based intelligence and toward externally managed interpretation. The result is a professional class that has often lost access to self-direction, threat calibration, desire, environmental awareness, macro-pattern recognition, and natural sociability, then mistakes that loss for authority. Because their own salience has been narrowed to binary judgment. The can only see the outcome as correct or incorrect, compliant or noncompliant, normal or disordered. They cannot recognize intelligence that exceeds the cognitive-based system. The impact on our children, particularly the the most sensitive children, negatively. They are punished, labeled and shamed when they externalize the higher intelligence capacities domestication has stolen from everyone else. The system is not discovering deficiency in these children; it is projecting an inversion of the capacities it has lost. The very traits it labels as deficits are the traits humanity needs to adapt to the change ahead.
Support the show
GiftedND.com
copyright 2025
View all episodes
By Lillian Skinner, Beth Anne JohnsonSend us Fan Mail
What we currently call “critical thinking” is limited and inaccurate. It considers only one layer of intelligence. The cognitive, dissection-based process that breaks ideas into parts, checks logic, and evaluates claims. This definition misses the body’s connection-based intelligence’s incredible value in critical thinking. Which asks how our current focus connects with reality.
The salience network is important in this discussion because it explains how a person decides what matters. In a domesticated system, salience is trained toward external authority: grades, diagnoses, instructions, metrics, approval, productivity, and correct answers. Education conditions the mind to treat system-defined signals as important and not to trust their own experiential knowledge. Before domestication of intelligence the salience network included the environment and lived reality in critical thinking.
Schooling, medicine, mental health systems, workplace discipline, and now AI all participate in salience rerouting. They train people away from connection-based intelligence and toward externally managed interpretation. The result is a professional class that has often lost access to self-direction, threat calibration, desire, environmental awareness, macro-pattern recognition, and natural sociability, then mistakes that loss for authority. Because their own salience has been narrowed to binary judgment. The can only see the outcome as correct or incorrect, compliant or noncompliant, normal or disordered. They cannot recognize intelligence that exceeds the cognitive-based system. The impact on our children, particularly the the most sensitive children, negatively. They are punished, labeled and shamed when they externalize the higher intelligence capacities domestication has stolen from everyone else. The system is not discovering deficiency in these children; it is projecting an inversion of the capacities it has lost. The very traits it labels as deficits are the traits humanity needs to adapt to the change ahead.
Support the show
GiftedND.com
copyright 2025