intellectual immigration and integrative thinking
[Music]
psychology is a very young field
it hasn’t been around for longer than a
little over a hundred years
and in this time there’s a lot that
we’ve been doing
so psychology has actually been
connecting with
all sorts of different fields there’s
actually
a bunch of different fields that connect
with it and we have a bunch of
interdisciplinary fields let me tell you
what a few of those are
some of you might never have heard of
engineering psychology
it exists some of you might never have
heard of psychophysics
it exists some of you might have never
heard of neuromarketing
but it exists what all of these fields
are is an amalgamation of knowledge from
different domains
in life so essentially
the journey of psychology over the last
century or so
has been an interdisciplinary journey
and today that’s what i’m going to be
talking about
i’m going to be starting you guys off
with two stories
the first is of a man named dr john
gottman
dr john gottman actually had a
background
in mathematics physics and psychology
he’s still an active researcher
dr john gottman is famous for combining
these areas of his work
and actually predicting the
possibility or the probability of
divorce
by watching couples interact with each
other so
he devised this system and through this
system
what he was able to tell was by
assessing different physiological
variables
by assessing different communication
variables dr john gottman was actually
able to tell
how likely a couple is to divorce
a few years from now with 94 percent
accuracy just think about that number
that’s staggering 94
he even came up with something he called
the four horsemen
of the apocalypse and if these four
things are present in a relationship
it’s likely that your relationship is
heading towards a divorce
i’m not going to tell you what those are
i’m going to let you google those after
the talk to see how well your
relationship is doing
so that’s dr john gottman so he’s one
example of how
that connection of different fields of
knowledge
leads to such an incredible outcome the
other one
was dr lillian gilbert
she had a background in engineering
literature and psychology and she
famously combined these
and she founded the field that is now
known as organizational industrial
psychology
and she was the first and one of the few
one of the first females in the us to
get a phd
and she also was a role model for many
women looking to get further education
in life
and she by combining all three of these
different fields
created the field of a very scientific
industrial management organizational
psychology
so the point is that these two and there
are many these are just two of them
these two individuals what they were
able to do were
they were able to combine various areas
of knowledge and create some incredible
outcomes
so the point is that intellectual
immigration begets innovation but let me
tell you what i mean when i say
intellectual immigration
it’s simple stepping slightly
outside of your area of knowledge and
into another that is a slight
immigration from one intellectual domain
into another
and when you’re able to do that that can
bring out a lot of innovative ideas from
within you
and then that sort of integrative
thinking where you can integrate
various ideas from various different
fields that can lead to very creative
solutions
to very complex problems because the
thing is that the problems of today
from climate change to artificial
intelligence to
health crisis they’re no longer rooted
in the reductionism of one field they
now require
various inputs from various different
fields for us to understand
how we can tackle the problem fair from
different areas and that requires
integrative thinking
so a little bit about what it’s like and
here in pakistan and why maybe we don’t
see a lot of interdisciplinary research
here
and maybe worldwide in general
so you see interdisciplinary research
isn’t really encouraged you have
a department of engineering you have a
department of psychology you have a
department of medicine you have a
department of dentistry
you don’t have a department of
biological psychology you don’t have a
department of neuro marketing
that’s not how departments and
universities are structured that’s
simply not the case
and since that’s not the case it’s rare
for people from one domain of knowledge
to be talking to people
in the other domain of knowledge and
saying hey what can we do together
so departments are set up
in a very narrow manner and so research
becomes narrow in that one
area of knowledge for the most part so
even the one psychology undergraduate
course that many individuals have
in university you’re taught some
freudian ideas that might not be very
relevant to you in your life
imagine if in that one undergraduate
course the knowledge you were receiving
was
actually knowledge that was relevant to
your field imagine the outcome it could
optimize the work you’re doing by
so much and give you new avenues of
thinking
so that is where the responsibility of
the student comes in and when i say
student i don’t just mean
university student i mean anyone who is
a student of knowledge anyone who loves
to learn
thomas huxley said try to learn
something about everything and
everything about something and that’s
really what i’m trying to say
your responsibility as someone who wants
to learn
is to reach into as many different
domains
as you can and create connections
because that will change the way
you think that will change the way you
behave entirely
so psychology worldwide
as i said is a young field if it is in
its early adolescence
in more developed parts of the world it
is
probably a toddler here in pakistan
because not only do we not have
interdisciplinary work going on here
we don’t even have the more narrow
fields that you see in other parts of
the world
just think for a second if we did have
those different domains of knowledge
how different things could be well let
me give you an example of how different
things could be
just a few weeks ago the supreme court
finally ended the death penalty
for mentally ill prisoners
but before that happened three
individuals
bibi and gulam abbas were on death row
for 18
30 and 14 years even though
they were all mentally ill and had
schizophrenia and should have been
receiving treatment and
many decisions were taken on this but
not a lot of change came
up until a few weeks ago and well better
late than never
but the point remains that when the
supreme court finally became aware of
the evidence of these different avenues
of thinking about mental illness and how
it impacts the law and crime
this decision happened and this is a
step in the right direction
this is a step in the humane direction
so like i said
if you can simply start viewing the
world
or viewing the way that you interact
with knowledge a bit differently
that can change your entire world view
and if you can change
your world view you can change your
world
and maybe even someone else’s
it is as edward de bono said creativity
involves breaking out of established
patterns in order to look at things in a
different way
so i don’t want to stand here and show
you these examples of these
brilliant individuals from these foreign
qualified individuals you don’t have to
be that in order to do this
you see breaking of established patterns
that means habits you can create a habit
anyone can do that you don’t have to be
from some fancy university to do that
you don’t even have to be from a
university to do that all you have to do
is
be wanting to learn and be wanting to
engage with knowledge
for today what i’d really like you to
think from my talk here
when you’re done with it when you go
back is how does
my area of work interact with other
areas of work
and how can i connect those areas of
work
to maybe change something or bring
something new
if not to my professional life if not to
my
domain of knowledge then perhaps to my
personal life because i guarantee you
that you can do that too
to end and in conclusion
complex problems require creative
solutions
creative solutions require integrative
thinking
and integrative thinking definitely
requires
a little bit of intellectual immigration
thank you
you