Southeast Center for Education in the Arts

Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein studied reports by eminent thinkers on how they think in many disciplines. From those reports, they identified a set of thirteen mental operations they call “thinking tools”. These operations are used consistently across the divergent fields of science, mathematics, history, philosophy, theatre, painting, writing, and music.

Observing – patient, detailed, sustained perception

Imaging – forming mental representations of the world when we do not actively perceive it

Abstracting – paring down complicated things to simple principles

Recognizing patterns – discovery of repeated structures in nature, mathematics, rhythm, music, movement, language

Forming patterns – combining and repeating structural elements or operations

Analogizing – identifying shared properties in two or more different things

Body thinking – drawing preverbal and preconceptual intuitions from our bodily sensations and responses

Empathizing – sensing the lived experience of another person or organism or thing

Dimensional thinking – imagining an object in another domain, from two to three spatial dimensions, or from present to future time

Modeling – creating a virtual, mental, imaginary, or physical representation of a concept, idea, object, or set of conditions

Playing – irreverent and imaginative reordering of conventions and rules

Transforming – serial or simultaneous use of multiple mental operations

Synthesizing – bringing together many of these operations in understanding the world

These are the cognitive processes we employ as we make sense of our experience. They are operations of deeply immersed and engaged thinking.