Do you know how a zip works? Most of us would say "yes" straight away. Then someone asks us to explain it step by step, and we get stuck on the second sentence. Psychologists have shown this in experiments too: people consistently overestimate how well they understand everyday objects and only notice when they try to explain them. That's exactly the first step in improving your thinking skills: seeing the gap between what you think you know and what you actually know.
What do we mean by thinking skills?
It isn't one skill but a group of connected ones. School curricula and psychology books usually highlight these:
- Problem solving: finding a path to a goal, especially when the path isn't obvious.
- Critical thinking: questioning what a claim rests on before accepting it.
- Analytical thinking: breaking something complex into parts and seeing how they relate.
- Creative thinking: being able to step outside the usual solution.
- Noticing your own thinking: psychologists call it metacognition. Being able to ask, "Do I really understand this?"
All of these are related to intelligence but aren't the same thing. Clever people often think hastily, with bias or with too much confidence. The good news is that thinking habits are much more open to change than intelligence itself.
First, an uncomfortable truth: there's no thinking without knowledge
"Learn critical thinking and you'll think well about everything" sounds nice, but it doesn't really work that way. Cognitive psychologists have long stressed that thinking skills are largely tied to a domain. A good doctor can think very critically about a disease, yet be as easily fooled as anyone when weighing an investment offer.
The reason is simple. To question a claim, you need to know what's plausible. Spotting what's odd about a pill that "makes you lose weight in three days" takes a bit of knowledge about how the body works. So one way to improve your thinking, however dull it sounds, is to build solid knowledge in the areas you care about. Knowledge and thinking feed each other.
Still, some habits do travel between areas. The ones below are among them.
Ways to get better at problem solving
In his classic book on problem solving, the mathematician George Pólya suggested a few simple questions. Decades later, they still work.
Restate the problem in your own words. Many mistakes come not from solving badly but from misunderstanding the question. If you can't clearly answer "What do I have, and what am I being asked?", it's too early to start solving.
Break the big problem into smaller ones. The Tower of Hanoi is one of the best examples. Moving five discs looks daunting. But if you know how to move four, the fifth is just one more step. For four you think about three, for three about two. Big projects at work get solved the same way.
Try a simpler version. When you're stuck, make the numbers smaller or drop one of the conditions. Once you solve the simple version, the logic of the real problem often reveals itself.
Work backwards. Looking back from the exit of a maze, or asking in a water jug puzzle "what should be in the jugs just before I reach the target?", can be much faster than trial and error going forwards.
Step away for a while. After staring at the same spot for a long time, a break sometimes makes a problem look different. It doesn't always work, but it's usually more productive than forcing your way on.
Critical thinking: being sceptical of our own minds too
When people hear "critical thinking," they usually think of questioning other people's claims. The harder part is questioning our own beliefs.
One well-known tendency of the human mind is to pay more attention to information that confirms what it already believes. This is called confirmation bias. Someone who believes in a diet remembers the stories where it worked and forgets the dozens of attempts where it didn't. This isn't a flaw of intelligence. Everyone has it.
A simple habit to counter it: when you reach a conclusion, ask yourself, "If I were wrong, what would that look like?" Or, more concretely, try to state the strongest argument for the opposite view in your own words. If you can't, you probably don't understand the issue well enough yet.
A few more questions that help in everyday life:
- "How do we know this?" Is the claim based on research, one person's experience, or just a sentence that's been shared a lot?
- "What else could explain it?" If a student's grades went up after private tutoring, was it the tutoring, or did they simply study more that term?
- "How many out of how many?" "Some people got better with this method" doesn't tell you how many tried it and how many didn't get better.
Noticing your own thinking: perhaps the most important skill
What matters most is being able to tell the difference between thinking you understand something and actually understanding it. That's what the zip example at the start is about.
The most practical way is to explain what you've learned to someone else, or to write it down. Where you get stuck while explaining is where your understanding stops. For students the difference is big: rereading a topic again and again creates a feeling of familiarity, and that feeling is easily mistaken for knowledge. Closing the book and trying to recall it shows the gaps and also makes the knowledge stick. The effect of self-testing on learning is one of the most consistent findings in educational psychology.
Then there's writing itself. A thought that seems clear in your head shows its holes once it's on paper. Writing down your reasons in a few sentences before a big decision slows your thinking down and pushes it, in a good way.
Do puzzles and brain games help?
To be honest: getting better at a puzzle mainly means getting better at that puzzle. Even in studies on chess, the evidence that it transfers meaningfully to areas like maths or general intelligence turns out to be weak.
But puzzles have another value. They give you a safe place to practise the strategies above: breaking things down, working backwards, trying the simple version. Losing costs nothing, and feedback is instant.
Some puzzles push particular thinking habits:
- The apple logic game is a version of the classic game of Nim. After losing a few times you start to notice a pattern. Finding the winning strategy yourself shows well what looking for patterns means.
- In Lights Out, every move changes more than one light. Moving without predicting the outcome doesn't work.
- Shikaku and the line puzzle require seeing how one constraint affects the others. They teach the strategy of starting from what's certain and working outwards.
- The cat puzzle asks you to reach the goal in as few moves as possible, which forces planning.
The trick is to pause for a minute after solving a puzzle and ask, "How did I solve that?" Once a strategy is noticed, it's more likely to carry over elsewhere. If it isn't, you've just solved a puzzle.
How to support thinking skills in children
For children, the most effective tools are usually the simplest. A few habits can make a difference:
Give questions instead of answers. When a child asks something, replying "What do you think?" or "How could we find out?" instead of answering straight away leaves the thinking to them.
Play estimation games. "How many beans do you think are in this jar?" "How many minutes will it take to walk to the shop?" Then check together. Talking about where the guess came from is the first step in reasoning.
Allow mistakes. A child who's afraid of being wrong tries to guess the right answer instead of thinking. Saying "That wasn't right, but tell me why you thought so" makes the thinking process more valuable than the result.
Share everyday tasks as problems. Scaling a recipe from two people to four, planning a trip, working out why a toy broke... These are far more real and memorable than textbook problems.
We've collected age-based game ideas in Brain Games for Kids.
Things that get in the way of thinking
Sometimes improving your thinking isn't about adding something new but removing obstacles. Lack of sleep clearly impairs decision-making and problem solving. Constantly interrupted attention leaves no time for deep thinking; twenty uninterrupted minutes on a problem can achieve more than two hours spent bouncing between notifications. We look at how attention affects thinking in more detail in Attention, Intelligence and Perception.
Then there's haste. Quick decisions aren't always bad, but on important matters the first answer that comes to mind is often the easiest, not the most accurate. Just asking yourself "Hang on, am I sure?" is sometimes enough.
If you want a general look at your own reasoning skills, the IQ test is a good starting point. The result isn't an official score, but seeing which question types feel easy and which are hard can give you an idea of where to focus. For more puzzles, have a look at the brain games page.