So many people are in the business of changing minds: salesmen, lawyers, psychiatrists, teachers, etc. But what is really involved when you change your mind? Not the sort where you decide to switch to fish instead of your usual roasted pork for lunch (though this might be a decision of great importance to, say, a person trying to lose weight or to eat healthy), but rather the situations where you deliberately abandon your customary stand or routine, something you’ve been clinging to perhaps even unconsciously, for a long time, for a new way of thinking or of doing things. Howard Gardner explores how such a change can take place, not just in other people’s minds, but also in our own as well.

The Contents of the Mind

How exactly does it happen? Your mind can be changed in an instant, as a result of an abrupt decision, or of a slow shift in viewpoint that takes place over a long period of time. Of course, it may be argued that an abrupt mind-change may simply be the manifestation of subtler processes. Still, the question remains - what factors bring about this change in the first place?

In this book, Howard Gardner explores the various agents and agencies of mind-change, the tools they have at their disposal, and the seven factors that help determine whether these agents have succeeded in changing minds.

A Psychology Open to Mind Talk

In the nineteenth century, psychology was based mostly on observations that researchers made about themselves. A new generation of psychologists demanded reports that focused on behavior objectively seen, recorded and quantified, a movement that became known as Behaviorism. However, the advent of computers in the 1950s and 60s, along with its method of computing - using information, data, to perform operations in sequence - launched the cognitive revolution. Cognitive science rejected the structures of behaviorism. Individuals are said to take in information, process it in various ways, and create diverse mental representations.