Critical Reasoning and Information Analysis - Essay Example

The more we learn about neuroscience, the more we understand that information literacy is a fundamental aspect of the human brain (Kandel & Squire 2000), and that humans are simply more naturally adapted to understanding certain things (like personal experience) than others (like numerical data). This sheds light on why we understand the world in the way we do. Like neuroscience, information technology is a growing field that is having a growing impact on the world. Firstly, it, for the first time, gives humans a different kind of intelligence to compare ours to: we can understand ourselves by seeing how different or similar computers are when serving different functions (Schellhammer 2008).

Furthermore, information technologies like the internet are giving humans a broader understanding of our identity as going past small scale, tribal allegiances, because they allow for much more communication over large ranges. This communication is incredibly important, because social understandings play an important role in critical thinking. There are many cases where one’s social or cultural atmosphere have drastic impacts on the way they understand the world. Firstly, we pay a great deal more attention to those things that happen in proximity to us: which includes both personal actions, and friends.

That means that problems that are common in one’s social group, for instance, will appear disproportionately larger than a more important problem that happens to people that are unrelated to you. This bias can cloud critical thinking, and must be avoided. The problem is, however, that other ways of understanding the world (such as universal laws of logic) do not function much better. This is because we are hard-wired to pay less attention to logic than emotions, as emotions played a more important role in our evolutionary history.

So while universal logic might seem important at understanding things in a globalized society, it can often be ignored.