Metacognition: thinking about thinking in the context of my coaching practice (Part 1) by Andrew Parrock
What does a coach DO? Not the detailed, minute-by-minute activity that happens during a coaching session, but the big ‘what am I working for my client to achieve’ picture.
For me a coach is aiming for their client to see themself in a different way, (and this blog is my point of view and understanding, and, inevitably, lack of understanding).
From my client’s point of view, that will almost always not be what they came to me for. They want an answer to their particular question (whether they can articulate that or not).
What they won’t know is how I will go about getting them that answer. But that does not matter at all. If we can quickly establish trust, then we can work together on the journey of exploration we are about to embark on; that journey will include seeing themself in a different way.
‘Seeing themself’ has everything to do with their self-awareness.
Relating ancient philosophy to modern science
Self-awareness is an idea with very deep roots.
The Ancient Greeks knew about it; they carved the words ‘Know Thyself’ into a stone at the Temple of Delphi. Plato (4th Century BCE) wrote, “...the wise or temperate man, and he only, will know himself, and be able to examine what he knows or does not know...No other person will be able to do this.” [1]. I don’t think that Plato would have extended this to women, given the culture in Athens at that time, but I certainly do [2]
The 1st century BCE Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu wrote, “To know what one does not know is best; Not to know but to believe one knows is a disease” [3].
And there is an unattributable Arab proverb (that I must thank a coaching colleague of mine for), which says,
“He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool; shun him.
He who knows not and knows that he knows not, is a student; teach him.
He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep; wake him.
He who knows, and knows that he knows, is wise; follow him.”
Psychologists call it metacognition; the ability to think about our own thinking. The idea is that people can explain what they are doing and why they are doing it. This depends upon another human ability, the “ability to reflect on, think about, and know things about ourselves, including how we remember, perceive, decide, think, and feel.” [4]
Please note this has nothing to do with the BIG question about where human consciousness comes from [6].
Connecting metacognition and coaching:
My ultimate aim as a coach is to help my clients develop so that they become able to,
Address their issues by themselves,
Reflect on what they do by understanding themselves better.
Or, to put it another way, getting them to think about how they think. This does beg the question, ‘can they already do this for themselves?’. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But even if ‘yes’, they are not aware that they can, it takes a little teasing out. If no, well, we are in for an interesting journey.
But given my ultimate aim, I am working towards improving their metacognition. It is my belief that if I know and understand the science behind how our human brain works (neuroscience), the scientific study of the mind and behaviour (psychology), and the history of socialization and culturalization, then I can become a more effective coach, because I will be working ‘with the grain’ of my client’s thinking, and perception, not against it.
This blog is about what I have learned and understood (which may well be imperfect!) about the science of metacognition in part 1, and then with my thinking about possible implications for coaching in part 2.
The science [7]: The building blocks of metacognition
Self-awareness is built from two ‘building blocks;
Keeping track of our uncertainty about our perception of the sensory input we are getting from our environment.
Our ability to monitor our actions, from small, detailed actions such as moving our fingers, to much larger actions, such as deciding I need a drink, or to change my life.
Keeping track of our uncertainty
The world is complex and the data (the sensory input through eyes, ears, skin etc converted into the electrical pulses that are things a brain uses for its ‘computations’) is noisy, like trying to tune in your car radio to a particular station before we had digital radios; there can be a lot of background noise that makes it difficult to hear the music. So the sensory information alone may not give a definitive answer.
The first building block, ‘keeping track of uncertainty’, is effectively me asking myself (albeit at a deep unconscious level) ‘am I sure that what I am seeing/hearing etc is what I think I am seeing/hearing etc?’ This is a vital component of the system that makes sense of the world around us. The brain is locked away inside our skull. The only way we, using our brain, can build a model of the world to allow us to interact with it (and thus survive) is through our senses, the various inputs of which are converted into nerve impulses (which can be considered to be data) which are then interpreted by the relevant neuronal networks responsible for those tasks. The process of data interpretation can be difficult; if the ‘noise’ is high compared to the ‘signal’, in which case there is a degree of uncertainty as to how to interpret the data. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the need for additional input from things other than the sensory data, in order to make sense of the sensory input. Optical illusions provide an illustration (sorry, pun intended!) of this point, as follows.
Here is a well-known optical illusion called the ‘Ponzo illusion’ [8]. Which of the two yellow lines is the longest? In fact, they are both the same. The top one appears longer because in the real world, parallel lines look like they converge the further away the are from us. The 2 dimensional picture gets interpreted as a 3 dimensional object by our visual systems.
These illusions work because we have learned to make educated guesses based upon our past experience of the world. When presented with a noisy signal (something ambiguous, for example, that might be interpreted in two or more ways), the brain draws in further resources from our past experience to make an ‘educated guess’ about the most likely interpretation (which the becomes the ‘correct’ interpretation. This is our brain keeping track of the uncertainty around the sensory input. When uncertainty is high, it uses more previous experience to reach an interpretation and thus make sense of the sensory input, choosing one, more likely, interpretation over another, less likely, interpretation. In situations where either answer is likely, we can switch what we see with a little practice.
Try this ‘spinning dancer illusion [9]. It took me a while to be able to see it rotating clockwise, then anticlockwise. In reality it is a 2 dimensional image that changes over time. We interpret it as a 3-d object that must be rotating.
Fleming provides the following analogy. Imagine that the sensory input data is like cake batter that we are going to put into a mould. The batter can be thick, so won’t take the mould’s shape, or it can be runny, in which case it will take the shape of the mould. The batter is the sensory data: the more certain we are about it, the thicker it is. The mould is our preconceptions based upon our experience (parallel lines converging). The less certain we are about the data, the more it will be shaped by our experience.
Keeping track of uncertainty allows us to make sense of the confusion of information we are constantly being bombarded with. One key side-effect of this process is that we can doubt what we perceive. Animals such as dolphin and macaques show this ability as well as humans.
The ability to monitor our actions.
The second building block also comes from an essential process linking brain to body; the ability to monitor our actions. This self-monitoring ability occurs before self-awareness. It is an ability essential to allow movement of limbs to be controlled. Its existence, in conjunction with uncertainty monitoring gives rise to self-awareness.
‘Actions’ has a very wide meaning in this context. “Everything our bodies do to change things in our environment can be considered an action: breathing, digesting, speaking, adjusting our posture.” Consider any form of movement, which requires close coordination of muscles, sensory nerves, eyes and the brain systems that control all of these.
To do this, the brain has a mechanism to detect when a planned movement is going astray.
It generates a set of expected sensory consequences and compares what is actually happening to the expectation. For example, we can move around and interact with our environment without falling over. We can coordinate hand and eye to pick up even tiny objects. There is constant feedback between our arm, hand, fingers and brain when we go to pick an object up. This is almost entirely unconscious; our conscious selves are unaware of it happening.
If there is a BIG discrepancy, then we become aware that we are making a mistake and might be able to consciously correct that. This is called Error Related Negativity. Ever had that ‘oh ****’ moment just before (or after!) pressing the send button on an email, or (nearly) knocking that tall glass of water over? That is the ‘Error Related Negativity’ system in action.
Imagine if you had to concentrate just to pick up a cup of tea (some people with particular neurological disorders do have real difficulty doing just that). The more complex, difficult or novel a movement is the more that feedback becomes conscious. We might pick up our mug of tea without the need to think much about it, but threading a needle requires all of my attention. Another, much more complex, example is learning the piano to concert pianist level: it starts out difficult and end up (for a very few individuals) as unconscious, even habitual perhaps. Validimir Horowitz, a concert pianist, said that “I am the general, my soldiers are the keys” [10]. This is an extreme example, but it demonstrates the point.
These two processes are the results of remarkable interplay and feedback between our environment, our senses and our conscious and unconscious neural processes that allow us, as living organisms, to survive and prosper in the environments we live in. I say ‘living organisms’ because it appears that it is not just humans that have these abilities, as animals also demonstrate these abilities. This “implicit metacognition”, which is completely unconscious, is happening all the time to allow many animals, including humans, to navigate the world survive and reproduce. Fleming uses the analogy of the autopilot of an aeroplane, which makes many small adjustments to the plane’s trim, speed and attitude to keep it in the air, flying straight and level at 30,000 feet.
The big question is, given this works just fine, what drove implicit metacognition to become a conscious thing?
Some History: Humans as social beings and our ability to understand what other people are thinking.
At some point in human evolution, people started to care what other people thought of them; the appearance of jewellery, such as bracelets and beads, and cave-art, becomes more common around seventy-five thousand to fifty thousand years ago. This may be interpreted as the emergence of the importance of knowing what other people are thinking, feeling and doing.
Maybe it was living in groups, which allowed early humans to collaborate in such activities as hunting and cooking, drove this ‘mind-reading’ (today this is called ‘Theory of Mind’; Fleming uses the term ‘mind-reading’).
It might be that as the collaboration became more complex, the survival of the group became dependent upon it, this created an evolutionary pressure to collaborate more effectively.
The need for such mind-reading, to understand the thoughts and intentions of others, along with the development of language to be able to communicate more complex ideas, bound the group together and allowed the creation of larger groups, and ultimately societies and civilisations. As our ability to understand the minds of others grew to allow collaboration, so our capability to understand our own thoughts, and thus our capability to self-reflect, grew, and our capacity for self-awareness grew along with it. Fleming thus proposes that the development of ‘mind-reading’ may be an important step in the development of self-awareness. [11]
What does ‘mind-reading’ look like to us today?
In the modern world we need to be able to get along with our families, our work colleague and with the strangers we meet because most humans now live in stratified towns and cities. Doing this successfully involves relying on acceptable social norms and having an idea about what other people are thinking, particularly those we engage more frequently with. This is ‘recursive thinking’; someone’s belief about what another person may or may not be thinking. For example, the (hypothetical) couple Karen and Keith are, perhaps, going out tonight. Keith believes that Karen thinks he wants her to buy the cinema tickets. Each of these three steps may be at odds with reality. The critical thing is that Keith knows that his belief might be false. This is ‘self-monitoring’ and ‘uncertainty monitoring’ being done consciously; the initial belief is a thought, and he is aware that it is a thought, and then recognises that that thought may be wrong. This ability, to understand what others are thinking, develops as we grow from infant, through child, becoming fully-formed around the age of three or four. ‘Fully-formed’ is a relative term, because some people are better at it than others. Fleming suggests that that ability leads to the ability of the adult human brain to think about itself.
An interesting consequence is that metacognition (aka mind reading) also allows us to enjoy theatre, novels and films, which apparently are an extension of the pretend play of young children. “We never stop pretending, it’s just the focus of our pretence that changes” [12]. A good story takes us into the minds and emotions of the characters in the story, despite the clear fact that we know these people do not exist!
There is an idea, associated with the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, that there is a deep link between our awareness of ourselves and our awareness of others. He argued that we self-reflect using the same mental tools that we use to understand other people. Fleming applied this idea to discover how our brain does this, by suggesting that we use the same ‘computational machinery’ to self-reflect that we use to think about other people. He calls it ‘second-order Rylean view of self-awareness’. It turns out, from studies of peoples’ living brains using brain scanners, that metacognition and mind-reading use similar, but not identical, neural machinery, so is somewhat in accordance with this model. That has implications for coaching, which I will examine in the next part of this blog series.
Connect with Andrew Parrock via Linkedin
Andrew Parrock (MSc, CMgr, MCMI) has, since graduating in 1980, been a teacher, a tax specialist and a manager. He spent 10 years as a volunteer mentor with undergraduate students at UCL and, later, Brunel University as part of the National Mentoring Consortium. He discovered coaching late in his career and has now become an accredited coach at Practitioner Level with the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC).
References and notes
‘Know Thyself: the new Science of self-Awareness' by Stephen M Fleming, 2021, quoted on p9.
I refer to ‘Pandora’s Jar- Women of the Greek Myths’, by Natalie Haynes. Page 68: ‘Athenian wives … would never have been left alone in the house with a strange man; page 148: ‘…juries in Athenian courts were all-male…whichever version of Clytemnestra’s story men read, or saw, or heard, they came across the same troubling (for the men) phenomenon: a woman who “did not know her place”. These are just two examples of the picture Natalie paints for us of the society that Plato was part of, so if feel quite comfortable in my inference.
Fleming, op cit, page 10
Fleming op cit, page 2
Fleming op cit, - this section is a very broad summary of the descriptions and detailed arguments made by Dr Fleming. See chapters 1 and 2 for the two building blocks. Chapter 3 examines how these interact with ‘theory of mind’ and our inferences about other people’s state of mind. Chapter 4 looks at the factors that affect our capacity for self-awareness.
Human consciousness; the undoubted fact that we are aware that we exist, we know we have our own thoughts that are not the thoughts of others (unless you have a mental illness). Consciousness is ‘the difficult problem’ of neuroscience. This is a different thing to metacognition.
Fleming op cit page 71
Fleming, op cit, p42
Fleming, op cit, pages 56 and 73
Fleming, op cit, page 62, quoting Lewis and Ramsay: “Development of Self-Recognition, and Pretend Play During the 2nd Year” Child Development 75, no 6: (2004) 1821-1831