学进去

In life，once on a path，we tend to follow it，for better or worse. What's sad is that even if it's the later，we often accept it anyway because we are so used to the way things are that we don't even recognize that they could be different.

This is what psychologists call functional fixedness.

The inability to think in new ways affects people in every comer of society. The political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase frozen thoughts to describe deeply held ideas that we no longer question but should. In Arendt's eyes，the complacent（自满的）reliance on such accepted “truths”also made people blind to ideas that didn't fit their worldview，even when there was ample evidence for them. Frozen thinking has nothing to do with intelligence，she said. “It can be found in highly intelligent people.

Ardent considered critical thinking to be a moral imperative-in its absence，a society could go the way of Nazi Germany.

Another context in which frozen thinking can turn truly dangerous is medieine. If you land in the hospital，it's natural to want to be treated by the most experienced physicians. But according to a 2014 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association（JAMA），you'd be better off being treated by the relative novices. The authors of the study explained that most errors made by doctors are connected to a tendency to form opinions quickly，based on experience. In cases that are not routine，the expert doctors may miss important aspects of the problem that are not consistent with their initial analysis. As a result，although junior doctors may be slower and less confident in treating run-of the mill cases，they can be more open-minded with unusual cases.

Fortunately，psychologists have found that anyone can unfreeze his or her thinking. One of the most effective ways is to introduce a little discord to one's intellectual interactions. Experiments have shown that it can not only sway（使动摇）us with regard to the issue at hand；it can also thaw frozen thinking in general，even in contexts unrelated to the original discussion.