Hi all. This is my first post on this forum.

This may be a somewhat random post, and may just indicate I have vanity issues. But I find that, for someone doing a PhD (started third year of a 3.5 year program) I seem to be rubbish at basic critical thinking. I'm talking about the basic critical thinking puzzles that you find in brain-teaser card packs, and the various puzzles that are shared around social media. I get the wrong answers almost all the time (often due to over-thinking). This is also reflected in how I react to news stories, especially politics, as I all-to-often get swepted into a particular (sometimes ideologically driven) narrative without properly assessing it.

As I said, this is a bit random, has nothing to do with the actual running of a PhD and may just be reflective of vanity issues I have. But the reason these issues bother me, is because as a PhD student/researcher, I feel like I should be good at critical thinking and it often makes me wonder how on earth I managed to get to where I am...

My supervisor once told me something about critical thinking that I found helpful.

She said to imagine an issue/topic/belief like a blob of jelly. As a critical thinker, your job is to poke that blob, pick it up and put it down again, roll it over and see what's on the other side, test it, feel it's consistency, play with it and look at it from all angles. In short, interrogate everything about that blob until you have such a good idea of how it will behave under different scenarios, that you know that blob like the back of your hand.

I always found that way of thinking helpful. I hope you do too.