Edward de Bono

Long before the phrase “neural network” entered popular vocabulary, Edward de Bono had described the mechanism neural networks instantiate: a self-organizing information system in which incoming experience carves asymmetric channels, and subsequent experience flows where the channels lead. His 1969 book The Mechanism of Mind identified this dynamic in the biological brain; half a century later, every large language model replicates it in silicon at a scale he could not have imagined. De Bono’s diagnosis was precise: vertical thinking—the logical, step-by-step reasoning that drills deeper within a framework—is constitutionally incapable of producing genuine novelty, because it can only reach conclusions that the premises already entail. The escape requires a categorically different operation, which he named lateral thinking: the deliberate step sideways out of the current framework and into a new one. He spent the rest of his life building the specific, teachable tools that make this step repeatable—the Six Thinking Hats, the provocation technique, the CoRT curriculum—tools that have become, in the age of