PERSON
Edward de Bono
Maltese physician, psychologist, and cognitive researcher (1933–2021) — the world's most persistent advocate for the claim that creativity is a teachable skill, and the author of the framework this entire volume applies to the AI moment.
Edward Charles Francis Publius de Bono (1933–2021) was a cognitive researcher whose work on creative thinking as a systematic skill spanned more than eighty books across fifty-four years. Born in Malta, he studied medicine at the Royal University of Malta before completing degrees in psychology and physiology at Oxford and medicine at Cambridge. In 1967 he introduced the concept of 'lateral thinking' — which entered the Oxford English Dictionary — and spent the remainder of his career developing the tools and curricula that followed from his underlying theory of the brain as a self-organizing pattern system.
In The You On AI Field Guide
De Bono's 1969 book The Mechanism of Mind described the brain as a self-organizing information system decades before the neural network paradigm vindicated the model in computational form. His practical tools — lateral thinking, Six Thinking Hats, Po, provocation, random entry, the CoRT curriculum — descend