On Thursday, 24^th July, 2025, Mr. Rafiq Jaffer, Director, Institute of Social Sciences, delivered a talk on “Critical Thinking” to the participants of the 38^th SMC.

Mr. Rafiq Jaffer started the discussion with the concept of mind map. He explained that thinking can be creative and critical. The creative thinking produces new ideas while in critical thinking we assess, evaluate and judge the quality of an idea. The process is to brainstorm new ideas and then evaluate these ideas for quality. He stated that the right side of the brain deals with creative thinking and the left side of the brain deals with critical thinking.

He explained the composition of brain which is responsible for various functions of human body. The speaker further elaborated a set of eight features which constitutes the process of critical thinking such as clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic and fairness.

The guest speaker advised that people should sensitize themselves about their critical thinking barriers. This would be the first step towards removing those barriers. Everybody should know about five powerful barriers which were egocentrism, sociocentrism, unwarranted assumptions, wishful thinking and relativist thinking. He added that critical thinking stops creation of new ideas. Firstly, use creative thinking to have large number of ideas and then use critical thinking to choose the best one. When doing creative thinking don’t mix it with critical thinking and vice versa.