Prologue
Thinking about thinking, treated as a practical clinical skill.
Chen and Nagendran open by making the case for metacognition as a working tool rather than an academic idea. Thinking about your own thinking, they argue, can sharpen the snap judgements and slower deliberations that fill a clinical day, and can ease some of the strain on an overloaded system. They preview the threads that run through the book: training that has not kept pace, the cognitive biases behind many misdiagnoses, rigid career structures and the arrival of AI. A self-rating exercise invites readers to score themselves and compare with peers, quietly demonstrating anchoring before it is named. A reference table catalogues the biases explored later.
Three takeaways
- Metacognition is offered as a low-cost, scalable lever for outcomes and morale
- The book turns on training, bias and career structure
- A bias catalogue up front maps what the later chapters unpack
Reflection
Questions for this chapter
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