Thinking

 and

 Writing

 

By Robert S. Sinclair

Revised edition of a monograph originally 

published by CSI in January 1984.

Cognitive Science

 and Intelligence Analysis
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis

expressed in this study are those of the author.

They do not necessarily reflect official positions

or views of the Central Intelligence Agency or any

other US Government entity, past or present.

Nothing in the contents should be construed as

asserting or implying US Government endorsement of the study’s factual statements and interpretations.

Cover image creator, Bruno Mallart. 

© Images.com/Corbis. 
Thinking and Writing:

Cognitive Science and

Intelligence Analysis

Robert S. Sinclair

Center for the Study of Intelligence

Washington, DC

February 2010

Originally published in January 1984
This study was originally prepared by Robert Sinclair during a fellowship with the Center for the 

Study of Intelligence. It has been updated with a new introduction and slightly edited.

Robert Sinclair was a CIA intelligence analysts for 37 years. He is now a consultant on analytical 

issues. 

The Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) was founded in 1974 in response to Director of 

Central Intelligence James Schlesinger’s desire to create within CIA an organization that could 

“think through the functions of intelligence and bring the best intellects available to bear on 

intelligence problems.” The Center, comprising professional historians and experienced 

practitioners, attempts to document lessons from past operations, explore the needs and 

expectations of intelligence consumers, and stimulate serious debate on current and future 

intelligence challenges.

To support these activities, CSI publishes Studies in Intelligence, as well as books and monographs 

addressing historical, operational, doctrinal, and theoretical aspects of the intelligence profession. 

It also administers the CIA Museum and maintains the Agency’s Historical Intelligence Collection.

Readers wishing to have copies of this monograph or other CSI publications may call 703-613-1753 

or secure 31753. Requests may also be sent via Lotus Notes to CSI-PubReq.
Contents

Introduction and Update v

A Quick Summary vi

Suggestion: Develop Collaborative Analysis vii

Suggestion: Increase Cognitive Diversity ix

Thinking and Writing: Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Summary 1

Recommendations 3

Preface 4

Introduction 4

I. A Quick Survey 6

II. Heuristics and the Incredible Chunk 8

III. Speaking and Writing, News and Knowledge 14

IV. Writing Schemes and Cognitive Overload 19

V. Creativity and the Conceptual Front End 21

VI. What Next? 26

1. Recruitment. 26

2. Training. 26

3. Analytic Writing. 26

4. Organization. 26

5. Presentational Methods. 27

6. Further Exploration. 27

Afterword 28

Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page v

When this monograph was published a quartercentury ago, it sank virtually without a trace. It is 

clear to me now that the paper lacked what today 

would be called “curb appeal”; moreover, cognitive 

science was a new and unproven discipline. Then, 

few inside or outside the intelligence world were 

aware of it, and even fewer had thought about its 

relevance to intelligence analysis.a

The field has opened up to a stunning degree 

since then. Not only have we seen a flood of studies documenting the myriad cognitive activities our 

brains engage in, but electronic imaging allows us 

to observe what happens in the brain as it goes 

about its business. Authors like Malcolm Gladwell 

have mined the literature to show the insights these 

processes can produce, as well as the times they 

leave us stuck in unproductive ways of thinking. 

In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, 

Gladwell reports that when experts were asked 

to assess the provenance of an allegedly ancient 

sculpture, they could agree that it was a fake but 

could not put into words how they had reached that 

a. One exception was Richards J. Heuer, whose articles, published in Studies in Intelligence beginning in 1978, helped trigger my own interest in the field. The CIA Center for the Study 

of Intelligence published an updated version of Heuer’s articles 

in a book, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, in 1999. Since 

reprinted by CIA and available commercially, the book is now a 

staple in many analytic training courses.

conclusion. This and other examples, he says, illustrate how the things we learn through experience 

often are not readily available to our conscious 

minds.b 

Economists these days speak of “behavioral 

economics,” which uses research based partly on 

cognitive-science protocols to suggest the limits to 

rational-actor models. Behavioral economics has 

reinstalled John Maynard Keynes on his pedestal.

In economics, the crucial Keynesian concept is 

uncertainty. Where it prevails, the simple rules 

of classical economics don’t apply. That’s because the classical economics that both predated Keynes and superseded him relies on 

rational actors making rational assessments. 

In order to make such assessments you have 

to have reliable knowledge, usually derived 

from past experience. Buyers of oranges or 

newspapers or legal services can be said to 

possess such knowledge. Buyers of speculab. See Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without 

Thinking (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2005), 3-8. 

More recently, Gladwell told a story with a different outcome: In 

2007 and 2008 the head of the investment firm Bear Stearns 

could not recognize, even in retrospect, the role his skills—the 

very skills that lay behind his earlier successes—played in his 

company’s collapse. See Gladwell, “Cocksure: Banks, Battles, 

and the Psychology of Overconfidence,” New Yorker, 27 July 

2009.

Acknowledgements

I would be remiss if I failed to thank those who made this odd project possible, both now and 25 years ago: Mary-Ann 

Rozbicki, Paul Corscadden (both of whom have since passed away), and Carla Scopelitis—the first time around; and Carmen Medina, until December 2009, the director of the Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI), which originally published 

this monograph, and CSI’s Andy Vaart for its return. I would be doubly remiss if I failed to mention my gratitude to Jack 

Davis, the Directorate of Intelligence’s long-time stealth subversive. Jack is one of the few people inside the Central Intelligence Agency who has sought to develop a genuine doctrine of intelligence analysis. His roller-coaster career—for a 

while in the 1970s and 1980s, it seemed that Jack was about to be fired at one moment, and at the next he was getting a 

medal for outstanding work—is in part a reflection of how difficult such a quest can be. 

For me, Jack’s early work with electronic mail (years before any of us had heard of the Internet) sensitized me to the 

medium’s possibilities, including its culture-changing potential. He had kind words about my monograph from the outset, 

and he and I have had countless fruitful exchanges over the years. Finally, it was Jack who put the idea of reissuing the 

monograph into my head. He thus can claim a big share of the credit for the publication of this strange hybrid document; 

any shortcomings, of course, are my responsibility alone.

Introduction and Update
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page vi

tive securities cannot. They’re always looking 

into an uncertain future, “anticipating what 

average opinion expects the average opinion 

to be,” as Keynes put it.a

And for its part, the Intelligence Community has 

taken a long list of initiatives ranging from structured analytic techniques to on-line blogs and social 

networking sites.

So why reissue this monograph? What could 

anyone gain from a 25-year-old piece on a subject 

that gets such broad coverage in today’s popular 

literature? For me, the most telling answer came 

from a couple of talks based on the monograph that 

I gave in the spring of 2009. I spoke to conferenceroom-sized groups of analysts from CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence (DI), and each time I had the 

impression that the talk was a revelation for most 

of the audience. Even after allowing as best I could 

for my own bias, I came away wondering whether 

information about cognitive science had percolated 

as widely as I had thought. In addition, in my regular interactions as a tutor of analysts and managers 

of analysts, I have similarly sensed that we have 

not absorbed the science into the way we think 

about our analytic jobs. Thus, one further attempt 

at consciousness-raising might not be out of place, 

especially since we have so many more ways to 

present this paper than we did 25 years ago.b

Moreover, while acknowledging that we have 

learned a great deal since 1984, I would argue that 

the elements of cognitive science highlighted in the 

monograph are still the ones of first-order relevance 

for the DI. I do not think an intelligence analyst will 

gain much professionally from knowing how neurons fire or which parts of the brain participate in 

which mental operations. I do consider it essential, 

however, that we be aware of how our brains ration 

what they make available to our conscious minds 

as they cope with the fact that our “ability to deal 

with knowledge is hugely exceeded by the potential 

a. Justin Fox, review of two books about Keynes, New York 

Times Book Review, 1 November 2009, 13.

b. In 1984 CSI had no Web presence internally or externally, 

and the only way of delivering the findings of its fellows was 

through printed products advertised in internal notices or generated from searches conducted by library researchers.

knowledge contained in man’s environment.”c Not 

only do they select among outside stimuli, they also 

edit what they let us know about their own activities.d

 This is the focus of the monograph.

A Quick Summary

The monograph has two parts: first, a survey 

of cognitive science as we understood it in 1984; 

second, suggestions for changing the way we do 

intelligence analysis in light of what the discipline 

was telling us. As I have indicated, I think the survey section holds up pretty well. While I would like 

to think the reader will learn something useful from 

immersion in all the detail (notably the diagram on 

page 10, which makes graphic the many elements 

that interactively shape our conscious mental activity), the basic concept is quite simple. The conscious mind cannot track more than about seven 

cognitive elements at the same time (cognitivescience jargon often refers to these elements as 

chunks); and to cope with this constraint, our brains 

constantly manipulate those elements, always 

at top speed and usually outside our conscious 

awareness. 

The second section is more of a mixed bag, but I 

believe the following concepts remain relevant:

•	 The importance of bringing to light what might 

be called, with a bow to former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the “unknown knowns”—the 

factors in our analysis that we are unaware of. 

c. Jerome Bruner, On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 240.

d. A recent book by two neuroscientists puts it this way:

Your brain lies to you a lot. . . . [It] doesn’t intend to lie to you, 

of course. For the most part, it’s doing a great job, working 

hard to help you survive and accomplish your goals in a complicated world. But because you often have to react quickly to 

emergencies and opportunities alike, your brain usually aims 

to get a half-assed answer in a hurry rather than a perfect 

answer that takes a while to figure out. Combined with the 

world’s complexity, this means that your brain has to take 

shortcuts and make a lot of assumptions. Your brain’s lies are 

in your best interest—most of the time—but they also lead to 

predictable mistakes.

See Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, Welcome to Your Brain

(New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 2.
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page vii

•	 The conservative bias of our default analytic 

approach: we tend to work from what we 

already “know”—even though, in fact, a host of 

“unknown knowns” affect the “known.”

•	 The solitary nature of the writing process and 

the difference between the way intelligence 

analysts typically do their work (linear, cerebral, mostly written) and the way policymakers 

do theirs (nonlinear, transactional, mostly oral 

and interactive).

•	 The importance of constructing our prose with 

the reader in mind; the monograph, summarizing the work of cognitive-science investigators, 

states, “A striking aspect of the approach of 

skilled writers is the frequency with which they 

think about how they are affecting the reader.”

•	 The importance of the work done at the beginning of an analytic project—what the monograph calls the “conceptual front end.”

•	 The time needed to gain real skill at a craft; 

the monograph cites data suggesting that 

people are unlikely to get good at what they do 

for at least a decade.

•	 The use that can be made of information technology to improve the quality of analysis.

Suggestion: Develop Collaborative Analysis

The Intelligence Community has not been blind 

to the potential in any of these areas. One has only 

to think of the emphasis on structured analysis 

and customer relevance; the attention we devote 

to scope notes; and the many blogs, the broader 

platforms such as A-Space and Intellipedia, and the 

coordination tools such as CIA’s POINT. 

Since I wrote the monograph, however, I have 

nurtured an idea that I think would move our 

analysis well beyond these accomplishments. The 

monograph is not terribly clear on this point since 

I still was laboring to articulate the idea; but as far 

back as 1984, I was sure that electronic interaction 

was the wave of the future for DI analysis. More 

specifically, I thought the time was at hand when 

we would be producing finished intelligence not just 

online but collaboratively.

The vision was reinforced later on when I read 

the introduction to Thinking in Time, by Harvard 

professors Richard Neustadt and Ernest May. The 

authors say they collaborated so closely that sometimes they lost track of who had written which part 

of the text.

In every sense of the word the book is coauthored. We taught together, class by class, 

and have written together, chapter by chapter. It has been a long process. We each 

wrote half the chapters in our first draft, then 

swapped them for redrafting with the rule that 

anything could be changed. Almost everything 

was. We had a further rule that any changes 

could be argued. Some were, some not. We 

carried on the argument by means of successive drafts, with new material subject to the 

same rules. There were so many swaps that 

each of us would change something only to 

be surprised by the other’s “OK with me, you 

wrote it.” We debated sources and argued 

out interpretations. Not only can we no longer 

remember who first wrote what, we cannot 

now remember who first thought what—or 

even who first found what when we jointly researched something. We are of one mind and 

(we hope) one voice.” a

I kept wondering, wouldn’t this sort of approach 

benefit our work?

I am sure that some collaboration of this sort 

is occurring today, but I have seen little sign, a 

quarter-century after the monograph came out, of 

any impact on the way the community as a whole 

operates. I have given a good deal of thought to the 

reasons my vision was so wrong:

•	 First, the idea required orders of magnitude 

more bandwidth and much more sophisticated 

software than we had in 1984. This constraint 

no longer holds, of course. We have plenty of 

a. Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: 

The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: The Free 

Press, 1986), xii.
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page viii

bandwidth, and programs to aid collaborative 

work are now widely available.

•	 Second, as I noted, the act of writing remains 

in essence a private process. To most writers, the idea of working interactively will seem 

like an intrusion into a space where they have 

always been alone.

•	 Third, the proposition faces serious cultural 

and organizational barriers. Hierarchy is at the 

core of any bureaucracy, including the DI’s. 

The core of an analyst’s performance evaluation is his or her publication record as an individual, and the serial review process is firmly 

ensconced as the way we generate our analytic product. A collaborative process would challenge the traditional approach in both areas. 

Managing it would require a healthy dollop of 

faith that something so messy and free-form 

can produce worthwhile results.a

 Furthermore, 

the obstacles loom larger in government bureaucracies than in the private sector. The risk/

reward relationship is clearer in the latter, the 

budgetary process is more flexible and more 

under the control of management, and market 

competition and the bottom line will often prod 

managers toward innovation.b

•	 Fourth, interactive forums, whether Facebook 

and YouTube outside the community or Intela. In the late 1970s the DI tried something analogous to this 

model (minus the IT element) in one of the offices responsible 

for political analysis. The branch-chief level of supervision was 

abolished, and analysts were encouraged to work on projects 

of their own choosing. A periodical called Contra was established to air alternative views. But over the next three or four 

years a sort of bureaucratic regression to the mean took place, 

and hierarchy and the review process reestablished themselves. Contra withered on the vine. The pendulum had swung 

far in the other direction by 1982, when Robert Gates (now the 

Secretary of Defense) took charge of the directorate. Gates 

undertook to review every draft himself and he pretty much did 

so.

b. The following is taken from Marc Ambinder, “Shutdown of 

Intelligence Community E-mail Network Sparks E-Rebellion,” 

Blog: TheAtlantic.com, 6 October 2009:

A former chief technology officer at the Defense Intelligence 

Agency . . . [stated,] “in some cases we are seeing IT 

departments cancel everything associated with innovation—

which would be a sign of a dying organization in the private 

sector.”

lipedia and A-Space within it, may be enlightening for the participants, but nothing about 

them presses participants toward consensus 

or closure. Their mode is conversational; their 

strength lies in information-sharing and an 

ongoing batting-around of ideas. A participant 

might take insights reached online and use 

them elsewhere, but the idea of a discrete 

product coming out of such mediums seems 

almost a contradiction in terms.c The incentive to generate such a product would have to 

originate somewhere else.

•	 Finally, managers may have special difficulty adjusting to the interactive world. Lee 

Rainie of the Pew Internet and American Life 

Project distinguishes “nine tribes of the Internet.” These, he says, can be divided into two 

groups: those “motivated by mobility” and the 

“stationary media majority.” One component 

of the latter group is the “desktop veterans,” 

who by themselves comprise 13 percent of 

the user population. Desktop veterans have 

been Internet users for 10.5 years on average; 

they are heavy users at home and work; 77 

percent have cell phones. They are “content 

to use a high-speed connection and a desktop 

computer . . . [and] happy to be connected 

while they are stationary and sitting. So, they 

place their cell phone and mobile connections 

in the background. And their 2004 cell phone 

still serves its primary purpose for them—making phone calls. Online hit its zenith about 

3-5 years ago when they first got broadband 

connections.”d

 I myself am a charter member 

of this cohort.

I would guess that the older and more senior 

the manager, the more closely he or she will fit the 

“desktop veteran” profile. Such a manager will use 

electronic mail, word-processing software, spreadsheets, and presentational tools like PowerPoint. 

But he or she will have only second-hand familiarity 

c. Whether a policymaker might find the online interchange 

useful is another question, one that is not addressed here but 

might be worth experimenting with.

d. Lee Ramie, “The Nine Tribes of the Internet.” Presentation 

at the Washington Web Managers Roundtable, 10 June 2009.
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page ix

with the interactive resources underlying any effort 

at online collaboration. (These will be more familiar 

to those in the lower ranks who are “motivated by 

mobility.”) And if it is correct, as noted above, that 

(1) interactive media exchanges are unlikely to 

reach closure without outside encouragement, and 

(2) managers, the obvious source of such encouragement, are not familiar enough with interactive 

media to provide it, the odds are against the full 

exploitation of this resource.

Perhaps we need not worry about this. Or perhaps the requisite organizational and (even more 

important) cultural changes seem too costly and the 

benefits too uncertain. I would only point out that 

cognitive-science literature makes clear the shortcomings of the process now in use, which amounts 

to an end-to-end series of solo efforts to get a piece 

drafted and then to coordinate and review it.

For every analyst and every reviewer in this serial process, the analysis starts from a body of analogies and heuristics that are unique to that individual 

and grow out of his or her past experience—afterimages of ideas and events that resonate when we 

examine a current problem, practical rules of thumb 

that have proven useful over time.

The power of this approach is incontestable, but 

we are all too easily blinded to its weaknesses. 

The evidence is clear: analysis is likely to improve 

when we look beyond what is going on in our own 

heads—when we use any of several techniques 

designed to make explicit the underlying structure 

of our argument and when we encourage others 

to challenge our analogies and heuristics with their 

own. Little about the current process fosters such 

activities, it seems to me; they would be almost 

unavoidable in a collaborative environment.

Suggestion: Increase Cognitive Diversity

One final thought, which is based on little more 

than observations about myself and those around 

me: I call it “cognitive diversity.” I believe the DI 

has always been populated very largely by serial 

thinkers like me, who analyze a problem by deconstructing it and laying out the result in writing, a 

quintessentially serial medium. I would of course be 

the last to decry this approach, but sometimes I am 

aware of getting so transfixed by my discoveries in 

the weeds that I have trouble getting back to the 

whole picture, much less the “so-what” that is the 

real purpose of the analysis. On the other hand, I 

have a good friend (he doesn’t work in intelligence) 

who as far as I can tell has not a serial bone in his 

body. Sometimes, however, he can see the entirety of an issue when I am still back in the weeds, 

and sometimes he runs circles around me when it 

comes to the “so-what.” In short, the analytic route 

taken by his mind differs from mine but is not necessarily less “analytic” in its own way, and sometimes he winds up in a more useful place than I do.

Might the DI do a better job if it were more cognitively diverse—if it took in more people with different cognitive “furniture”? I have opinions but no real 

answer to this question. I do believe diversifying the 

workforce in this way would require a cultural shift 

at least comparable to that involved in a shift to online substantive collaboration. Without such a shift, 

the directorate, like any organism under threat, 

would identify people who failed to fit the dominant 

pattern as foreign bodies and extrude them.
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

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Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 1

Thinking and Writing: Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

By Robert S. Sinclair

Before they are six years old, nearly all humans 

learn to generalize, to impute continuity, to discern 

relationships, and to determine cause-and-effect. 

Moreover, we can store the conclusions drawn from 

such processes in a way that gives us access to 

them without burdening our working memory. We 

also learn a language, that uniquely human capacity which sits at the center of conscious cognitive 

activity. Language opens the way to abstraction 

and generalization, and permits each normal human to develop a rich network of concepts. 

All of us are aware of the limitations of these processes. For example, we all are obtuse in dealing 

with logic and probability; we are comfortable with 

imprecision; and our minds are conservative in their 

approach to new information—quicker to recognize 

the familiar than the unfamiliar, reluctant to change 

concepts once we have accepted them. Finally, 

there are innumerable processes that influence our 

mental activity but are not accessible to the conscious part of the mind. 

Some of the attributes that look like limitations, 

however, are actually the main sources of the 

mind’s power; sloppiness is not just the bane but 

the strength of our mental activity. This is because 

of the role played by heuristics. The heuristic approach is a form of intelligent trial and error, in 

which we use experience and inference to refine 

a problem and render it workable. Few would give 

the process high marks for elegance, but it is quick, 

it gets the job done, and it keeps us from getting 

paralyzed by the range of choices confronting us. 

There are many disadvantages: the approach is inherently conservative, it tends to be imprecise, and 

it is not particularly congenial to logic, probability, 

and the scientific method. Nonetheless, heuristics 

are likely to remain the way we go about our busiThe pages that follow describe some of the powerful metaphors about the workings of our minds that 

have developed over the past two decades, and 

attempt to apply those metaphors to the work of 

CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence.a

 I believe the Dl 

can thereby gain insights into such issues as the 

following: 

•	 What is the best way to reconcile the bureaucratic imperatives of accountability, centralization, and structure with the fact that analytic 

work is essentially an individual effort? 

•	 Can the directorate do a better job of pitching its analysis to catch the attention of its 

audience without sacrificing essential analytic 

detail? 

I am not claiming that cognitive science offers definitive answers to such questions, but I do think it 

has something important to contribute to our understanding. 

The term “cognitive science” embraces several 

disciplines, notably computer science, linguistics, 

and neurophysiology, as well as psychology. A 

cognitive scientist seeks to understand what the 

mind does when it searches for patterns, when it 

makes a value judgment, when it must choose between pattern-finding and judgment-making, when 

it engages in the myriad other activities that occupy 

it. Some fragmentary answers to questions such as 

this have become possible in the last 20 years. 

a. The original monograph and this edition’s introduction focus 

on CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence because it is the analytic 

component of the Intelligence Community I am most familiar 

with. I hope, however, that the points I raise have relevance 

elsewhere in the IC’s analytic world. 

Summary
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 2

ness most of the time, particularly when we are 

deeply engaged in an issue. 

The heuristic approach is based in part on 

deeply set mental patterns. “Working memory,” the 

part of the mind that does our conscious mental 

work, can handle about seven items at a time. In 

compensation, it can manipulate those items with 

extraordinary speed. Cognitive scientists refer to 

this manipulative capability as the mind’s chunking

capacity—our ability to develop conceptual entities 

or chunks, to build hierarchies of those entities, to 

alter them, and to bring wildly differing entities together. We form chunks about any information that 

interests us, and we tend to believe our chunks are 

valid until the evidence that they are not is overwhelming. Each new bit of data is evaluated in light 

of the chunks already on hand; it is much harder 

to evaluate existing chunks on the basis of new 

evidence. 

When we need to get through large quantities of 

data, when we do not have to move too far from an 

experiential reference point, and when a “best possible” solution suffices, heuristics and chunking can 

be amazingly effective, as Herbert Simon proved in 

his studies of first-class chess players. Such players are distinguished by the large number of board 

patterns (50,000, say) they keep in their long-term 

memories. Talent obviously is important as well, 

but Simon concluded that no one can become an 

expert player without such a store of chunks. Developing such a store in any field of mental activity 

is laborious, and there apparently are no shortcuts: 

the investment may not pay off for a decade. 

All this information quickly takes on operational 

significance for the Directorate of Intelligence when 

we turn to writing, an activity that is simultaneously 

at the heart of the DI’s work and at the frontier of 

cognitive science. When cognitive scientists refer 

to the means used by humans to communicate with 

one another, they tend to use the term “language,” 

and unless they state otherwise, the word means 

speech rather than writing; few of them have focused on writing as a subject of research. Yet there 

are many ways in which the cognitive processes 

involved in writing differ from those involved in 

speech. Among other things, writing is capable of 

far more breadth and precision; neither complex 

ideas nor complex organizations would be possible 

without it. On the other hand, because everyone 

works with speech, whereas not everyone works 

very much with writing, speech is a far more general medium of exchange. I would argue that speech 

is the medium to which all of us, even the compulsive writers among us, turn when an issue engages 

our emotions; and above all, I think, speech is the 

medium of decisionmaking. 

I find it impossible to avoid the conclusion that 

our work will do its job better if it includes an element of speech—if we aim for prose that has a 

conversational ring. Such prose would often differ 

from that now produced in the directorate, and I 

think it would strain the organization to turn in this 

direction. I do believe, however, that to do so would 

help us get our message across. 

Conversational prose must be produced by the 

original writer; it cannot be edited in later. This 

implies there will be an additional burden on the 

writer, but it is easy to overstate the burden and 

misstate the way it would be felt. Cognitive science 

makes it clear that, although the writing process is 

extraordinarily convoluted, good writers represent 

the writing problem as a “complex speech act.” 

With them, the conversational element is already 

present to some degree. 

In the words of one expert, “a writer in the act 

is a thinker on a full-time cognitive overload.” One 

principal source of the overload is that the writer 

creates a datum—a malleable entity outside the 

mind that grows out of the mind’s internal workings. 

The datum acts as an extension of working memory, but working memory itself cannot keep track of 

all aspects of the datum unless it shifts constantly 

from one aspect to another. Skilled writers have 

various ways of reducing the overload. For example, like the chess master with his 50,000 patterns, 

they use chunks stored in long-term memory. Or 

they satisfice—an ungainly bit of jargon referring to 

the mind’s ability to accept a “best-possible” solution, at least temporarily. One of the most effective 

techniques is to develop and monitor a variety of 

heuristic strategies. Typically there are three sorts 

of strategies: 
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 3

be reduced by divorcing substance from hierarchy 

as often as possible; through hierarchy-jumping in 

contacts with consumers; and by enfolding SAFE—

which has the potential to bring significant changes 

in the way the directorate does its work—in the 

culture of the directorate. Concept papers could be 

made to bring out the To Do schemes of the various 

participants more clearly. 

The directorate might explore the possibilities of 

non-written media, such as television, more extensively.

Finally, the ideas contained in this essay do not 

exhaust the possibilities offered by cognitive science. Suggestions for further work include a cognitive task analysis of the analytic process and an 

exploration of the extent to which the directorate’s 

concentration on the written word limits its analytic 

flexibility. 

These findings have obvious implications for the 

way the directorate recruits and trains its people. 

They suggest that more emphasis should be given 

to effectiveness at the To-Do level, and perhaps 

that skills of the To-Say variety are somewhat less 

important. Moreover, if it is true that around 10 

years are needed to acquire a first-class network 

of chunks, training probably should figure far more 

heavily in the DI’s thinking than it does now. 

The trends already under way in the Dl should 

encourage conversational prose, and the notion of 

bringing the audience into focus should help writers and reviewers establish common ground to 

work out the nonsubstantive aspects of a paper. It 

still will take repeated effort, however, to bridge the 

conceptual gaps that are bound to appear. 

The conflict between organizational imperatives 

and the way analysts do their cognitive work might 

Recommendations

•	 A scheme To Do, the overall rhetorical problem as posed by the person solving it. 

•	 Subordinate to this scheme, a scheme To 

Say—the substantive points to be made. 

•	 Finally, in coordination with the scheme To 

Say, a scheme To Compose, the interaction 

between ideas and the developing text. 

Good writers, it has been found, spend much of 

their time considering schemes To Do and To Compose; unskilled writers concentrate on schemes To 

Say. A striking aspect of the skilled writer’s approach is the frequency with which he or she thinks 

about the audience. The cognitive-science literature 

indicates that developing a vivid image of the audience tends to enhance substantive content as well. 

Thus, being clear about the overall strategy and 

refining one’s concept of the audience offer a way 

to bridge the gap between speech and writing. 

Cognitive science also sheds light on the tension 

between creativity and the demands of a structured 

organization like the Dl. The problems can be reduced if we recognize the overriding importance of 

what we do right at the outset of the analytic process. It is here that the writer makes assumptions 

about the overall rhetorical problem—the strategy 

To Do. I suspect this strategy is not well articulated 

for much of the DI’s work, and I think it is problems 

at this level that cause the real headaches. There 

is, moreover, a built-in potential for conflict between 

what happens at the “conceptual front end” and the 

demands of a necessarily serial review process: 

plans To Do may have to be articulated over and 

over as the process goes forward. 

Plans To Do typically get articulated incrementally and heuristically in any case, and thus it takes 

time to find out what is going on. Not all analysts 

find such inquiries congenial, and managers at all 

levels begrudge the time. But to the extent that all 

concerned can work early and often at narrowing 

the gaps between various concepts of the scheme 

To Do, the chance of a bumpy review process 

will diminish, whatever creativity there is may be 

preserved, and a sense of collegiality will be enhanced. 
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 4

addressed in the following pages. The essay is a 

layman’s view of a body of knowledge that did not 

exist two decades ago, together with an attempt to 

lay out some operational implications of that knowledge. 

The concerns that stimulated my inquiries still 

were pretty inchoate when I submitted my request 

for a sabbatical (in this sense the genesis of the 

essay exemplifies the cognitive processes it discusses). I think it is a tribute to those who approved 

the request—perhaps to their faith, perhaps to their 

gullibility—that I have been allowed to spend six 

months finding out what my questions were and 

then trying to answer them.

This essay has its origins in the controversies 

over CIA’s analytic work that arose after Vietnam and Watergate, the criticisms levied against 

the Agency by its principal consumers, and the 

Agency’s efforts to respond to those criticisms. 

For much of this period it seemed that producer 

and consumer were talking past each other, and I 

sometimes thought that the resultant organizational 

tinkering was proceeding with little reference to the 

analytic work going on around me. The producerconsumer gap has since been greatly narrowed, 

and our analytic work seems more on target now 

than in the past. I have a sense, however, that we 

still do not understand the way we do our analysis, 

or the intricacies of the producer-consumer relationship, as well as we might. These are the questions 

Preface

Introduction

Two quotations sum up what this essay is about: 

Our insights into mental functioning are too 

often fashioned from observations of the sick 

and the handicapped. It is difficult to catch and 

record, let alone understand, the swift flight of 

a mind operating at its best.a

A writer in the act is a thinker on a full-time 

cognitive overload.b

The pages that follow will be concerned with the 

“mind operating at its best”—and in the Directorate 

of Intelligence, which operates mainly in the written mode, that usually means a mind “on a full-time 

cognitive overload.” In brief, I hope to describe 

some of the powerful metaphors about the workings of our minds that have developed over the 

past couple of decades. I think these metaphors 

can help provide better answers to such questions 

as the following: 

a. Bruner, On Knowing, 15.

b. Linda Flower and John R. Hayes, “The Dynamics of 

Composing: Making Plans and Juggling Constraints” (article 

provided by the authors).

•	 What is the best way to reconcile the bureaucratic imperatives of accountability, centralization, and structure with the fact that analytic 

work is essentially an individual effort?

•	 Can the directorate do a better job of pitching its analysis to catch the attention of its 

audience without sacrificing essential analytic 

detail? 

The hardest part of the essay to get right comes 

at the outset. Few readers are likely to know much 

about the territory I am asking them to explore, 

and much of the terminology—”cognitive science,” 

“psycholinguistics,” “neurophysiology”—is abstruse 

and off-putting. I believe, however, that the new territory is likely to prove surprisingly accessible. One 

of the virtues of cognitive science, in fact, is the 

way it gives insights into what we have been doing 

all along. Unlike Moliere’s bourgeois gentilhomme, 

who was surprised to learn he had been speaking 

prose all his life, I think most of us will recognize 

ourselves in what follows. 

But how relevant are these findings to the Directorate of Intelligence? Many might argue, for instance, that introspection of this sort will gain noth-
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 5

ing at best and paralysis at worst. The point is just 

to do the analysis, and doing it is learned on the 

job, in consultation with our consumers. Those who 

hold this view probably would applaud the thought 

behind the following bit of doggerel: 

A centipede was happy quite

Until a frog in fun 

said, “Pray, which leg comes after which?”

This raised its mind to such a pitch

It lay distracted in a ditch 

Considering how to run. 

This is not an easy argument to dispose of, and 

the centipede will reappear from time to time in the 

pages that follow. The argument is based on the 

proposition, which seems correct to me, that the Dl 

is essentially a craft shop, and I agree that most of 

the learning of a craft does take place on the job. 

But look again at the quotation from Flower and 

Hayes that I began with. If the very act of writing 

puts a writer—any writer at all—into “full-time cognitive overload,” then perhaps we would benefit from 

a better understanding of what contributes to the 

overload. 

The novelist and poet Walker Percy offers a concept that may be even more fruitful. In a series of 

essays dealing with human communication, Percy 

asserts that a radical distinction must be made between what he calls “knowledge” and what he calls 

“news.”a

 Percy’s notion takes on added significance 

in light of the findings of cognitive science (of which 

he seems largely unaware), and I will be discussing 

it at greater length in due course. For the present 

I would simply assert that the nature of our work 

forces us to swing constantly back and forth between knowledge and news, and I believe cognitive 

science has something to contribute to our understanding of the problem. I am not claiming it offers 

a. Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (New York; Farrar, 

Straus, and Giroux, 1982).

a panacea; I do think that in ways such as this it 

sheds powerful light on important practical issues. 

A few clarifications are in order at the outset. 

First, although this essay talks a lot about writing, it 

is not designed to deal with the how-to-write issue. 

As the title indicates, its topic is thinking and writing—the complex mental patterns out of which writing comes, their strengths and limitations, and the 

challenges they create, not just for writers but for 

managers. I hope my suggestions are relevant to 

the never-ending struggle toward better writing, but 

I am trying to cast my net more broadly than that. 

Second, it should be obvious that cognitive science is only one of many ways to approach human 

mental activity. Factors other than the cognitive 

activities discussed in this essay play major roles 

in the way we do our mental work—for example, 

the attitudinal predilections that can be measured 

by psychological testing, or the emotional factors 

discussed in the psychoanalytic literature. To my 

mind, however, the findings of cognitive science 

have special relevance for the way the directorate does its business because they illuminate the 

process itself as well as the equipment we bring to 

the procedure. 

Third, I am not claiming to speak as an acrossthe-board expert in cognitive science. What follows 

is the result of very rapid chunking (a useful bit of 

cognitive-science jargon, as we shall see), and it 

tends to emphasize the work of Herbert Simon and 

his colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon University. I think 

there is good reason for such an emphasis since 

I believe their work has particular relevance for 

the DI’s writing-based culture. I would be the last, 

however, to assert that what follows is a definitive 

treatment. That is why many of the suggestions in 

the last section are put as questions rather than assertions. My main goal is to start a discussion; any 

progress will need the help of real experts. 
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

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First we need to get some notion of what is 

involved in cognitive science. The term embraces 

several disciplines, notably computer science, 

linguistics, and neurophysiology, as well as psychology. Very broadly there are three main areas 

of inquiry: how the various parts of the brain (and 

the nervous system as a whole) interact, in both a 

neurological and a functional sense; how the human capacity for language is turned into specific 

linguistic skill; and how people analyze and solve 

problems, both simple and complex. To pick a 

starting point, we might say the field began to open 

up in 1959, when the linguist, and all-round radical thinker, Noam Chomsky published a scathing 

review of a book by B.F. Skinner, whose behavioralscience approach had dominated research into the 

workings of the mind up to that point.

Viewing the Interstate 

To get some flavor of what this activity has produced, imagine that you are sharing my aerie on 

the 10th floor of a building that overlooks Interstate 

66, just outside Washington, DC. Every afternoon 

we can watch a game involving the Virginia State 

Police and that rugged individualist, the Washington commuter. No car is supposed to use the 

westbound lanes of the interstate after 3:30 p.m. 

unless there are two or more people in it, but some 

commuters tempt fate every afternoon, and many 

afternoons the police are waiting for them as they 

come over the rise on the access ramp. 

From our vantage point we can view this game 

in different ways. We can guess whether a specific 

car is going to be stopped. We can see if we can 

discern any patterns in the frequency with which 

the police appear. Or we can ponder the values that 

come into play when a government limits the use of 

a road and individuals decide to ignore the rules. In 

the latter case we can look at the conflict more or 

less dispassionately—guessing, perhaps, about the 

likelihood that the government will stick to its position—or we can join the fray, siding with either the 

government or the commuter. I would argue that all 

I. A Quick Survey 

these activities are analogous to the sort of work Dl 

analysts do at one time or another. 

Now imagine that there is a third person, a cognitive scientist, in the room with us. To this person the 

interesting question is not the judgments you and 

I make about what is happening on the interstate, 

but the processes our minds use to make those 

judgments. He or she wants to know what the mind 

does when it searches for patterns, when it makes 

a value judgment, when it is forced to choose 

between pattern-finding and judgment-making, 

when it engages in the myriad other activities that 

occupy it. And the amazing thing— amazing given 

the physical complexity of the brain, where the 

neocortex alone contains something like 10 billion 

nerve cells, each capable of firing several times 

a second—is that some fragmentary answers are 

possible. 

To illuminate the answers to the scientist’s questions, we need to operate at a more elemental 

level. As you imagine yourself looking at the interstate, consider not the little drama that is going 

to begin when the next car gets to the top of the 

rise, but your perception of the car itself. A crucial 

point is that perception itself involves analytic work 

of a very basic sort. You constantly check out the 

characteristics of the car and match this information with information already in your memory. You 

then predict what the car is going to do next, and 

you check that prediction against what happens. 

You are not aware of these processes because 

long ago you learned them thoroughly (cognitive 

scientists would use the term “overlearned”) and no 

longer have to waste the limited capacity of your 

working memory on them. 

But it is worth pausing to reflect on what we all 

learn without apparent difficulty before the age of 

six. In the context of the I-66 example, any of us 

would know that the car that just emerged from 

behind the building across the way is the same 

one that disappeared behind the other side a few 

moments ago; that the term “car” can be applied to 

both the Continental and the Honda, however different they may appear, but not to the GMC pickup; 
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 7

that the shiny metal and glass, glimpsed momentarily through a gap in the fence, is another passing car; and that the styrofoam cup in the road is 

being blown about because a car has just passed. 

In more formal terms, we all learned to generalize, 

to impute continuity, to discern relationships, and to 

determine cause-and-effect. And we can store the 

conclusions drawn from such processes in a way 

that gives us access to them without burdening our 

working memory. This is a formidable array of skills 

(they obviously are the basis for the skills used in 

the Dl), and they all developed with such ease that 

the childhood process seems almost automatic. 

But this is not all. We also learned to give names 

both to the things we see and to the relationships 

among those things. In short, we learned a language, the uniquely human capacity that sits at the 

center of all our conscious cognitive activity. Obviously it is language that permits us to communicate 

information of any complexity to each other, but in 

addition, language is a prerequisite for the steadily 

increasing complexity of which our own minds are 

capable as they develop. Naming a thing and naming its relationship with other things are themselves 

acts of abstraction and generalization, and once 

we have taken this step we can name relationships 

among relationships, thereby building a dense conceptual network. 

All of us know, however, that if we did nothing 

but marvel at the achievements of our minds we 

would be leaving a lot unsaid. I am not referring to 

the times our mental processes prove inadequate 

to a task; I want to focus on the limitations these 

processes encounter even when they are working 

well—limitations, we often see more easily in others 

than in ourselves. For example, we all are determinedly obtuse when we attempt to deal with logic 

and probability. We are much readier to use them 

to buttress arguments we have already worked out 

than to discipline those arguments. 

We also are surprisingly comfortable with imprecision. Douglas Hofstadter, in his brilliant and infuriatingly self-indulgent book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, 

states the situation well: 

The amazing thing about language is how 

imprecisely we use it and still manage to get 

away with it. SHRDLU [an artificial-intelligence 

computer program] uses words in a “metallic” way, while people use them in a “spongy” 

or “rubbery” or even “Nutty-Puttyish” way. If 

words were nuts and bolts, people could make 

any bolt fit into any nut; they’d just squish 

the one into the other, as in some surrealistic 

painting where everything goes soft. Language, in human hands, becomes almost like 

a fluid, despite the coarse grain of its components.a

A small example from close to home: a group of 

Dl analysts, asked what numerical odds they would 

associate with the word “probable,” gave answers 

ranging from 50 to 95 percent. Part of the tendency 

toward imprecision derives from the way humans 

surround every explicit statement with a cloud 

of assumptions. Our cognitive activity would be 

cumbersome indeed if we had to articulate all these 

assumptions, even though in not doing so we may 

discover afterwards that we were not talking about 

the same thing as someone else. Another factor 

making for imprecision is the element of abstraction 

that is built into language, since with abstractions it 

is difficult to be clear exactly what we are referring 

to. Indeed people deal in hierarchies of abstractions, and the Dl generally operates toward the 

more abstract rather than the more concrete end of 

the hierarchies. 

Moreover, our minds are conservative in the way 

they select information for processing by working 

memory. The capacity of working memory is tiny: It 

can only deal with about seven items of information 

at once. Yet the mind must sort through a welter of 

sensory data (held in very short-term buffers and all 

clamoring for attention) and must also make effective use of the information in long-term memory. 

Faced with this cacophony, our minds generally are 

quicker to recognize the familiar than the unfamiliar, 

and data already in our memories heavily influence 

the processing of new data. We rarely are fully conscious of the choices that are made. To put it more 

a. Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden 

Braid (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 674–75. 
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

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Some readers may remember the following 

episode from Jacques Tati’s classic film comedy, 

Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. The scene is a French railroad station. The camera takes in three platforms, 

and a little knot of travelers is waiting expectantly 

on the platform in the center. Suddenly the loudspeaker overhead begins to bleat a long and utterly 

unintelligible announcement; and just then a train 

slowly approaches the platform on the left. After 

a few moments of growing agitation 

the travelers, goaded by more 

bleats from the loudspeaker, 

disappear down the platform 

steps. They emerge on the 

left platform just as it becomes 

obvious that the train is going through without stopping. Their train is at that moment pulling in 

at the platform to the right.

This episode can serve as a model for the way 

our minds work in a much larger sphere. It is 

not hard to reconstruct the cognitive work being 

done—done at a furious pace—by the travelers. 

First, with the trains, they are following the overlearned patterns that we followed with the cars on 

the interstate: matching what their senses tell them 

with information already in their memories, they 

recognize the train and make some predictions for 

their senses to check out. But they then apply a 

concisely, within broad limits, we see what we want 

to see and make what we want of what we see. 

Complex though they are, moreover, these 

aspects of the mind’s activities, which are at least 

partly conscious and volitional, are far from the 

whole story. The literature is full of information on 

processes of which we cannot be aware, processes 

that constantly affect our conscious mental operations.a

a. These processes have been discovered through neurological investigations; they are distinct from the unconscious activities investigated by psychoanalysts. For further information, 

see Erich Harth, Windows on the Mind (New York; Morrow, 

1982) and Gazzaniga and Ledoux, The Integrated Mind (New 

York: Plenum, 1978). Among other things, the latter book proBut given all this uncertainty, all these aspects 

of our minds that are in principle unknowable or 

beyond our control, what can introspection gain us? 

Don’t you wind up in the ditch with the centipede 

if you start asking what goes on in our minds? In 

fact, however, it is by looking at some of these very 

attributes that we gain useful insights into the way 

we go about our work. Some things that up to now 

have looked like weaknesses are actually the main 

sources of the mind’s power. It turns out that sloppiness is not just the bane but the strength of our 

mental activity.

vides a useful corrective to the popular literature’s treatment of 

the right brain/left brain phenomenon.

similar process of perception/prediction/verification 

to information that for the most part is generated internally. What emerges is a collection of unspoken 

hypotheses, which might perhaps be put into words 

as follows: “My train is the next one scheduled; 

the loudspeaker almost certainly is announcing 

my train; that train over there seems to be the only 

one coming in; all trains must stop at the station; 

so the train over there must be mine.” They easily 

reach a consensus; perhaps they even 

perceive that the train is slowing a bit (it’s easy to let one’s 

presuppositions affect one’s 

perceptions). And, of course, 

they wind up looking silly. 

But—and this is a critical part of the model—

they do not miss their train. Further, I think anyone 

watching the movie would assume that even if the 

travelers make some mistakes, they still can catch 

the train if they scramble. In other words we and 

the travelers start from the idea that the system is 

built to accommodate a certain amount of trial and 

error.a

a. In New York City that is the case, according to the New York 

Times, which on 16 October 2009 reported that commuter 

trains almost always leave their platforms a minute after their 

scheduled departure times.

II. Heuristics and the Incredible Chunk 

The 

heuristic approach is a 

form of intelligent trial and error 

in which we use experience and 

inference...
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The jargon for the approach of the travelers 

is heuristics. A cognitive scientist might call their 

struggles a heuristic exploration of a poorly defined 

problem space; he or she would argue that heuristics offer a more satisfactory account of the way humans learn than the stimulus-response approach of 

the behavioral scientists. The heuristic approach is 

a form of intelligent trial-and-error, in which we use 

experience and inference to clarify, narrow, or otherwise refine a problem to make it workable. Logic 

has a role, but a subordinate one. The essence of 

the process is a non-random barging around. If we 

decide one tactic is not working, we back up and try 

another, but we are reluctant to do so. We tend to 

assume our theories are right until they are firmly 

disproven. Much of the time we end our search for 

solutions before we achieve the optimal outcome. 

We accept a “best-possible” solution and move 

on to something else, or to use the ungainly word 

invented (I think) by Herbert Simon, we satisfice.a

Few would give the process high marks for 

elegance, but it does deserve high marks for success. In other words, it works. Heuristics seem to 

have played a major role in the rapidity of human 

evolution, and they are equally prominent in the 

development of each individual. This is true of both 

cognitive and physical skills. The way children learn 

their native language is a particularly clear example. Preschool children do not learn a language by 

memorizing rules or parroting the sentences they 

hear. The essence of their approach from the very 

beginning is to experiment with linguistic patterns 

of their own. Using this approach they can learn 

rules of extraordinary complexity with little apparent 

trouble. Moreover, from the beginning, their linguistic activity has both a creative component and an 

element of satisficing. Logic and the scientific method—what Piaget called formal procedures—come 

late, are almost never fully assimilated, and seem 

to be used less systematically by nearly everyone 

after the age of 20 or so.b

a. The last syllable of the word rhymes with “dice.” Herbert 

Simon, a Nobel laureate in economics, began delving into 

cognitive theory partly out of dissatisfaction with the benefitsmaximizing “rational man” of classical economic theory. His 

“thinking man” is a satisficer. See Simon, Models of Thought

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 3.

b. See Carol Gilligan and J.M. Murphy, “Development from 

What is it about heuristics that makes them so 

useful? First, they are quick and they get the job 

done, assuming the experiential base is sufficient 

and a certain amount of satisficing is not objectionable. Second, what cognitive scientists call the 

problem-space remains manageable. Theoretically 

that space becomes unmanageably large as soon 

as you start to generalize and explore: any event 

may be important now, any action on your part is 

possible, and you could get paralyzed by possibilities as the centipede did. But humans constantly 

narrow the problem-space on the basis of their own 

experience. And most of the time the results are acceptable: what more efficient way is there to narrow 

an indefinitely large problem-space? 

But there are obvious limitations to the approach, 

and the limitations become more apparent when 

one faces issues like those confronting the Dl: 

•	 Heuristics are inherently conservative; they 

follow the tried-and-true method of building on 

what has already happened. When the approach is confronted with the oddball situation 

or when someone asks what is out there in the 

rest of the problem-space, heuristics begin to 

flounder. Yet we resist using other approaches, 

partly because we simply find them much less 

congenial, partly because the record allows 

plausible argument about their effectiveness 

when dealing with an indefinitely large set of 

possibilities. 

•	 As most people use them, heuristics are 

imprecise and sloppy. Some of the reasons 

why cognitive activity is imprecise were noted 

earlier; another reason is the tendency to 

satisfice, which encourages us to go wherever 

experience dictates and stop when we have 

an adequate answer. With perseverance and 

sufficient information one can achieve considerable precision, but there is nothing in the 

heuristic approach itself that compels us to do 

so and little sign that humans have much of 

an urge to use it in this way. Most of the time, 

“Adolescence to Adulthood: The Philosopher and the Dilemma 

of the Fact” in Intellectual Development Beyond Childhood, 

No. 5 in the series New Directions for Child Development (San 

Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1979).
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 10

moreover, the information is not terribly good. 

We then may find ourselves trying to get more 

precision out of the process than it can provide. 

•	 In everyday use, heuristics are not congenial 

to formal procedures such as logic, probability, and the scientific method. This fact helps 

explain why we rarely use logic rigorously, why 

we tend to be more interested in confirming 

than in disconfirming a hypothesis, and why 

we are so poor at assessing odds. 

Warts and all, however, heuristics are likely to remain the way we all go about our business most of 

the time. And it seems to me that the more deeply 

engaged we are, the likelier we are to operate 

this way. Perhaps it is an obvious proposition that 

humans use the approaches they are most comfortable with when an issue is important to them, and 

heuristics, whatever its drawbacks, are what we all 

are comfortable with. 

One reason the heuristic approach is so deepset is that it uses even more deeply set mental 

patterns. Once again at this level we find capabilities with great power (they let us run circles around 

computers in many respects) but with significant 

limitations as well—limitations we probably would 

be well advised to learn to work with rather than try 

to change. 

The below diagram is typical of the way cognitive scientists represent the mind’s operations.a

We all have a system of buffers that enables us 

to organize incoming stimuli, a long-term memory 

of essentially infinite capacity, and a short-term or 

working memory that does our conscious mental 

work. At the level of generality at which we are 

operating, the roles of the buffers and long-term 

memory are fairly obvious. It is working memory 

that needs further discussion. 

a.This particular diagram is taken from Morton Hunt, The Universe Within (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), l03.

O

u

t

side

S

t

i

muli

Visual

Aural

Tactile

Gustatory

Olfactory

Short term

Memory

Long term

Memory

Permanently

Lost

Permanently

Lost

Lost or unavailable 

but possibly

recoverable (although

perhaps much altered)

B

UFF

E

R

S

Dec ay Forgot ten Forgot ten

Flow

Chart of the Human Memory System

Rehearsal

Impressions not attended to

Elaborative

Processes

Retrieval
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

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The two salient features of working memory are 

its speed and its limited capacity. In one of P.G. 

Wodehouse’s novels a particularly dunderheaded 

character is said to be capable of only “one thought 

at a time—if that,” and the rest of us are closer to 

this standard than we might like to admit. As I noted 

earlier, working memory can handle perhaps seven 

items at a time. This number has to include not 

just substantive information but also any processing cues. If we have something we want to say in a 

complex sentence, for example, we must use one 

or more of the seven slots to keep track of where 

we are—which is one reason our spoken discourse 

rarely uses complex sentences. 

It should be apparent the heuristic approach is 

critical to the effectiveness of our conscious mental 

activity, since short-term memory needs procedures 

like heuristics that narrow its field of view. On the 

other hand, the drawbacks are equally apparent. 

The ability to process large quantities of information 

is always an advantage and sometimes a necessity. How can we operate effectively if we can consider so little at a time? The answer to this question 

lies in the speed and flexibility with which we can 

manipulate the information in short-term memory; 

to use the terminology, in our chunking prowess. 

In Morton Hunt’s formulation, a chunk is 

any coherent group of items of information that 

we can remember as if it were a single item; 

a word is a chunk of letters, remembered as 

easily as a single letter (but carrying much 

more information); a well-known date—say, 

1776—is remembered as if it were one digit; 

and even a sentence, if familiar (“A stitch in 

time saves nine.”) is remembered almost as 

effortlessly as a much smaller unit of information.a

A chunk, it should be clear, equates to one of the 

roughly seven entities that short-term memory can 

deal with at one time. Hunt’s formulation notwithstanding, it need not be tied to words or discrete 

symbols. Any conceptual entity—from a single letter 

to the notion of Kant’s categorical imperative—can 

a. Morton Hunt, The Universe Within, 88.

be a chunk. And not only do we work with chunks 

that come to us from the outside world, we create 

and remember chunks of our own. Anything in longterm memory probably has been put there by the 

chunking process. We build hierarchies of chunks, 

combining a group of them under a single conceptual heading (a new chunk), “filing” the subordinate 

ideas in long-term memory, and using the overall 

heading to gain access to them. We can manipulate 

any chunk or bring wildly differing chunks together, 

and we can do these things with great speed and 

flexibility. 

Consider just two examples. First, the use you 

make of this essay. You are not likely to recall a 

single sentence of it when you finish; but you will 

(I hope) have stored ideas derived from it in your 

long-term memory. You will, in fact, have developed 

your own chunks on the basis of what you have 

read. If I have done my job there will be a great 

many such chunks, they will bear at least a familial 

resemblance to the ideas I am trying to explicate, 

you will have formulated them quickly and easily, 

and you will manipulate them on your own. 

The second example is very different. Simon and 

his colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon University have 

specialized in the oral protocol, in which individuals are asked to articulate as much as possible of 

their thought-processes as they solve a problem 

or engage in some other kind of mental activity. 

Here is an excerpt from one such protocol, in which 

the subject has been asked to turn a simple story 

problem into an algebraic equation. The aspect that 

sheds light on the chunking process is the use of 

“it” at the two points where I have underlined the 

word. 

We’ll call the number n. It says that if we multiply it by 6 and add 44 to it, “the result is 68.” b

You will notice that superficially the meaning of 

“it” changes between the first and the second use; 

the word refers to n the first time and to 6n the second. But there is an underlying sense in which “it” 

remains constant. One might articulate this sense 

as “the idea (or chunk) I am currently manipulatb. Simon, Models of Thought, 209. 
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 12

ing, whatever its specific content at the moment.” 

Furthermore, this sense is clear enough for us to 

have little doubt what the person doing the protocol 

is trying to say. In this brief excerpt the subject of 

the experiment has been caught in the act of rapid 

chunking, and we have been caught in the act of 

comprehending the process without noticing it. The 

process was as quick for us as it was for the subject.a

In some ways “chunk” is a misleading term for 

the phenomenon. The word calls to mind something discrete and hard-edged, whereas the very 

essence of the phenomenon is the way we can give 

it new shapes and new characteristics, and the way 

conceptual fragments interpenetrate each other in 

long-term memory. A chunk might better be conceived of, metaphorically, as a pointer to information in long-term memory, and the information it retrieves as a cloud with a dense core and ill-defined 

edges. The mind can store an enormous number of 

such clouds, each overlapping many others. 

This “cloudiness”—the way any one concept 

evokes a series of others—is a source of great efficiency in human communication; it is what lets us 

get the drift of a person’s remarks without having 

all the implications spelled out. But it can also be a 

source of confusion. Consider the following examples, some showing efficiency, some opening the 

way for confusion. 

•	 My teenage daughter, nervously trying to pour 

conditioner into a narrow-necked bottle, says, 

“This isn’t going to work.” But she doesn’t hesitate in her pouring, and the job is completed 

without mishap. Her words, her inflections, and 

her actions have communicated a whole web 

of concepts to me (and perhaps to herself) 

which are far indeed from what she actually 

said.

•	 A boss comes out of an inner office, puts a 

small stack of typewritten pages on the secretary’s desk, says, “There aren’t enough copies,” and goes back into the office. The secrea. Another point this little excerpt brings to light is the degree of 

linguistic imprecision we can tolerate, particularly when we are 

dealing with spoken language

tary might tell you the boss had said to make 

more copies. The boss might agree. Both are 

working from assumptions that go unarticulated but not from what the boss actually said. 

(In addition you, the reader, may have thought 

of the boss as being male and the secretary as 

being female—another unarticulated assumption.) 

•	 In a cognitive science lecture a speaker reads 

aloud the following sentences: “Mary heard the 

ice cream truck coming down the street. She 

remembered her birthday money and ran into 

the house.” Those in the audience conclude 

that the sentences are about a little girl who 

is going to buy some ice cream; the speaker 

notes that this conclusion is based on inference, not on anything explicitly stated. 

Cognitive scientists apply a variety of terms—

”networks,” “schemata,” “scripts”—to the unspoken 

contexts into which we set pieces of information. 

The last example in particular makes clear how 

eager we are to build such contexts. Neither we nor 

the lecturer’s audience had any obvious need to 

construct any story at all from those two sentences 

about Mary, yet nearly everyone does. We form 

chunks about any information that interests us, and 

(heuristics again) we tend to believe our chunks are 

valid until the evidence that they are not is overwhelming. And we form our chunks right away, as 

the information is coming in: there is no nonsense 

about waiting for a sufficiency of evidence. Each 

new bit of data is evaluated in light of the chunks 

already on hand, all of which are treated as at least 

arguably valid. We find it far more difficult to evaluate existing chunks on the basis of a new piece of 

data.

When we need to get through large quantities of 

data, when we do not have to move too far from an 

experiential reference point, when a “best possible” 

answer is sufficient (and these criteria are met most 

of the time), chunking can be amazingly effective. 

The approach works in contexts far more complicated than might be expected, as is indicated by 

the experiments with chess players conducted by 

Simon and others. 
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 13

What are the hallmarks of a first-class chess 

player? Not, it seems, the ability to look further 

ahead in the game or to evaluate a larger number 

of possible moves; the master’s approach is not 

much more extensive in these respects than the 

beginner’s. What distinguishes the master and the 

grandmaster is the store of chess patterns built up 

in long-term memory over years of competition and 

study. Simon estimates that a first-class player will 

have 50,000 of these patterns to call on—by no 

means a small number, but orders of magnitude 

less than the theoretical possibilities that flow from 

any given position. The expert can use them to 

drastically reduce the number of choices he must 

consider at any point in a game, with the result that 

he often hits on an effective move with such speed 

that the observer attributes it to pure intuition.

So formidable is this ability (which is little more 

than heuristics and chunking) that humans were 

able to keep ahead of chess-playing computers 

for longer than most experts in the field predicted. 

When a computer that could beat nearly every human was developed, it did not duplicate the chunking approach but instead performed a brute-force 

search of all possible moves. Computers still are far 

inferior to humans in their ability to narrow the field 

heuristically, but they can now explore the whole 

field of chess moves in the time normally allowed 

between moves. 

None of this emphasis on the importance of a’ 

store of chunks is to deny the importance of individual talent in chess or any other field of mental activity. There is nothing that says you will automatically 

become a grandmaster if you simply lodge 50,000 

or more chess patterns in your long-term memory. 

But you apparently cannot become a grandmaster without such a store of chunks, and cognitive 

scientists argue that a network of similar size and 

complexity is essential for effective work in most 

fields. Developing an adequate network is laborious 

and time-consuming, and there apparently are no 

shortcuts. Edison’s aphorism about genius being 

two percent inspiration and 98 percent perspiration 

is buttressed by J.R. Hayes’s discovery that almost 

without exception, classical composers did not start 

producing first-rate work until they were at least 10 

years into their careers.a

By now we can speak in some detail about how the 

centipede runs—i.e., how humans do mental work. 

We still are speaking in highly schematic terms, the 

picture that emerges is exceedingly complex, and 

there is a great deal that cannot be addressed intelligently at all. But I think we can draw some illuminating conclusions, often humbling and heartening 

at the same time:

•	 Heuristics—non-random exploration that uses 

experience and inference to narrow the field of 

possibilities—loom large in the development of 

each individual and are deeply ingrained in all 

of us (particularly when we are doing something we consider important). Combined with 

the chunking speed of short-term memory, the 

heuristic approach is a powerful way to deal 

with large amounts of information and a poorly 

defined problem space.

•	 But there is always a tradeoff between range 

and precision. The more of the problem space 

you try to explore—and the “space,” being 

conceptual rather than truly spatial, can have 

any number of dimensions—the harder it is to 

achieve a useful degree of specificity. Talent 

and experience can often reduce the conflict 

between the need for range and the need for 

precision, but they cannot eliminate it. We 

almost always end up satisficing.

•	 We are compulsive, in our need to chunk, to 

put information into a context. The context we 

start with heavily conditions the way we receive a new piece of information. We chunk so 

rapidly that “the problem,” whatever it is, often 

a. Mozart, who springs to mind as the obvious exception, turns 

out to have been a late bloomer by this standard. Hayes used 

a criterion for “first-rate work” that seems terribly unscientific 

at first: he decided that a composition qualified if five or more 

recordings of it were listed in the Schwann catalogue. The idea 

looks a bit more sensible at second glance, and in any case 

the consistency of Hayes’s findings is striking. He obtained 

data for 76 composers and found only three—Satie, Shostakovich, and Paganini—who produced even one such piece 

within 10 years of the time they began studying music intensively.
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 14

When people who deal with cognitive activity 

discuss the means we use to communicate with 

each other, they tend to refer to something they 

call “language.” Unless they specify otherwise they 

generally mean spoken language, not writing. They 

discuss written language much less frequently, and 

when they do there sometimes is even a hint that 

they consider it less important than speech. Few 

have focused on it as a subject of research. This 

seems strange, since not only do 

these people make their living by the written word, they 

would have little hope of fully 

articulating their thoughts unless they had writing available as a 

tool.

What accounts for this phenomenon? First, it 

simply may not have occurred to them that there 

is a useful distinction to be made between speech 

and writing. Second, writing is a much more opaque 

process than speech and thus is harder to analyze. 

has been sharply delimited by the time we 

begin manipulating it in working memory.

•	 Skill in a given area of mental activity involves 

both talent and time, the latter to build the 

extensive network of chunks that appears to 

be a prerequisite for really first-class work. The 

effort typically extends over several years; the 

investment may not pay off for a decade.

•	 Although the conceptual network formed 

through years of experience may make an 

individual a more skillful problem-solver, it can 

also make him or her less open to unusual 

ideas or information—a phenomenon sometimes termed “hardening of the categories.” 

The conservative bias of the heuristic approach—the tendency we all share of looking 

to past experience for guidance—makes it 

easy for an old hand to argue an anomaly out 

of the way. In fact the old hand is likely to be 

right nearly all the time; experience usually 

does work as a model. But what about the 

situation when “nearly all the time” isn’t good 

enough? Morton Hunt recounts an instance 

of a computer proving better than the staff of 

a mental hospital at predicting which patients 

were going to attempt suicide.

•	 Finally, the mental processes outlined in this 

section seem certain to remain the processes 

of choice for all of us. With all their drawbacks, 

heuristics remain arguably the most efficient 

way to narrow a large field of possibilities; and 

efficient or not, we like it. 

So far, however, the findings we have discussed 

are little more than abstractions; they lack an operational context for the Dl. And for good reason: 

the directorate is basically a writing organization, 

and cognitive science can hardly be relevant to our 

work until it addresses the main thing we do. As the 

section that follows makes clear, the focus quickly 

becomes operational as soon as the ideas accumulated so far are applied to the issue of writing.

A speaker literally is making up what he says as he 

goes along, and it is relatively easy to gain insights 

into his cognitive activity by observing what he says 

and how he says it. The writing process is more 

convoluted and internal, and it is harder to get even 

a general notion of what is happening.

But I think there is a third reason, one that has 

great import for the way the directorate goes about 

its cognitive work. In some ways 

those who treat writing as less 

important than speech are 

right. The spoken word is the 

dominant (usually the only) 

linguistic medium in those preschool years when our basic conceptual furniture 

is being established, and I would argue that it is 

the medium to which we all, even the compulsive 

writers among us, naturally turn when an issue 

engages our emotions. Above all, I think, speech 

is the natural medium of decisionmaking. In my 

own family, when we are doing something hard like 

III. Speaking and Writing, News and Knowledge 

Speech is the natural medium of decisionmaking....The essence of the decision process is oral.
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 15

picking a college for a high-schooler, we will write 

some transactional letters, and we will do some 

reading to gain information. But the essence of the 

decision process is oral. If this is true for someone 

like me—someone whose whole career has been 

involved with writing—how much truer must it be for 

those who do not see writing as a way of life. This 

latter group obviously includes most of humanity; 

it specifically includes nearly all of those for whom 

our written products are intended. I do not conclude 

from this that the directorate should get out of the 

writing business. I do not think we can do our work 

in any other medium. But if it can be shown that the 

cognitive processes involved in writing and speech 

differ in important respects, then I think it follows 

that the relationship between our writing-based 

work and our speech-oriented consumers deserves 

close attention. 

Here are some of the ways in which writing and 

speech differ: 

•	 With speech, much of the communication 

takes place in ways that do not involve words: 

in gesture, in tone of voice, in the larger 

context surrounding the exchange. Speech is 

a complex audio-visual event, and the implications we draw—the chunks we form—are 

derived from a whole network of signals. 

With writing there is nothing but the words 

on the paper. The result may be as rich as 

with speech—nobody would accuse a Shakespeare sonnet of lacking richness—but the 

resources used are far narrower. 

•	 Writing calls for a sharper focus of attention on 

the part of both producer and receiver. When 

you and I are conversing, we both can attend 

to several other things—watching the passing 

crowd, worrying about some aspect of work, 

waving away a passing insect—and still keep 

the thread of our discourse. If I am writing or 

reading I must concentrate on the text; these 

other activities are likely to register as distractions. 

•	 The pace and pattern of chunking is very 

different in the two modes. With speech, one 

word or phrase quickly supersedes the last, 

and the listener cannot stop to ponder any of 

them. What he ponders is the chunk he forms 

from his perception of everything the speaker 

is saying, and he is not likely to ponder even 

that very intensively. He does have the opportunity to ask the speaker about what he has 

heard (an opportunity almost never available 

to a reader), but he rarely does so; the spoken 

medium has enormous forward momentum. In 

compensation, speech uses a much narrower 

set of verbal formulae than writing. It relies 

heavily on extralinguistic cues, and by and 

large it is more closely tied to a larger context 

that helps keep the participants from straying 

too far from a common understanding. In the 

written medium, by contrast, the reader can 

chunk more or less at his own pace. He can 

always recheck his conclusion against the text, 

but he has little recourse beyond that. All the 

signals a writer can hope to send must be in 

the written words. 

•	 A reader is dealing with a finished product: 

the production process has been essentially 

private. A listener is participating in a transaction that is still in progress, a transaction that is 

quintessentially social. 

•	 Partly because of the factors listed so far, writing is capable of more breadth and more precision than speech. Neither complex ideas nor 

complex organizations would be possible without writing. My own impression is that even in 

this television-dominated era, people attach 

more solidity and permanence to something 

written than to something spoken. Perhaps we 

have an ingrained sense that the products of 

speech are more ephemeral than the products 

of writing. But to achieve this aura of permanence writing sacrifices a sense of immediacy. 

A writer tends to speak with the voice of an 

observer, not a participant. 

Thus it appears that a person working with 

speech is doing markedly different things than a 

person working with writing. This is true whether 

the person is acting as a producer or a consumer. 

Further, because everyone works at times with 

speech—whereas not everyone works in any 
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 16

comprehensive sense with writing—speech is a 

far more general medium of exchange. I suspect 

that most people tend to transfer what they have 

learned from writing into the spoken mode: usually 

that is where information gets used.

The transfer from writing to speech is made easier because the chunks I form after reading your text 

are most unlikely to take in all the detail you have 

laid out. The only way to work back toward your 

degree of detail is to reread your text, and I will not 

take in everything even if I do so (much of what you 

want to say is not even set down explicitly). If I do 

not go back I will operate with the chunks as they 

currently exist in my mind (and as they combine 

with other chunks, at least equally powerful, that 

my mind was working with before). This does not 

necessarily mean that my new set of chunks will be 

either less complex or less valid than yours; it does 

suggest that what I glean from your prose will be 

altered and simplified. Because of the simplification, what I have gleaned will be easily available for 

me to use in the speech mode. I will be all the more 

inclined to use it in this way if I am oriented toward 

decision and action, either generally or in this particular situation. If such is my inclination, I probably 

will do just what I did when the issue of sending 

children to college arose: view the text mainly in 

terms of what seems useful and ignore the rest. 

The distinction I am making between writingbased and speech-based cognitive processes is 

illumined by Walker Percy’s distinction between 

news and knowledge. To introduce his thesis Percy 

asks us to imagine an isolated island inhabited 

by people with a well-developed culture. On the 

shores of this island arrive thousands of sealed 

bottles, each bottle containing a single assertion 

like the following: 

•	 E=MC2. 

•	 A war party is approaching from Bora Bora.

•	 The dream symbol, house and balcony, usually represents a woman. 

•	 Being comprises essence and existence. 

•	 In 1943 the Russians murdered 10,000 Polish 

officers in the Katyn Forest. 

•	 Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean. 

•	 There is fresh water in the next cove. 

•	 Chicago is on the Hudson River or Chicago is 

not on the Hudson River. 

An islander, Percy avers, might experiment with 

various ways of organizing these messages, but 

in the end would put each of them into one of two 

categories. The first category would include all the 

scientific and formal statements, all the generalizations, and also all the poetry and art. Producers of 

such statements are alike in their 

withdrawal from the ordinary affairs of life to 

university, laboratory, studio, mountain eyrie, 

where they write sentences to which other 

men assent (or refuse to assent), saying, “Yes, 

this is indeed how things are.”

The second category would include statements 

that are significant 

precisely insofar as the reader is caught up 

in the affairs and in the life of the island and 

insofar as he has not withdrawn into laboratory 

or seminar room. 

The statements about the Bora Bora war party 

and the water in the next cove would be obvious 

candidates for this category. The categories are 

neither hermetic nor unchanging. The statement 

about the Katyn massacre might be in either. The 

first category Percy calls knowledge; the second, 

news.a

Percy continues that not only are there two 

categories of information, they are read from two 

different postures, there are two different kinds of 

verifying procedures, and there are two different 

kinds of response: 

•	 Nature of the sentence. Knowledge can in 

theory be arrived at “anywhere by anyone and 

a. Percy, The Message in the Bottle, 119–39.
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 17

at any time”; news involves a nonrecurring 

event or state of affairs which bears on the life 

of the recipient.

•	 Posture of the reader. The reader of a piece of 

knowledge stands “outside and over against 

the world;” the reader of a piece of news is 

receiving information relevant to his specific 

situation.

•	 Scale of Evaluation. We judge knowledge according to the degree it achieves generality; 

we judge news according to its relevance to 

our own predicament.

•	 Canons of acceptance. We verify knowledge 

either experimentally or in light of past experience. News is “neither deducible, repeatable, 

nor otherwise confirmable at the point of hearing.” We react to it on the basis of its relevance to our predicament, the credentials of 

the newsbearer (according to Percy, “a piece 

of news requires that there be a newsbearer”), 

and its plausibility.

•	 Response of the reader. A person receiving a 

piece of knowledge will assent to it or reject it; 

a person receiving a piece of news will take 

action in line with his evaluation of the news. 

(And, I would add, the receiver of a piece of 

news is more immediately concerned than the 

reader of a piece of knowledge with the correctness of the information.)

Obviously, I am building toward an assertion that 

the Dl tends to deal in knowledge and our customers are interested mainly in news; and furthermore 

that there are correlations between news and the 

cognitive processes involved in speech on the one 

hand, and between knowledge and the cognitive 

processes involved in writing on the other. Equally 

obviously, the reality is not that simple, and the 

correlations are not exact. Not only does it demean 

our consumers to imply that they have little interest 

in knowledge as Percy defines it, but the distinction 

between news and knowledge, never airtight, has 

become increasingly problematic over time. With 

the information explosion and the widespread acceptance of the notion that knowledge is power (or 

to be more consistent with Percy’s terminology, the 

notion that control over news is a source of power), 

speech- and action-oriented people have become 

ever more eager to scan knowledge-purveying documents for their news value. Moreover, the scope 

and depth of what such individuals are expected 

to know has expanded greatly. In both senses the 

potential domain of news has grown and has come 

to include regions that might in the past have been 

left to knowledge. 

The boundaries get fuzzed in other ways. If I 

have discovered a new way to look at a problem, 

the discovery is likely to have the feel of news for 

me. But I may decide I have to use a knowledgebased mode to explain it. Perhaps, if I come from 

a scholarly environment, I believe knowledge has 

higher status than news. Or perhaps I do not think 

I can do justice to my discovery in a news-based 

mode—and if news, like speech, has a limited 

capacity to cope with complexity and my discovery 

is complex, my belief may have some validity. The 

recipient probably will duly register the resulting 

product as knowledge and may miss the sense of 

discovery altogether. 

Finally, the material the Dl deals with usually can 

fit under either heading, as was the case with the 

sentence about the Katyn massacre. A statement 

about the boiling point of water clearly is knowledge, and a statement about a fire that has just 

broken out in my office clearly is news; a statement about a balance-of-payments problem or a 

festering insurgency or a restive legislature could 

be either and is probably both. None of the latter 

statements is likely to have a high level of generality, none is likely to be easily verifiable under the 

canons of acceptance applicable to knowledge, 

and all are likely to involve the news-type question, 

“What (if anything) should the United States do?” 

I still would argue, however, that when all is 

said and done the analytic work of the directorate 

fits more naturally on the knowledge side of the 

line and is inseparable from writing; whereas our 

consumers tend to look for news and to be more 
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 18

comfortable with speech. I think this is one way of 

stating a basic challenge facing the directorate.a

I find it impossible to avoid the conclusion that 

we will do our work better if we include elements 

of speech and news. I also think that if we produce 

something that sounds like speech, it will tend to 

sound like news as well. I am not saying we should 

make our writing read like spoken English; the 

canons of speech and writing differ too greatly for 

that. But I do think we should aim for prose that has 

a conversational ring. How one does this is largely 

a matter of individual style, but some suggestions 

may be possible. Speech specializes in short sentences, it shies away from complex constructions, 

it uses short words (especially Anglo-Saxon ones), 

and it is peppered with verbs. Modelling prose 

around these characteristics—not inflexibly, not 

burdened by the specious claim that the result will 

inevitably be Dick-and-Jane (or perhaps Hemingway) prose—will, I think, help writing sound a little 

more like speech.

But don’t you thereby rob yourself of conceptual 

complexity? Is it possible to lay out difficult ideas 

in conversational prose? All I can say is, it’s been 

done. Whatever one thinks of Robert Pirsig’s Zen 

and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in terms of 

substance, it does present some tough philosophical concepts in a palatable enough way to make 

the best-seller lists. The same is true of Hofstader’s 

Godel, Escher, Bach. There is, in fact, a tradition of 

heavyweight conversational prose dating back as 

far as St. Paul and Plato. So at least in theory the 

idea is feasible. I would also urge all writers to ask 

themselves the following question: the idea may 

have been hard to clothe in words and get down 

on the page properly, but now that it is there, does 

a. I also believe it is one factor making for turbulence in the 

flow of the review process. A reviewer, alive to the desires of 

the consumer, is likely to be looking for something resembling 

news/speech, whereas the writer will worry that the nuances 

and precision that can be conveyed only through knowledge/

writing will be lost. What is pedestrian or convoluted to one is 

detailed and circumstantial to the other. 

it seem quite so complicated? Perhaps so; on the 

other hand, perhaps not. If the latter, perhaps putting it into more conversational language would not 

be too difficult. 

This approach would nonetheless pose several 

problems. What I have called heavyweight conversational prose differs markedly in style from that 

usually produced by the directorate, and I think the 

differences arise from factors other than the DI’s 

stylistic conventions and variations in individual 

writing skill. The most notable difference is that all 

the writers I cited as examples make extensive use 

of the first and second persons. This is a natural 

tendency when one is being conversational; one 

almost inevitably tries to personify the newsbearer 

and the recipient. I found in writing this essay that 

giving in to the tendency has a liberating effect. 

A writer can forgo the first person singular and 

still be conversational— fortunately for the directorate, since the message-bearer for the news we 

write is a collective labeled “CIA,” which can call 

itself “we” but never “I.” The tendency to personify 

would persist, however. Even without the first 

person singular, I suspect the directorate’s prose 

would take on a more individualistic cast. Moreover, 

a person writing in this mode is likely to assume a 

more actively persuasive tone and to risk crossing 

the line between persuasion and argumentativeness. These considerations lead me to believe that 

a turn toward conversational prose would add to 

the stress of the review and (perhaps even more) 

the coordination processes. I also think it is worth 

asking whether the structure would really be willing to tolerate a higher individuality quotient in the 

papers it produces. 

I do not believe any substantial move would be 

made toward a greater news/speech content without tradeoffs such as these. They probably could be 

managed, if only because such changes in institutional style would have to come gradually, with 

large amounts of satisficing at every stage. But I do 

think such issues would have to be anticipated. 
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 19

not keep track of all aspects of the datum unless it 

shifts constantly from one aspect to another. 

Skilled writers use a variety of means to reduce 

the overload. For example, they satisfice. “Not the 

right word but what the hell,” said one subject of an 

oral-protocol experiment at Carnegie-Mellon. The 

context indicates he was implying that the word 

was good enough for now and could be polished 

when working memory had been cleared of other 

demands. Or they draw on patterns stored in longterm memory, just as the 

skilled chess player 

does. (The patterns must be 

appropriate, of 

course. A new arrival in the Dl is likely to 

discover that many patterns learned 

earlier no longer work, and building a store of, say, 

50,000 patterns that do work takes time.) According 

to Flower and Hayes, perhaps the most effective 

technique of all is what they call “planning”—but the 

term takes on a different meaning in this context. 

It does not simply equate with outlining. In fact, 

Flower and Hayes found in their analysis of oral 

protocols that few people made use of outlines or 

other structured techniques. “Planning” might better 

be thought of as developing heuristic strategies and 

monitoring those strategies. 

Flower and Hayes suggest that there are three 

different sorts of strategies: 

•	 At the highest level, a strategy To Do. This is 

the rhetorical problem the writer sets out for 

himself: “Write a current intelligence article 

shooting down this coup report”; “Turn out 

something that will get through the review 

process without too much hassle”; “Write a 

paper that shows how stupid the conventional 

wisdom is”; “Set down this new idea.”

•	 Next, a strategy To Say. This is essentially a 

content plan—the points to be gotten across 

to the reader. One can jot down informal notes 

or work up a detailed outline. “A plan To Say is 

Only the original writer can impart a conversational tone to a draft, of course; it cannot be edited 

in later. Yet this essay has suggested that a writer is 

not likely to get his ideas articulated with the precision they require unless he works in a knowledge/

writing mode, and that knowledge/writing is not inherently conversational. This implies that the writer 

would have to rework his prose even after the ideas 

had been articulated—a prospect few writers would 

relish. But putting the issue in these terms overstates the added burden and misstates the 

way it would be felt. The 

writing process is 

extraordinarily 

convoluted, 

and all writers 

constantly shift 

from one aspect of the 

problem to another. In this juggling act 

there is no question of deciding what you are going 

to say and then deciding how you are going to say 

it; writers—good writers in particular—work on all 

aspects of their problem virtually from beginning 

to end. If Flower and Hayes are correct, moreover, 

good writers represent this problem to themselves 

as a “complex speech act”; the conversational element is already present to some degree. 

Looking at the writing process as a whole will 

illuminate these notions. A writer is trying to accomplish two quite different things: to define what his 

ideas are by clothing them in words, and to communicate those ideas to others. Such is the nature 

of writing that the two goals are inextricably intertwined. To repeat, the writer does not decide what 

his ideas are and then decide how to communicate 

them; internal and external communication are of 

a piece. The complexity of this operation is one 

source of “cognitive overload.” Another source is 

that as he writes, the writer is creating a datum—a 

malleable entity outside the mind that grows out of 

the mind’s internal workings. The datum acts as an 

extension of working memory; the writer now has 

available a dependable array of chunks that is not 

limited by what working memory can attend to. Yet 

working memory itself is as tiny as ever, and it canIV. Writing Schemes and Cognitive Overload 

The writer 

does not decide what his ideas are and 

then 

decide how to communicate them; 

internal and external 

communication are of a piece.
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 20

essentially a scale model of the final product. 

Perhaps that is why it has been so widely and 

vigorously taught, often to the exclusion of any 

other kind of planning.” The plan To Say is 

subordinate to the plan To Do. 

•	 Finally, and coordinate with the strategy To 

Say, a strategy To Compose. This category 

includes the interaction between ideas and the 

developing text. It includes short-range mental 

notes like “I’ll write down a bunch of ideas and 

connect them later.” or “A point I will want to 

make someplace is that...”

Failure to go beyond a plan To Say is a good 

route to ineffective prose. Skilled writers are adept 

at using all three strategies in conjunction with each 

other, checking and rechecking one against another 

and monitoring how each is working. They spend 

less time considering plans To Say than do novices, and more time considering the overall assignment (plans To Do) and the rhetorical challenges 

involved (plans To Compose). Flower and Hayes 

add: “Moreover, as they write, they continue to 

develop their image of the reader, the situation, and 

their own goals with increasing detail and specificity.” 

A striking aspect of the approach of skilled writers is the frequency with which they think about 

how they are affecting the reader. A comparison 

between two writers of different skill levels is shown 

in the table below. The expert spoke of the way 

he represented the audience and the assignment 

more than twice as often as the novice did, and 

he spoke of goals vis-a-vis the audience 11 times, 

whereas the novice did not consider this aspect of 

the problem at all. By contrast, the two were quite 

similar in the frequency with which they addressed 

questions of text and meaning. Hayes and Flower 

go on to assert that being alive to the audience 

and other aspects of the rhetorical context enriches 

substantive content as well. With a good writer 

three fifths of the new ideas grew out of thoughts 

about the assignment, the audience, or the writer’s 

own goals; whereas with poor writers 70 percent 

of the new ideas flowed from the topic itself. “All of 

this suggests that setting up goals to affect a reader 

is not only a reasonable act, but a powerful strategy 

for generating new ideas and exploring...a topic.” 

Here we have, I think, a way of closing the gap 

between news/speech and knowledge/writing. 

Perhaps, in setting up the dichotomy between news 

and knowledge, Percy underestimated the wiliness 

of the skilled writer. Perhaps the body of information that he calls knowledge is roughly equivalent 

to what a writer would work with under a plan 

To Say—the substantive points to be made. But 

Flower and Hayes say the mark of a good writer is 

the resources devoted to the aspects of the problem other than the substantive points, especially 

the strategy To Do. Attention to these areas—and 

in particular, treating the audience as a vivid entity—is what distinguishes those who can turn the 

process of creating text into a “complex speech 

act.” For such writers, conversational prose not only 

is possible, it is what they tend to produce.a

 Thus to 

move writing back toward speech and knowledge 

back toward news, a writer should be urged to treat 

the nonsubstantive aspects of the assignment with 

the importance they deserve. It usually will not be 

possible to retain all the density of argumentation 

that knowledge/writing can achieve, but a surprising 

percentage can be preserved, and what does get 

set out has a much better chance of actually being 

transferred. 

a. This notion is buttressed by the examples of “good writing” 

included in my favorite how-to-write book, Jacques Barzun’s 

Simple and Direct. The writers whom Barzun singled out range 

from Dorothy Sayers to Eric Hoffer to a man writing about 

how to use a saw. Nearly all of them, and Barzun himself for 

that matter, produced what I have been calling conversational 

prose.

Analysis of rhetorical situation: 

Audience and 

Assignment

Analysis of goals

Audience Self Text Meaning Total

Novice 7 0 0 3 7 17

Expert 18 11 1 3 9 42

Number of times writer explicitly represented each aspect of the rhetorical problem in first 60 lines of protocol 
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 21

•	 It is unconventional in the sense that it requires modification or rejection of previously 

accepted ideas. 

•	 It requires high motivation and persistence, 

taking place either over a considerable span of 

time (continuously or intermittently) or at high 

intensity.

•	 The problem as initially posed was vague and 

ill-defined, so that part of the task was to formulate the problem itself.a

Simon notes that not all the criteria need be satisfied before a work is considered creative. I would 

go further and assert that for the individual producing the work, one criterion suffices by itself: that 

the work have “novelty and value...for the originator.” Furthermore, the nature of the 

cognitive process is such 

that almost everything 

produced will meet 

this criterion. I noted 

early in this essay that 

a child’s approach to the 

learning of a language has 

a creative as well as a satisficing 

element. A child discovers how language works by 

constructing original sentences, sentences that did 

not exist until he formed them. I suspect that pleasure at having produced something new is a powerful force for further linguistic exploration and that 

an overlearned (and thus unconscious) sense of 

satisfaction accounts for part of the conversational 

dynamic in adults.

The creative component in this narrow, individualistic sense is if anything even more apparent with 

written work. With speech, the words are ephemeral and part of a social process. The individual 

producing them cannot get too closely identified 

with them; they are tossed into the conversational 

stream and soon are lost to consciousness, leaving nothing behind but an assortment of conceptual chunks in the memories of those participating 

a. Simon, Models of Thought, 139.

One of the enduring concerns of Dl analysts is 

the creativity issue. What role is there for creativity 

in a structured, basically hierarchical organization— 

an organization, moreover, that operates more or 

less according to craft-work standards? Doesn’t 

such an organization run the risk of stunting creativity, making do with run-of-the-mill analysis, and perhaps missing important trends? On the other hand, 

some might argue that creativity is not even particularly relevant to what we do. The important goal 

is to meet the needs (stated and implicit) of our 

consumers in a timely and accurate way, and tons 

of creativity will not help if this goal is not met. An 

organization has both the ability and the obligation 

to impose norms, these people might argue; constraints of some sort are bound to turn up sooner or 

later, and they almost certainly will seem arbitrary 

when they do. So why not impose the 

constraints of the craft, which 

at least have the virtue of 

some consistency and 

continuity? 

This argument is 

clouded by a definitional 

problem which needs to be 

disposed of before we can address the 

issue constructively. Creativity usually is treated as 

a rare phenomenon, and so it is under the usual 

definition. But the whole cognitive process actually has a creative component, and in this specific 

sense creativity is all around us. I believe many of 

the problems confronting an organization like the 

Dl, whose raison d’etre is the intellectual activity of 

the people who comprise it, flow from the conflict 

between these two sorts of creativity.

Herbert Simon provides a useful list of the criteria by which the creative aspect of a piece of work 

is judged: 

•	 The work has novelty and value (either for the 

originator or for his culture). 

V. Creativity and the Conceptual Front End 

What 

role is there for 

creativity in a structured, 

basically hierarchical 

organization

?
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 22

in the exchange. (People do, of course, identify 

themselves closely with the chunks.) By contrast, 

a person producing a written sentence is bringing 

something discrete and durable into existence, and 

I would suppose that the sense of having created 

something is all the stronger for that reason. The 

private nature of the writing process reinforces 

this sense. Moreover, the imbalance in emotional 

investment between producer and consumer—the 

one closely involved with the specific words, the 

other much less so—is likely to be more apparent 

with writing.

The writer must circulate his text to others; this 

is part of his unspoken contract with the rest of the 

world. The criteria at this point, however, are the 

other items on Simon’s list, which are all essentially 

social rather than individual, and society discerns 

creativity less often than the individual does in 

himself. An organization, moreover, is necessarily 

concerned with standards of some sort, and it has 

a right to require a degree of conformity from the 

journeyman.

Acceptance of such norms does not always 

hobble creativity. Until the last couple of centuries 

much of the great art was produced by people 

whose outlook was that of craftsmen. Consider the 

following comment by Jerome Bruner: 

One cannot help but compare the autobiographic fragment left by Ghiberti, discussing 

the long period during which he worked on the 

famous doors of the Baptistery at Florence, 

with the personal writing, say, of a modern 

sculptor like Henry Moore. Ghiberti talks of the 

material that was “needed” to do the designs 

that were “required.” It is as if it were all “out 

there.” Moore is concerned with the creating of 

illusions and symbols, and self-awareness for 

him is as important as a stone chisel.a

Yet it does seem to me that creativity is important 

for an organization like the Dl, and that such an 

organization constantly runs the risk of inhibiting 

the creative component in the work of its people. 

Few, I suspect, would dispute the proposition that 

a. Bruner, On Knowing, 54.

satisfying consumer needs is aided by a certain 

degree of creativity, and to me it is equally obvious that some sort of creativity is essential if the 

directorate is to satisfy the predictive aspect of its 

mission as well as possible. I would also suppose 

that work deemed creative under Simon’s broader, 

socially determined criteria must have creativity in 

the narrow sense as a precondition. It is here that 

the risks arise for an organization like the Dl. The 

following examples cited by Morton Hunt support 

this argument.

In one of Torrance’s many studies of creativity in school children, children were given 

pencils, crayons, and simple collage materials 

and told to make a picture that no one else 

would be likely to come up with. A variety of 

kinds of comment and appraisal were given to 

different groups of the children, and some got 

no evaluation at all. The upshot: those who 

worked without evaluation turned out pictures 

that were more creative than those produced 

by children receiving the most constructive 

commentary. In a study by another researcher, 

a group of students were told they would earn 

a reward for thinking up the largest number 

of plot titles and stories; their output was less 

imaginative and original than that of another 

group who expected no reward. Merely, knowing that one’s work will be critically appraised 

by experts after it is finished has a negative 

influence. Teresa Amabile, in her collage studies, told one group of college women that their 

efforts would be judged by artists, while another group was told nothing; the latter group 

did significantly more creative work.b

One can easily criticize research such as this. 

For example, how is it possible to judge something 

as subjective as creativity? Might not the researchers have gone into their studies with biases that 

skewed the results? Perhaps a more telling point 

is that the subjects of the experiments seem not to 

have had much skill or experience in the activities 

they were engaged in, and thus may have been 

particularly sensitive to the notion of being judged. 

One might expect a more complex situation, for 

b. Morton Hunt, The Universe Within, 313.
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 23

instance, if an experienced artist was faced with 

the possibility of being judged by other artists. But 

even taking such objections into account, the notion 

of creativity being inhibited by the mere prospect 

of outside comment—even positive comment—is 

thought-provoking. Even a skilled artist might be 

inhibited if he was required to keep in the front of 

his mind the evaluation to which his work was to be 

submitted. Yet this is a requirement which a structured organization can hardly avoid imposing. 

Or consider the comment by Jacob Bronowski 

in his Silliman lectures at Yale in 

1967: 

The society of 

scientists, the community of scientists, 

has this advantage, that 

from the moment we enter it, we all 

know that fifty years from now, most of the 

things we learned here will turn out not to have 

been quite right. And yet that will have been 

achieved without enormous personal dramas. 

It will be achieved by giving due honor to the 

people who take the steps, the steps that turn 

out to be wrong as well as the steps that turn 

out to be right.a

Again one can quibble: surely it is only the “steps 

that turn out to be right” which win Nobel prizes. 

But the essence of Bronowski’s argument is hard 

to dispute. Science does reserve a place of honor 

for those who explore blind alleys, not least because discovery is as likely to proceed from an 

earlier error or ambiguity as from an earlier truth. 

The place of error in a structured organization, on 

the other hand, is much less certain, particularly 

if accountability is one of the driving forces in that 

organization. Even with the best will in the world 

such an organization is likely to put a premium on 

being right. As a result tentative ideas may have a 

harder time surviving, and there may be a tendency 

to equate “being right” with “not being wrong.” If so, 

caution and the school solution will have an easier 

time of it than they might otherwise have. 

a. Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 133. 

And yet the Directorate of Intelligence cannot 

devote many of its resources to nurturing creativity, 

at least under any very expansive definition of the 

term. Like any craft organization, the Dl has jobs to 

do, and worrying about creativity would often get in 

the way. Moreover, much of the activity we report 

and analyze is actually pretty ordinary or closely 

tied to a narrow set of events, and with work of 

such an ephemeral nature the scope for creativity 

is limited. Finally, there is no guarantee that you will 

get more creativity if you do nurture it. I know of no 

approach that has proven more capable than others of producing results which 

are simultaneously creative, valid, relevant, 

and efficient. 

The concepts discussed in this essay do, however, offer some hints about reducing the 

tension between structure and creativity—reducing 

rather than eliminating, since the sources of tension will not go away and we are certain to wind up 

satisficing. The key is the importance of the work 

we do right at the outset of the process. Simon 

notes at one point, “Much of the skilled processing 

in chess occurs at the perceptual front end.” This 

proposition holds for all cognitive activity, although 

in the DI’s case it may be more accurate to talk 

about a conceptual rather than a perceptual front 

end. Being clear what is going on at the beginning 

takes on overwhelming importance in light of cognitive scientists’ findings; moreover, there is a built-in 

potential for conflict between what happens at the 

conceptual front end and what happens during a 

necessarily serial review process.

The importance, as well as the difficulty, of defining what is happening at the start is put into clearer 

relief by an obvious point made by Flower and 

Hayes: “People only solve the problems they give 

themselves.” I cannot give you a problem to solve; 

I can try to interest you in a problem; I can talk it 

through it with you; if I am your boss, I can order 

you to take it on. But the problem you solve still will 

be the one you pose to yourself, not the one I have 

given you. The two will rarely be congruent, and if 

we are not clear with each other they may diverge 

Yet, the 

DI cannot devote many 

resources to nurturing creativity...it has 

jobs to do and worrying about creativity would 

often get in the way.
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 24

drastically. Each of us will have sharply narrowed 

our concept of the problem by the time we begin to 

talk about it, and neither my concept nor yours will 

be confined to the substance of the issue. We both 

will have a complex set of assumptions as well as 

an assortment of goals, usually unspoken, that we 

hope to achieve. If I am your boss one of my goals 

might be, “Try once more to get some worthwhile 

prose out of this analyst.” You, the subordinate, 

might have “Get this guy off my back” as one of 

yours. Both goals will affect the product—your 

goals more than mine, in fact, since as the one in 

charge of the keyboard you have the biggest role in 

deciding how the problem will actually be solved.a

The problem you give yourself to solve is roughly 

equivalent to your strategy To Do—the rhetorical 

challenge in all its complexity, as it is posed by the 

person meeting it. This is easily the most important 

part of the “conceptual front end” to articulate, particularly if the topic is difficult or controversial or if it 

is breaking new analytic ground. I suspect it is the 

part that is least well articulated for much of the DI’s 

work. Most of the time we focus on the areas of To 

Say and To Compose—the points we are going to 

make and the way we are going to express them. 

But problems in these areas are often easy to fix. It 

is the unspoken divergences at the level of plans To 

Do, I believe, that cause the real headaches. This 

is particularly true if such divergences do not come 

to light until a paper makes its way up through the 

hierarchy. 

It is terribly hard to articulate one’s strategies at 

this level. In the ivory-tower setting of this paper I 

can make the obvious point that everyone benefits 

when a goal like “Show those turkeys downtown 

how stupid they are” is brought into the open, or 

when a reviewer-to-be makes explicit a line of attack that looks promising. In a real-life situation, 

however, it is in the nature of assumptions that they 

do not even get noticed, much less articulated. 

And articulated in the context of the specific situa. Many analysts may cavil at the last statement, arguing that 

the review process has left them no longer in charge of their 

own prose. Perhaps analysts do have less control than in 

earlier eras, but I would argue that because they are the ones 

constructing the prose, for better or for worse they remain by 

far the most influential factors in what gets produced.

ation: if an assumption is not so articulated, you 

can never be sure it is common property, given the 

idiosyncratic way each of us chunks the information 

at our disposal. The post-facto “any-fool-shouldhave-known” argument is always an unsatisfactory 

substitute.

A sure way not to illumine a strategy To Do is to 

develop nothing but an outline, since outlines are 

necessarily concerned mainly with plans To Say. 

Concept papers will shed more light, but in my 

experience they rarely are fully satisfactory. This is 

at least partly because strategies To Do typically 

get articulated bit by bit (once again we meet the 

proposition that learning and insight are achieved 

heuristically and incrementally). Thus the actual 

process of finding out what has happened at the 

beginning of the conceptual process takes time. It 

involves a series of exchanges, not just at the formal inception of a project but even before it takes 

shape and also as it progresses. 

Not all analysts find such exchanges congenial, 

managers at all levels begrudge the time, and 

divergences among various strategies To Do are 

not always resolved amicably. And indeed not all 

projects are worth spending too much time on. 

But to the degree that all concerned—higher level 

reviewers as well as those actually involved in the 

writing—can work early and often at narrowing the 

gaps among various conceptions of the rhetorical 

problem, the chances of a bumpy review process 

will diminish. Perhaps more important, the chances 

of preserving whatever creativity there is will be 

enhanced. And finally, hammering out differences 

at the level of strategies To Do might make a virtue 

of necessity: it might give a more collegial cast to a 

process whose hierarchical aspects are built-in and 

inescapable.b

b. Looking at the problem in this way exposes an anomaly in a 

related area. As we have seen, the value of experience—experience extending over a decade or more—is well documented 

in the cognitive-science literature. Such experience generally 

makes itself felt at higher levels of problem solving; a first-class 

composer or a chess grandmaster stands out because of his 

skill at a level analogous to Flower and Hayes’s strategy To 

Do. In the Dl the people in upper levels of management have 

a high concentration of experience of this sort, yet the serial 

nature of the review process and the other demands of their 

job make it hard for them to bring it to bear at the point where 
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 25

(Editor’s note: At the time of this monograph’s 

original appearance there were developments on 

the horizon that promised profound effects on the 

way DI analysts did business in just these areas. 

Project SAFE and the concurrent development of 

AIM appeared with recurrent troubles that tended 

to buttress the negative mindsets of many in the directorate at the time. Their potential attractiveness 

became apparent before long. The attractiveness in 

this context arose not from the information-retrieval 

aspect of SAFE, but from the interactive 

capabilities of the partner 

development, AIM, 

which was designed 

to permit frequent 

written exchanges 

between analysts–December 

2009.)

If the history of such systems is any guide, Dl 

analysts are likely to find interaction of this sort a 

congenial way to work. If they perceive the initial 

capability to be inferior to what is available elsewhere, they are likely to press for greater speed, 

comprehensiveness, and flexibility. 

AIM’s interactive capacity will be a boon in many 

ways, but it will also pose new managerial challenges:

•	 It will encourage collegiality among analysts 

concerned with various aspects of the same 

problem—an important advantage in the 

expanded directorate. It will not magically 

eliminate parochialism and dog-in-the-manger 

attitudes, but to the extent it is used, it will help 

analysts establish communication and get 

around competitive barriers.

•	 Exchanges via AIM will be informal and basically conversational, and there is every reason 

to expect some of the conversational flavor 

strategies To Do are evolving.

to carry over into more formal products. Thus 

AIM seems likely to foster the sort of prose 

called for earlier in this essay. If it does, of 

course, it will also raise the sort of managerial 

questions discussed there.

•	 AIM seems well suited to the incremental 

articulation of strategies To Do. Those involved 

in the exchanges are likely to develop clearer 

notions—and a higher degree of consensus— 

about what their purposes are.

•	 But those who do not 

participate will have 

a harder time catching up. This means, 

among other things, that 

potential reviewers may find it even 

more difficult to make contact with the problem-defining process unless they keep current 

as it progresses—unless they participate in 

the written as well as the spoken interplay. The 

potential for heavier demands on managers’ 

time is obvious. 

•	 At the same time, collegiality could work at 

cross purposes with hierarchy. What would it 

do for a division or branch chief’s authority, for 

example, if the office director used AIM to get 

deeply involved in helping an analyst define a 

rhetorical problem?

•	 Nor will the system be uniformly beneficial on 

the substantive side. Writing still will be essentially a private process, and some analysts will 

not function at their best if they have to work in 

a sort of electronic marketplace of ideas. Others may find the exchanges so much fun that 

they forgo analytic digging. There never will be 

dependable correlation between the intensity 

of the interaction and the quality of the product.

There 

never will be 

dependable correlation 

between the intensity of the interaction and 

the quality of the product.
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 26

Out of this discussion grow numerous questions 

about the way the directorate goes about its business. They include the following subject areas. 

1. Recruitment. 

Is there any way in pre-employment interviews 

to focus more sharply on the way a prospective 

employee deals with strategies To Do (and perhaps 

To Compose)? More pointedly, in hiring decisions 

should more weight be given to these attributes 

and less to skills of the To-Say variety? Should we 

look harder for writers and reporters and less hard 

for scholars? Should we count more on internal 

training and put less reliance on what an individual 

has learned before coming aboard? Should there 

be sharper distinctions in approach between disciplines—would it be reasonable, just for example, 

to require advanced degrees for economists but to 

emphasize BAs among political analysts? There 

never will be absolute answers to questions like 

these, but the ideas laid out in this essay make affirmative answers plausible in many cases. It also 

would be worthwhile seeing if there are any tests 

that get at skills of the To-Do variety. 

2. Training. 

If it is correct that around 10 years are needed 

to acquire the conceptual network necessary for 

first-class work, what are the implications for the 

way the directorate goes about its training effort? 

Presumably an analyst is well into the notional 

10 years on his or her arrival, but it still might be 

prudent at that point to anticipate another 5 years 

of development. If so, it seems to me, more careful attention needs to be given to how the analyst 

learns the trade, and training should figure far more 

heavily in the DI’s thinking than it does now. I would 

suggest that if what is involved is, in fact, craftwork, nearly all the training should be on the job. 

It even might make sense to make training one of 

the specific functions discussed on a branch chief’s 

performance appraisal report (PAR). The question 

would then shift to how branch chiefs should be 

trained. (An exercise of this sort might also produce 

a broader examination of the branch chief’s functions—an examination I think the directorate would 

find illuminating.) 

3. Analytic Writing.

 The suggestions in this essay about conversational prose mesh with some of the trends already 

underway in the Dl. If the best route to that sort of 

writing is to build a vivid image of one’s audience, 

then frequent contact with the audience is likely 

to prove a useful tool for sharpening the writer’s 

effectiveness. Moreover, the notion of bringing the 

audience into focus should help writer and reviewers establish common ground to work out the 

nonsubstantive aspects of a paper.a

 Beyond that, I 

would suggest that the vocabulary of cognitive science (and the concepts behind it) will be useful to 

those involved in teaching analytic writing, both on 

the job and elsewhere. 

4. Organization. 

I have suggested that there is an unavoidable 

conflict between the way an organization operates 

and the way the individuals in the organization do 

their cognitive work. Estimating the costs imposed 

on the organization by this conflict is impossible, 

since to do so one would have to guess what might 

have been produced but wasn’t. It seems safe to 

say, however, that although the costs probably 

are lower than analysts believe, they probably are 

higher than many managers would admit. If so, 

some effort to ameliorate the conflict might prove 

worthwhile. Four lines of approach come to mind.

a. To an analyst, of course, the audience includes the chain of 

review; this may actually be the most important audience of all 

from his or her perspective. In addition, it should be obvious 

that an analyst will get a different sort of audience-image from 

working-level colleagues than from exposure to their bosses, 

and that secondhand information about the interests of the 

latter will have a tough time competing with the first-person 

experience. This is one of many conceptual gaps it will take 

repeated effort to bridge.

VI. What Next? 
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 27

•	 First, divorcing substance from hierarchy as 

often as possible. This means exchanges between managers and analysts at times when 

a paper is neither under review nor in prospect—at conferences, for example, or simply 

as part of everyday chitchat. The greater the 

hierarchical gap, the harder such exchanges 

are to arrange, but the more valuable they 

might prove to be. To the extent that nonhierarchical channels for feedback can be developed, I believe the chances of operating at 

cross purposes when something is on the line 

will be reduced. 

•	 Second, hierarchy-jumping in contacts with 

consumers. The desk analyst, in my opinion, 

would benefit enormously from learning firsthand what is on the minds of high-ranking 

officials. 

•	 Third, enfolding AIM’s interactive function into 

the culture of the directorate. Interactive systems are basically democratic, and I believe 

that properly used, they can reduce the height 

of organizational barriers.

•	 Fourth, giving more articulation to assumptions at the level of strategies To Do. One way 

this might be done is to modify the format of 

concept papers. Putting such papers in the 

first person, and replacing impersonal constructions (“This paper will examine...”) with 

straightforward questions (“What will happen if...?”) would help to make the rhetorical 

scheme more visible. AIM and extrahierarchical exchanges will have a similar effect. 

5. Presentational Methods. 

Conversational prose is one way to bridge the 

gap between speech and writing, but are there 

others? Can more extensive use be made, for 

example, of television, whose effectiveness as an 

intelligence medium has already been proven in a 

limited way? I am thinking of something less formal, 

more ephemeral, and more personalized than what 

has been produced so far. Three possibilities spring 

to mind.

•	 If a videotape were to be produced in which 

an analyst discussed the findings of a freshly 

produced paper, those findings would almost 

certainly make it across the gap between 

knowledge and news. Many in the DI’s potential audience would probably find an extemporaneous discussion much more vivid 

than words on paper. The list of objections to 

the idea, of course, is formidable—the loss of 

precision as the analyst speaks extemporaneously, the time involved in producing even an 

informal discussion, the problem of defining 

the audience, the dilution of the sense that 

the paper is a product of the directorate as an 

institutional entity. But the benefits, if the tape 

was done right, might be equally impressive.

•	 Television might offer a better way of laying 

out alternative hypotheses. I have trouble 

believing that the present method, in which 

heated disagreements are set forth in determinedly flat prose, captures enough of the flavor to be much help. Taping a live discussion 

among experts might do a better job.

•	 In fast-breaking situations of prime importance, it might be useful to supplement other 

forms of current intelligence with televised analytic commentary. These days, current intelligence at its best almost exactly fulfills Walker 

Percy’s criteria for news: it produces information bearing on the reader’s predicament and 

it is carried by a newsbearer. Videotape would 

let a knowledgeable analyst be called into service as a specialized newsbearer on matters 

of great moment. 

6. Further Exploration. 

The Dl might benefit from using cognitive-science 

techniques to analyze the production process. After 

reading an earlier draft of this essay, for example, 

Professor J.R. Hayes of Carnegie-Mellon University 

suggested a “cognitive task analysis of what analysts do. This information could aid the design of 

systems such as SAFE [and AIM].” Hayes has also 

suggested that we could do our own oral protocols 

of an analyst—or a reviewer—at work; he adds that 
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

Page 28

observing the reviewer might give particularly illuminating insights into the process.

Moreover, the notions in this essay exploit only 

a part of the expertise in cognitive science. For 

example, there is considerable disagreement in 

the field over the role of language in the cognitive 

process. Many would argue against the emphasis 

I have placed on the written word. They would say 

that such concentration significantly limits the directorate’s analytic flexibility. Others might assert that 

I have understated the degree to which computers 

can supplement our mental processes. Exploration of either field (they are not mutually exclusive) 

might bring further benefits to the DI’s analytic 

effort. At this point, however, we leave the area in 

which I can even pretend to competence. 

Afterword

This list of suggestions points up once again the 

difficulty of the cognitive activities in which the Dl is 

engaged. The difficulties arise because, as this essay has tried to show, the directorate must mediate 

a series of irreconcilable demands: 

•	 Between the individual, private nature of the 

analytic effort and the social and hierarchical 

constraints imposed by bureaucratic imperatives.

•	 Between the cognitive patterns that are necessary to develop complex ideas (patterns that 

can only operate through writing) and the patterns our speech- and news-oriented customers are comfortable with. 

•	 Between the early point at which critical analytic decisions are made and the serial nature 

of the review process.

•	 Between the need to search for new insights—

to explore the murkier reaches of a problem 

space—and the need to avoid mistakes. 

These conflicts have always been present, and 

we probably have always been aware of them, 

more or less. But as the Dl grows and works out the 

implications of the trend toward centralization, as 

it spreads its analytic net more broadly and uses a 

finer mesh, they are likely to become more acute.

It would be easy to find a catalogue of conflicts 

like this depressing—to feel a bit like the centipede 

after its mind was set churning by the frog. But unlike centipedes (even sentient ones), humans can 

also treat such conflicts as a challenge. Indeed it 

seems to be part of our nature to see a situation as 

a problem to be solved. Morton Hunt notes: 

We perceive situations as problems, and 

therefore undertake to solve them. An ape, 

coming to a broad river, would see it merely 

as an end to further travel in that direction; a 

human being might see it as a body of water to 

be crossed, and thereupon invent a raft. Innate 

neural impulses and early learning provide 

each species of animal with the specific procedures it needs to obtain food, avoid enemies, 

mate, care for its young, and so on; human 

beings, too, acquire procedures for dealing 

with these basic problems, but they also solve 

countless others that did not exist until their 

own minds saw them as problems. Art and 

arithmetic, music and money, detergents and 

democracy are all solutions to problems created not by Nature but by the human mind. 

Problem solving is virtually species-specific, 

but what is absolutely species-specific and 

ultimately human is problem generating. The 

problem is in the eye of the beholder, and we 

are beholders.a

We are, in fact, better at generating problems 

than at solving them. Rarely can we say unequivocally that we have solved a problem, particularly 

if it is a hard one. Rather we keep plugging away 

a. Hunt, The Universe Within, 240.
Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis

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at it heuristically. Often enough we manage to 

satisfice—to achieve a “best-possible” solution so 

that we can take up something else. The problem 

has not gone away and we do not really delude 

ourselves that it has. But being realists (i.e., heuristic individuals to the core), we accept the results 

and live with them—recognizing that sometime we 

may find ourselves returning to the problem once 

more. As I have noted, this is a sloppy way of doing business, but we sell ourselves short if we do 

not acknowledge its strengths. It deals as well as 

anything yet developed with the fact, to use Jerome 

Bruner’s words, that our “ability to deal with knowledge is hugely exceeded by the potential knowledge contained in man’s environment.” 

The gross imbalance between what humans 

can know and what is available to be known is 

nowhere more apparent than in the Directorate of 

Intelligence. Indeed this is the central dilemma the 

Dl faces. We have always coped with the dilemma 

in a typically heuristic, satisficing way, and there is 

no reason to suppose this approach will change. 

My own impression, however, is that the directorate has never articulated the nature of the dilemma 

very clearly—a fine example of how hard it is to talk 

about the “conceptual front end.” A clearer notion of 

what the pressures are, and of what there is in our 

own makeup that makes them so powerful, should 

enable us to make better use of the power inherent in the heuristic approach. We never will get 

away from the need to satisfice—in other words, we 

always will be able to look at a given solution to a 

problem and see ways to make it better—but with 

greater understanding of what we are about, we 

may be able to attain a level of satisficing that we 

are more content with.