9 Barriers to Critical Thinking: How Memory Helps Remove Them

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The biggest barriers to critical thinking can prevent you from identifying the real issue, evaluating evidence accurately and changing your mind when the facts demand it.

Memory also plays a larger role than most people realize.

After all, reasoning requires something to reason with.

You need to retrieve relevant facts, examples, principles and previous experiences. Then you need to question whether what you’ve remembered is accurate, relevant and complete.

That’s an important distinction.

A good memory does not automatically make you a good critical thinker.

However, critical thinking becomes much harder when you cannot access the knowledge you’ve already acquired. As I’ve discussed in detail when explaining how memory helps you think faster, readily available knowledge gives reasoning more material to work with.

Research supports taking barriers seriously too. A major review of barriers to critical thinking discusses problems involving bias, intuitive judgment, emotion and our understanding of what counts as knowledge.

I’ve encountered all of these issues during decades of university study, teaching, writing, entrepreneurship and practicing memory techniques.

So on this page, we’re going to look at nine barriers from a practical perspective.

More importantly, I’ll show you how to work on overcoming them.

Ready?

Let’s dive in.

The 9 Most Common Barriers to Critical Thinking

Although there are many obstacles to clear reasoning, these nine deserve particular attention:

1. Failing to identify the real issue
2. Letting your own perspective dominate
3. Trusting memory because it feels certain
4. Applying cognitive bias labels mechanically
5. Stopping your research too soon
6. Trusting summaries without checking the source
7. Mistaking proof of concept for proof of transfer
8. Ignoring the limits of your competence and capacity
9. Treating critical thinking as a talent instead of a discipline

As you work through them, keep a journal nearby.

Write down which barriers cause you the most trouble. Then choose one to work on first.

Trying to fix everything at once can become its own barrier.

One: Failing To Identify The Real Issue

One of the most useful things I learned during my legal studies was IRAC:

• Issue
• Rule
• Application
• Conclusion

Lawyers and law students use variations of this framework to analyze legal problems.

Yet I’ve found the first letter useful far beyond law.

What is the actual issue?

I knew to ask questions like this before studying law. However, IRAC gave me a compact framework that helps bring the habit back to mind.

It’s surprisingly easy to argue about background details, personalities, consequences and hypothetical possibilities without first isolating the problem you’re supposedly trying to solve.

Once you’ve identified the issue, you can ask what information actually bears on it.

That’s where logical thinking becomes much easier.

Legal studies also reinforced another idea for me:

Much of life is a history of forking paths.

One decision gets made instead of another. An interpretation prevails. A technology wins. A business changes direction. An institution adopts one policy rather than its alternatives.

Finding the fork can be incredibly instructive.

Ask:

• Where did the paths separate?
• What alternatives existed at the time?
• Why was one path chosen?
• What information did people have when they made the decision?
• What do we know now that they could not have known then?

You might not be able to change the past.

But reconstructing the fork can help you understand the present much more clearly.

Two: Letting Your Own Perspective Dominate

Most of us experience an ongoing internal narrative.

I sometimes call it SRIN:

Self-Referential Inner Narrative.

Others use terms like “monkey mind.”

Whatever you call it, your personal experience can easily become the default lens through which you judge everything else.

For example, people sometimes dismiss claims by saying:

“I don’t personally know anyone this has happened to.”

That observation might matter.

Or it might tell you almost nothing.

A simple corrective is to deliberately change scale.

Consider the issue at the level of your family, neighborhood, city, region, country or world. Then ask what might remain true even if your own experience were completely removed from the picture.

You can also try seeing an event from another person’s point of view. In studies of autobiographical memory, researchers distinguish between experiencing memories from a first-person or “field” perspective and viewing them more like an observer.

Changing perspective does not guarantee that you’ll reach the right conclusion.

It does help you stop treating your perspective as the only available one.

For practical demonstrations of this kind of mental movement, I’ve collected several critical thinking examples you can study and apply.

Three: Trusting Memory Because It Feels Certain

Here’s a barrier I encounter in ordinary life:

Sometimes I remember details from arguments with my wife incorrectly.

My recollection can feel perfectly convincing.

That doesn’t make it correct.

Over time, I’ve learned to be more modest about what I think I remember. Instead of assuming certainty, I’m much more willing to accept that she might be right and calmly work through what actually happened.

Agitation doesn’t help.

In fact, once emotions rise, it becomes even easier for a discussion about what happened to turn into a completely different argument.

The practical lesson is simple:

Memory confidence is not the same thing as memory accuracy.

When the exact details matter, slow down.

Compare recollections. Check messages, notes or other records when they’re available. Most importantly, stay open to correction.

I’ve explored this issue in greater detail in my guide to memory bias.

Critical thinkers need knowledge available in memory.

They also need enough humility to question what memory provides.

Four: Applying Cognitive Bias Labels Mechanically

For years, one of the biases I’ve watched most closely in myself has been recency bias.

It is tempting to judge reality according to what happened most recently rather than considering a longer historical record.

Reading history and discussing it with others has helped me counter that tendency.

But something interesting has happened.

AI, Google, YouTube and other technologies have changed the internet so rapidly that I can no longer be certain my old problem with recency bias is always a problem.

Sometimes recent developments really do deserve unusual attention.

The environment changed.

Therefore, the corrective sometimes has to change too.

This is why memorizing a list of cognitive biases isn’t enough.

You need to understand them well enough to ask whether the label really applies in a particular situation.

Research on debiasing points in a similar direction. A large 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of educational approaches to cognitive bias found evidence that targeted training can help, while also raising questions about how well improvements transfer into real-world decisions.

In other words, learning the name of a bias is the beginning.

Application takes practice.

Five: Stopping Your Research Too Soon

During my PhD, one of my field examiners gave me a lesson I’ve never forgotten:

If you think something hasn’t been covered before, you almost certainly haven’t dug deeply enough.

That principle has served me ever since.

The more you study a subject, the more branches you discover.

Books point to other books. Arguments have histories. Terms change meaning. Apparently original ideas often turn out to have surprisingly deep roots.

This is another reason I find the “forking paths” model so useful.

Rather than asking only, “What happened?” ask:

How did this particular version of events, argument or interpretation become dominant?

That question often sends you backwards into sources you otherwise would never find.

Of course, research cannot continue forever when you have a deadline.

The point is to avoid confusing “I haven’t found it” with “it doesn’t exist.”

You also have to retain enough of what you discover to compare sources intelligently. That’s why I’ve spent so much time developing methods for remembering what you study.

Research without retention can leave you repeatedly rediscovering the same material.

Six: Trusting Summaries Without Checking The Source

I use summaries.

The problem begins when a summary becomes a substitute for the material it claims to represent.

That concern has become much more important now that software can generate summaries in enormous quantities.

In theory, software might sometimes produce an excellent summary.

But if you don’t have enough contact with the source material, how are you going to judge whether the summary is excellent?

You can’t evaluate what has been:

• Omitted
• Distorted
• Overemphasized
• Removed from context
• Flattened into an oversimplification

Recent research on AI in education makes the issue worth watching carefully. A 2026 systematic review of ChatGPT and critical and creative thinking found that outcomes differed depending on how the technology was used, with unstructured use sometimes associated with cognitive offloading.

My preference is straightforward:

Whenever the subject matters enough, get closer to the source.

Then produce your own summaries.

Write.

Discuss what you’ve learned.

Explain it to another person.

Most importantly, retrieve the ideas without constantly looking at the source.

There is substantial research showing that retrieval practice strengthens long-term retention compared with repeatedly studying the same material.

Producing your own account also exposes gaps surprisingly quickly. It works because you might think you understand something perfectly.

But when you try to explain it, your knowledge starts to fall apart.

Discovering this problem is a good thing because it gives you an opportunity to fill in those gaps.

Seven: Mistaking Proof Of Concept For Proof Of Transfer

Years of practicing memory techniques have made me more skeptical of claims made by other memory experts.

Not less.

Why?

Because experience helps me distinguish between two very different things:

Proof of concept vs. proof of transfer.

Suppose someone memorizes a massive list of names using the techniques I teach in my remember names guide.

It’s very impressive.

But do the techniques transfer to other forms of retention and recall?

Critical questions I immediately ask include:

• Can the same person memorize scripture verbatim?
• Does the technique improve comprehension?
• Will it help someone reason more accurately?
• Does the skill transfer into academic achievement or professional expertise?

Even if proof of concept in one area of memory demonstration deserves respect and I love seeing what trained memory can accomplish, that doesn’t mean the skills transfer to memorizing other things.

And research on learning provides good reasons to keep these claims separate. For example, one study of retrieval practice and analogical problem-solving found improved memory for practiced information without finding evidence of improved application to the analogous problems in one experiment.

That doesn’t mean transfer never happens. But it does suggest that transfer itself needs evidence.

So whenever you see an impressive demonstration, ask:

What does this demonstration actually establish?

Just that one question can eliminate a surprising number of critical thinking errors.

Eight: Ignoring The Limits Of Your Competence And Capacity

I like decision rules because they reduce the amount of thinking you need to reinvent every time a familiar problem appears.

One principle I’ve taken from Warren Buffett is the importance of staying within your circle of competence.

In his 1996 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter, Buffett stressed that knowing the boundaries of what you can competently evaluate matters enormously.

Another principle I keep in mind is simple:

Know the deal in advance.

Work out your boundaries before excitement, pressure or opportunity starts bending them.

I’ve had to think much more deeply about this in entrepreneurship.

My passion for what I do has often made me reluctant to delegate. I also dislike manufacturing excitement or loyalty through leaderboards, management software and other techniques that can turn working relationships into games.

Those concerns are real.

However, trying to do too many things myself has created its own problems.

I’ve had to recognize that refusing one imperfect approach doesn’t mean I should refuse every possible middle ground.

That’s critical thinking too.

Sometimes the barrier isn’t choosing a bad option.

It’s demanding such a perfect option that you never build a workable alternative.

One framework I use when decisions get complicated is W.R.A.P., which I learned from Chip and Dan Heath’s Decisive:

• Widen your options
• Reality-test your assumptions
• Attain distance before deciding
• Prepare to be wrong

The framework only helps, however, if you remember to use it.

That’s where memory becomes part of critical thinking.

You can deliberately practice a framework until recalling it becomes easier. Understanding procedural memory helps explain why repeated use matters.

You can also encode frameworks in a Memory Palace so that the prompts are available when you need them.

The goal isn’t to let the mnemonic make your decision.

It’s to make sure the questions you intended to ask are actually present when the decision arrives.

Nine: Treating Critical Thinking As A Talent Instead Of A Discipline

Many people seem to think critical thinkers are simply born that way.

I don’t.

Critical thinking has a systematic nature that can be learned.

Once you know certain systems well enough, using them often requires less mental energy than people imagine.

The hard part is learning and practicing them in the first place.

During one period of my research, I spent 90 days studying the art of memory in the sixteenth century.

Reading was only part of the process.

I discussed the material with people, wrote about it and followed suggestions that came from those conversations.

And it all boils down to this cycle:

Study. Retrieve. Discuss. Write. Apply. Revise.

In fact, if you seriously want to improve your critical thinking, I suggest treating it as a discipline for at least a year.

• Read some of the best critical thinking books you can find.
• Work through exercises rather than merely reading them.
• Join good-faith discussions and debates.
• Write regularly.
• Apply different critical thinking strategies to business, relationships, learning and whatever else matters in your life.

Speaking practice matters too.

Giving presentations and speeches from memory has repeatedly forced me to retrieve information while responding to what is happening in real time.

• Make mistakes.
• Adjust.
• Then continue.

That’s practice in a nutshell.

And because critical thinking is a discipline, practice matters far more than merely identifying yourself as a “critical thinker.”

Why Memory Matters For Critical Thinking

There’s one principle running through nearly every barrier on this page:

Reasoning involves retrieval.

Suppose you’re discussing history.

You need historical examples available.

If you’re evaluating an argument, you benefit from remembering relevant principles of logic.

When a business problem appears, previous cases, mistakes and decision frameworks can help you work through it.

The more philosophers you’ve studied deeply, for example, the more perspectives on reasoning you can potentially retrieve and apply.

Of course, retrieving more information doesn’t guarantee better reasoning. For example:

• You might retrieve the wrong fact.
• Your memory might be distorted.
• Perhaps you learn that your knowledge is outdated.

You might also have retained plenty of examples that support what you already believe while neglecting counterexamples.

That’s exactly why memory training and critical thinking belong together without being the same thing.

How To Start Overcoming Your Critical Thinking Barriers

Please note that there’s no need to eliminate all nine barriers this week.

Choose one.

Keep a journal and watch for it.

Then create a deliberate practice around that specific weakness.

For example:

• If you keep losing sight of the issue, practice identifying the “I” in IRAC before analyzing problems.
• If memory confidence trips you up, deliberately verify important recollections before defending them.
• If you trust summaries too quickly, return to more primary sources and write your own summaries.
• If cognitive biases concern you, study them while also looking for situations where applying the label would itself be simplistic.
• If you consume information without retaining much, add retrieval practice and memory techniques.
• If you admire demonstrations, practice separating proof of concept from proof of transfer.
• If you regularly operate outside your competence, define the boundaries before making the next decision.

Most of all, give yourself time.

I’ve spent years studying thinking, memory, philosophy and related topics, including teaching at university.

My research is still not done.

It never will be.

That’s not discouraging.

It’s one of the great pleasures of developing your mind.

The more you learn, the more paths appear.

And the more you remember, question and apply what you’ve learned, the better equipped you become to travel those paths without pretending you already know where all of them lead.

If you want to continue, work through my complete guide on how to improve critical thinking.

Then practice.

Write.

Discuss.

Retrieve.

And whenever the evidence demands it, change your mind.