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This book describes some of the powerful metaphors that have developed over the past two decades about the workings of our minds including cognitive science (which embraces several disciplines, notably computer science, linguistics, neurophysiology and psychology), in an attempt to apply those metaphors to the workings of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence. These findings have obvious implications for the way the directorate recruits and trains its people. 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. 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