56 Teaching Minds imagining consequences to those steps. The more you plan, the bet- ter you get at it. We do planning every day. It matters a great deal and the better you are at it, the easier your life will go. The same is true of the third mental process: analysis of causation. Knowing why some- thing happened allows us to not do it again—if we didn’t like the end result—or to try to do it again, if we did, and everything in between. Determining causation is a mental process that is very similar to diag- nosis, of course. So these three are all cognitive processes and they require constant practice. Getting better at them throughout one’s life is very impor- tant. I define learning as improvement in one’s cognitive processes. Lifetime learning does not mean the continual acquisition of knowl- edge so much as it means the improvement in one’s ability to do these processes by means of the acquisition and analysis of experiences to draw on. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023802