None of us sees the world as “it is,” therefore; we can only see the world that we think. If we can’t think it, then what it is that we can’t see doesn’t exist for us at all. At least, not yet.

Herein lies the dolphin thinker’s difficult-to-explain advantage. From the dolphin perspective, you can potentially see all the current worlds crafted of all the variations of the human mind that have checked in at the front desk of awareness thus far. You can see these minds at work. And you can understand, in great measure, why they are choosing the route they select, what the up sides and the down sides to their choices are and, to a considerable extent, where the train wrecks from their shortcomings and weaknesses are likely to happen and why.

These aren’t the famous “parallel universes” of quantum physics. Parallel universes may be nothing more than conjectures in the minds of those who talk about them. If they are real, parallel universes are separate worlds stacked from here to infinity, incorporating the opposite of every yes/no decision you and everyone else who ever lived has ever made and acted on, and if this myriad of worlds are real, there doesn’t seem to be much leakage, if any, between them. If and when worlds are parallel, where you are, you might say, is what you get. Or to put it another way: in for a penny, stuck there for a pound.

The dolphin thinker’s world is something else. Oxymoronically, the multiple worlds that the dolphin thinker can see, and often does, are all part of a piece. A singular world in that if you know how and where to look, you can find every physical component to be found in any one of the worlds in all the others.

But that’s the rub: knowing when and how and where to look, and what to look for. In the advance toward dolphin thinking, the brain has become progressively more skilled at:

• Making connections.

• Discerning cause and effect.

• Anticipating consequences.

• Spotting and avoiding its own chimeras—the false threats and shadows, the pipedreams and nonsensical defenses it fashions of fancy and not of fact.

• Withholding judgment until it can know more.

• Delaying gratification until the timing is right.

• Seeing a whole serration of choices, instead of no choice at all, and getting better and better at favoring those choices with the best odds.

As the humanly conscious brain has matured over the centuries, it has grown more and more adept at knowing how and where to look—for what, for what reason, to what end.

Think of seven simultaneously-at-work worlds, including the dolphin thinker’s world, partitioned off from each other by layers of glass. Between each of the glass partitions, a separate kind of world is being lived, up close and personally, by the occupants of that layer. Each of the actions taken in each layer contributes to the composite of all the possible worlds, but with a critical caveat.

Not all the actions, ingredients, possibilities or even participants in these worlds are visible to participants in other worlds—except for one. That capability, that responsibility, that “complication of consequence” belongs only to the user of the dolphin thinker’s mind, who sees through all the glass partitions all too clearly.

Explained this way, you may now realize that you’ve been experiencing dolphin thinking without realizing what it really was. There are salient clues. Have you come to realize a certain, new sense of isolation, conversationally and intellectually? Do you note a growing sense of boredom or impatience or maybe irritation at the opinionated chitchat of longtime companions, with whom you used to converse easy enough? Do people to whom you try to explain things and suggest things to, people who used to hear you out with no unease or lack of enthusiasm, now look at you like the proverbial deer in the headlight when you discourse at any length? Do you wonder if you any longer share many of their key values? Fit snugly into their comfort zone? Really belong any longer in their world?

It may be become you are closing in on the dolphin thinker’s capabilities.

If there is a single, concrete feature supporting all other features of dolphin thinking, it is this mind’s tendency to come at each and every situation with a healthy, robust, undiluted, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may kind of optimistic pragmatism—an upbeat, advanced, quick-study, highly generalized common sense.

This is the argument I advance in my latest book, LEAP! How to Think Like a Dolphin & Do the Next Smart, Right Thing Come Hell or High Water. Details about the work are here. Hope you’ll take a look!