Crucially, they have arrived having promised to stop interrupting. They have agreed 1) to start giving attention, 2) to stay interested in where each other’s thinking will go next and 3) to ‘share the stage’ equally.

And in that promise, too, there is a rich colony of catalysts. There are at least ten conditions – the ‘components of a thinking environment’ I mentioned, conditions we are providing when we give attention and don’t speak. These ‘components’– attention, equality, ease, appreciation, feelings, encouragement, information, difference, incisive questions and place – we will explore in fresh detail later. The point here is that they actually generate thought. To decide to live them is to decide to cherish independent human thinking.

I have said that we have also very recently begun to understand that the mind seems to think in ‘waves and pauses’, not in ‘parts’. (Formerly I thought the road to the incisive question consisted of ‘parts’ and could be mapped. I was wrong. The mind is not so predictably linear.) It then determines in the pause the ‘just right’ question among those ‘innate questions’ to generate a new wave. As the listener, we are now able to navigate that same ‘pause’ process to determine the right question when the person cannot do it for themselves.

This puzzled me. But then I thought about this: on screen the promise of no interruption is broken, yes. But not by the listener. It is broken by the platform. And it is the listener’s promise, not the platform’s, that ignites the thinker’s mind. It is the thinker’s trust in that human promise that allows them to claim their own intelligence and fly. And although this means that one of the three aspects of the component of place – the room – is deeply compromised, the most important aspect – the listener – holds steady and perhaps does ‘double duty’ to make up significantly for the interruptive room.

We can create a thinking environment even in the dwellings of extreme disagreement. We can, quite simply and profoundly, promise not to interrupt. We can honour the three ingredients of that promise: to start giving attention, to stay interested in where the person will go next and to ‘share the stage’ equally.