COMBINING THE UNRELATED INTO NEW IDEAS

 

Look at the figure below.

When the lines at the left are combined to form the figure on the right, we can no longer perceive the original two patterns without great effort. Instead, we see a continuous wavy line running through a series of bars. Combining the lines creates a new pattern with new properties. The illustration verifies the seemingly obvious point that from a combination can emerge new properties that were not evident in either of the original lines.

It is the same with concepts and ideas. Gregory Murphy of the University of Illinois had people rate how true certain properties were of individual concepts and their combinations. One set of concepts consisted of the individual words “empty” and “store” and their combination “empty store.” Consider the property “losing money.” Like subjects in Murphy’s study, you probably recognize that losing money is typical of “empty stores,” but not of “stores” in general or of things that are “empty.”  Meaning changes when we combine concepts, and the more novel the combination, the more novel the new meaning. This is why genius is often marked by an interest in combining previously unrelated ideas, goods and services, making novel combinations more likely. Following is one technique of many that demonstrates how easy it is get ideas using combinations.

RANDOM OBJECTS. Select 20 objects at random. You can select any objects, objects at home, objects at work, or objects you might find walking down the street. Or you can imagine you are in a technologically-oriented science museum, walking through the Smithsonian Institute, or browsing in an electronic store and make a list of 20 objects that you would likely see. Make two lists of 10 objects each on the left and right sides of the paper (See example below). Pick one from the left and combine it with one on the right. When you find a promising new combination, refine and elaborate it into a new invention.

In the example, the illustrated combinations yielded the following ideas:

∙         Combining bagel with slicer yields a bagel slicer with plastic sides designed to hold the bagel and prevent rotation when slicing.

∙         Bathtub and hammock combines into a baby tub with a simple hammock in the  tub with a headrest to hold the baby’s head securely, leaving the parent’s hands free to do the washing.

∙         Sunglasses and windows combine to form the idea of tinted house windows,  like tinted sunglasses,  designed to change colors with ultraviolet light to help keep the house cool.

∙         Suntan lotion and insect repellent combines to form a new product— one lotion that protects against both the sun and insects.

You can also try the inverse heuristic to generate ideas, which states that if an object performs one function, a new artifact might be realized by combining it with an object that performs the opposite function. The claw hammer is a good example. So is a pencil with an eraser. Can you create new objects from the list of random objects by combining the object with something that performs the opposite function. How about a small cap for tightly sealing a soda can that could be attached to the lever of the pop-top device?

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YOUR MOST IMPORTANT ASSET

To discover a good idea you have to generate many ideas. Out of quantity comes quality. It took Thomas Edison 50,000 experiments to invent the alkaline storage cell battery and 9,000 to perfect the light bulb. For every brilliant idea he had, there were countless duds. For instance, the horse-drawn contraption that would collect snow and ice in the winter and compress it into blocks that families could use in the summer as a refrigerant. Another dud was his perpetual cigar, which consisted of a hollow metal tube with a spring clip that moved the tobacco forward as it burned.

An important aspect of this Darwinian theory for creativity is that, in addition to quantity, you need some means of producing variation in your ideas. For this variation to be truly effective, it must be “blind.” To count as “blind,” the variations are shaped by random, chance, or unrelated factors. In nature, a gene pool totally lacking in variation would be unable to adapt to changing circumstances, with consequences that would be fatal to the species’ survival. In time the genetically encoded wisdom would convert to foolishness. A comparable process operates within us. Every individual has the ability to create ideas based on his or her existing patterns of thinking. These patterns follow a route ingrained in our youth as we were being taught to think. But without any provision for variations, ideas eventually stagnate and lose their adaptive advantages.

Typically, we think reproductively, that is, on the basis of similar problems encountered in the past. When confronted with problems, we fixate on something in the past that has worked before. We ask, “What have I been taught in life, education, or work on how to solve the problem?” Then we analytically select the most promising approach based on past experiences, excluding all other approaches. Then we work, within a clearly defined direction, toward the solution of the problem. In contrast, geniuses are willing to explore as many approaches as possible, including the least and most obvious. Geniuses delight in looking at problems in many different ways and in inventing unconventional approaches.

Last summer, I visited an old friend who served with me in the military. He’s now an engineer with a power company in the northwest and he described a problem that he and the other engineers in his company were trying to solve. Essentially, the problem was how to de-ice power lines during ice storms so they don’t collapse from the weight of the ice. The conventional approaches to the problem were proving to be very expensive and inefficient. I asked my friend to open a dictionary, close his eyes and point to a word. He pointed to the word “honey.” I then asked him to think of the attributes of “honey” and to force a connection between each attribute and the problem. One attribute he mentioned was that honey attracts bears. My friend laughed and said, “I got it. We can put a pot of honey on top the poles. The honey will attract bears and the bears will climb the poles to get the honey, causing the poles to vibrate and shake off the ice.” Suddenly, he stopped laughing and said, “By God, that’s it! The answer is vibration. Remember the downwash from helicopters in the service? The answer is to hover choppers over the lines and the downwash will vibrate the ice off the lines.” This proved to be the most efficient and economical solution to the problem.

The point is, that by introducing something “random” into his thinking, the engineer disturbed his conventional thinking patterns and he came up with an unconventional approach. In nature, a genetic mutation is a variation that’s created by a random or chance event which ignores the conventional wisdom contained in parental chromosomes. Nature then lets the process of natural selection decide which variations survive and thrive. An analogous process operates within geniuses. Creative geniuses produce a rich variety of original ideas and solutions because in addition to their conventional way of thinking, they’ll look for different ways to think about problems. They deliberately change the way they think by provoking different patterns which incorporate random, chance and unrelated factors into their thinking process. These different thinking patterns enable them to look at the same information as everyone else, but the genius will find something different.

About Michael Michalko

REVERSE BRAINSTORMING

REVERSE BRAINSTORMING       

Reverse brainstorming is a technique that flips typical techniques upside down, allowing you to approach complex problems from a different perspective.

In traditional brainstorming, people will focus on collecting ideas for how to solve a problem. In reverse brainstorming, you instead look at what could make the problem worse or why the problem can’t be solved. Then, you reverse those ideas to discover new things you didn’t see before, allowing you to look at the problem, the cause and the solutions in a completely new way.

As an example, Linda manages a doctor’s office. The doctors want her to improve patient satisfaction with their visits. She prepares by writing down the problem statement:

“How do we improve patient satisfaction?”

Then she reverses problem statement:

“How do we make patients more dissatisfied?”

Already she starts to see how the new angle could reveal some surprising results.

At the team meeting, everyone gets involved in an enjoyable and productive reverse brainstorming session. They draw on both their work experience with patients and also their personal experience of being patients and customers of other organizations. Linda helps ideas flow freely, ensuring people do not pass judgment on even the most unlikely suggestions.

Here are just a few of the “reverse” ideas:

• Double book appointments.
• Remove the chairs from the waiting room.
• Put patients who phone on hold (and forget about them).
• Have patients wait outside in the car park.
• Discuss patient’s problems in public.

When the brainstorming session runs dry, the team has a long list of the “reverse” solutions. Now it’s time to look at each one in reverse to think about a potential solution. Well-resulting discussions are quite revealing. For example:

• “Well of course we don’t leave patients outside in the car park – we already don’t do that.”
• “But what about in the morning, there are often patients waiting outside until opening time?
• “Mmm, true. Pretty annoying for people on first appointments.”
• “So why don’t we open the waiting room 10 minutes earlier so it doesn’t happen”
• “Right, we’ll do that from tomorrow. There are several members of staff working already, so it’s no problem.”

And so it went on. The reverse brainstorming session revealed many improvement ideas that the team could implement swiftly and Linda concluded: “It was enlightening and fun looking at the problem in reverse. The amazing thing is, it’s helped us become more patient-friendly by stopping doing things rather than creating more work”.

MICHAEL MICHALKO

ABOUT MICHAEL MICHALKO

HOW EINSTEIN EXPLAINED HIS CREATIVE TALENT

Einstein summarized the value of using your imagination to fantasize best when he said “When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”

Think of how Albert Einstein changed our understanding of time and space by fantasizing about people going to the center of time in order to freeze their lovers or their children in century-long embraces. This space he imagined is clearly reminiscent of a black hole, where, theoretically, gravity would stop time. Einstein also fantasized about a woman’s heart leaping and falling in love two weeks before she has met the man she loves, which lead him to the understanding of acausality, a feature of quantum mechanics. A caricature of special relativity (the relativistic idea that people in motion appear to age more slowly) is based on his fantasy of a world in which all the houses and offices are on wheels, constantly zooming around the streets (with advance collision-avoidance systems).

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Try to solve the following thought experiment before you read the paragraphs that follows it. The thought experiment is attributed to the German Gestalt psychologist Karl Dunker.

One morning, exactly at sunrise, a Buddhist monk began to climb a tall mountain. The narrow path, no more than a foot or two wide, spiraled around the mountain to a glittering temple at the summit. The monk ascended the path at a varying rate of speed, stopping many times along the way to rest and to eat the dried fruit he carried with him. He reached the temple shortly before sunset. After several days of fasting and meditation, he began his journey back along the same path, starting at sunrise and again walking at a varying speed with many stops along the way. His average speed descending was, of course, greater than his average climbing speed. Is there a spot along the path that the monk will occupy on both trips at precisely the same time of day?

If you try to logically reason this out or use a mathematical approach, you will conclude that it is unlikely for the monk to find himself on the same spot at the same time of day on two different occasions. Instead, visualize the monk walking up the hill, and at the same time imagine the same monk walking down the hill. The two figures must meet at some point in time regardless of their walking speed or how often they stop. Whether the monk descends in two days or three days makes no difference; it all comes out to the same thing.

Now it is, of course, impossible for the monk to duplicate himself and walk up the mountain and down the mountain at the same time. But in the visual image he does; and it is precisely this indifference to logic, this superimposition of one image over the other, that leads to the solution. The imaginative conception of the monk meeting himself blends the journeys up and down the mountain and superimposes one monk on the other at the meeting place.

Your brain is a dynamic system that evolves its patterns of activity rather than computes them like a computer. It thrives on the creative energy of feedback from experiences real or fictional. You can synthesize experience; literally create it in your own imagination. The human brain cannot tell the difference between an “actual” experience and a fantasy imagined vividly and in detail. This discovery is what enabled Albert Einstein to create his thought experiments with imaginary scenarios that led to his revolutionary ideas about space and time.

Imagination gives us the impertinence to imagine making the impossible possible. Einstein, for example, was able to imagine alternatives to the sacred Newtonian notion of absolute time, and discovered that time is relative to your state of motion. Think of the thousands of scientists who must have come close to Einstein’s insight but lacked the imagination to see it because of the accepted dogma that time is absolute, and who must have considered it impossible to contemplate any theory.

Einstein described his favorite creative thinking technique as “combinatory play” in a 1945 letter to his friend Jacque Hadamard as the essential feature in the way he thought. Our brains are conditioned to associate similar subjects but have great difficulty are forcing connections between two dissimilar and unrelated subjects or images that seem to have no associations. Our educated and practiced ability to associate similar concepts limits our ability to be creative (apples and oranges are fruit). We form ‘associative walls’ that makes us very efficient at finding common associations  but it discourages us from looking for connections between dissimilar subjects.

Overcoming these associative habits is probably one of the most important skills when it comes to creative and innovative thought. It is no coincidence that the most creative and innovative people through history are experts at forcing new connections between dissimilar subjects through combinatory play. I’ve traced the technique back to Leonardo da Vinci who wrote in his notebooks “It is not possible to think simultaneously of two subjects, no matter how dissimilar, without connections being formed.

EXAMPLE: CAN YOU GROW A BOOK? 

Following is an example of how I used the technique with a publisher who was looking for more innovative ways to publish books. The question I asked him to think about was “What is impossible to do in your industry, but if it were possible would change the nature of your business forever?”

The publisher kept a dream diary. He told me that when he had an interesting problem, he would write “key” words in a notebook by his bed before he went to sleep. When he awoke, the first thing he would do was to try to recall his dreams and record everything he could remember. Then he told me about a dream he had in the past that fascinated him.

He dreamed he was planting seeds in a large field. He nurtured the plants as they grew.  Each plant grew into a large cabbagelike head. When the plant ripened, the leaves unfolded revealing a book. Each plant produced a book. Excitedly, he raced from row to row opening each book. They were all different. Some were fiction, others were nonfiction, children’s books, coffee table books, dictionaries, biographies. He flipped through the books laughing and laughing. That was the answer to my question he said. It is impossible to grow books.

He and I discussed the meaning of the dream about growing books. We realized the impossibility of growing books but listed all the connections we could think of between growing plants and publishing books. One connection was that trees are planted and harvested for the manufacture of paper and paper is used to publish books.

Why not publish books that become trees? This would be a way to educate and inspire young readers about the need for ecologically responsible behavior. The idea the publisher decided to pursue is to publish storybooks for children about trees. The book can then be planted (planting instructions are included) and will grow back into a tree. The books will be handstitched, made from recycled acid-free paper and biodegradable inks and the cover is embedded with poplar tree seeds. Each copy comes with planting instructions. Readers are encouraged to plant and name their tree and to care for it as it grows. The marketing department plans to have the book displayed in bookshops, where it can be seen germinating by customers.

Stretching  your  imagination by trying to make impossible things possible with combinatory play between unrelated subjects makes it possible to create ideas you cannot get using your usual way of thinking.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………Michael Michalko is a renowned creativity expert whose books describe creative thinking techniques used by creative geniuses throughout history to get their breakthrough ideas. Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques; Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius; ThinkPak: A Brainstorming Card Deck and Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work. 

REARRANGE OUR WORLD

Our world has changed immensely in the last few weeks but amid the upheaval and distress, there are reasons to believe we can emerge from the crisis with some human qualities enhanced, writes Matthew Syed on BBC.  Matthew Syed acknowledged one of my ideas that I wrote about in my book THINKERTOYS (A HANDBOOK OF CREATIVE THINKING TECHNIQUES). He wrote “A few years ago, Michael Michalko, a former US army officer, came up with a fascinating idea to sharpen creativity. He called it “assumption reversal”. You take the core notions in any context, subject, discipline and then, well, turn them on their head.

So, suppose you are thinking of starting a restaurant (obviously not possible right now!). The first assumption might be: “restaurants have menus”. The reversal would be: “restaurants have no menus”. This provokes the idea of a chef informing each customer what he bought that day at market, allowing them to select a customized dish. The point is not that this will turn out to be a workable scheme, but that by disrupting conventional thought patterns, it might lead to new associations and ideas.

Or, to take a different example, suppose you are considering a new taxi company. The first assumption might be: “taxi companies own cars”. The reversal would be: “taxi companies own no cars”. Twenty years ago, that might have sounded crazy. Today, the largest taxi company that has ever existed doesn’t own cars: Uber. Now we are living through a disruption (you might even call it a reversal) of unprecedented scale.

The coronavirus has turned our lives upside down and, although we hope to return to some version of normality in the coming months, it is probable that nothing will quite be the same again. Many have lost their livelihoods and businesses, and there is no diminishing the difficulties – emotional and financial – this has brought in its wake. But amid the darkness, there are also opportunities. Opportunities to reimagine the world and one’s place within it.

Reversal techniques are typically used by creative people working to come up with new products or innovations. I wonder if we can all use it to seek out a silver lining or two amid the grey clouds.

For years, bankers assumed that their customers preferred human tellers. In the early 1980s, Citibank concluded that installing automatic tellers would help them cut costs. However, the Citibank executives did not imagine that customers would prefer dealing with machines, so they reserved human tellers for people with more than $5,000 in their accounts and relegated modest depositors to the machines. The machines were unpopular, and Citibank stopped using them in 1983. Bank executives took this as proof of their assumption about people and machines.

Months later, another banker challenged this assumption and looked at the situation from the customer’s perspective. He discovered that small depositors refused to use the machines because they resented being treated as second-class customers. He reinstituted the automatic tellers with no “class distinctions,” and they were an instant success. Today, even Citibank reports that 70 percent of their transactions are handled by machine.

Henry Ford tried to get into the automobile industry for years and failed. The industry believed you had to bring people to the work at a tremendous cost. One day Ford was visiting a pig slaughterhouse and watched a line of butchers each cutting off a portion of the pig as the pigs moved on a conveyor belt in front of the butchers. He got his Eureka! The way to manufacture autos was to bring the work to the people. He did this by manufacturing assembly lines and changed the nature of automobile manufacturing forever.

Alfred Sloan took over General Motors when it was on the verge of bankruptcy and turned it around. His genius was to take an assumption and reverse it into a “breakthrough idea.” For instance, it had always been assumed that you had to buy a car before you drove it. Sloan reversed this to mean you could buy it while driving it, pioneering the concept of installment buying for car dealers.

Reversals destabilize your conventional thinking patterns and free information to come together in provocative new ways. For example, one town reversed drivers control the parking time of cars to cars control parking times. This triggers the idea of parking anywhere as long as you leave your lights on.

Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stair, spray all the monkeys with ice cold water. After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result-all the monkeys are sprayed with ice cold water. Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, turn off the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and will want to climb the stairs. To his surprise, all of the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.

Again, replace a third monkey with a new one. The new one goes to the stairs and is attacked. Two of the four monkeys that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

After replacing the fourth and fifth monkeys with new ones, all the monkeys that have been sprayed with cold water have been replaced. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs. Why not? Because as far as they know that’s the way it’s always been around here.

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HOW TO EASILY INCREASE THE NUMBER OF IDEAS YOU GET

Imagine a pearl diver on an island in the South Seas. He pushes his canoe off from shore, paddles out into the lagoon, dives deep into the water, picks an oyster off the bottom, surfaces, climbs into his boat, paddles to shore, and opens the shell. Finding nothing inside but an oyster, he pushes his canoe off again, and begins paddling into the lagoon.

What an incredible waste of time. The reasonable thing to do is not to paddle back to shore with one oyster, but to dive again and again, to fill up the canoe with oysters and then return to shore. Pearls are rare—a diver must open many oysters before finding one. Only a foolish person would waste time and energy making a separate trip for each oyster. It’s the same with producing ideas. Many times we’ll produce one or two ideas and proceed as if they are the answer. But creative ideas, like pearls, occur infrequently. So the sensible thing to do is to produce many ideas before we evaluate. Just as a good idea may stop you from going on to discover a great one, a great idea may stop you from discovering the right one.

Many times we work hard, but don’t work creatively. We ask the same question, we peruse the same data. Inevitably that leads to generating similar ideas. Increasing your idea production requires conscious effort.

Suppose I asked you to come up with ideas for the alternative uses for the common brick. No doubt, you would come up with some, but my hunch is not very many. The average adult comes up with three to six ideas. However, if I gave you a quota (50 ideas) and time limit your energy will be focused in a competitive way that guarantees fluency of and flexibility of thought.

To meet the quota, at first you find yourself listing all the usual uses for a brick (e.g., build a wall, fireplace, outdoor barbeque, and so on) as well as listing everything that comes to mind

(e.g., anchor, projectiles in riots, ballast, device to hold down newspaper, a tool for leveling dirt, material for sculptures, doorstop, nut cracker, sharpening stone and so on). Finally, to meet your quota you will exert extra effort which allows you to generate more imaginative alternatives than you otherwise would (e.g., use as a trivet to keep hot pots off the counter, hide a spare key in a brick in your garden, pencil holder, fish tank decoration for fish to swim around and through, paste book covers on bricks and use as bookends, a water saver by putting a brick the back of a toilet to lower the amount of water when you flush.

Initial ideas are usually poorer in quality than later ideas. Just as water must run from a faucet for a while to be crystal clear, cool and free of particles, so thought must flow before it becomes creative. Early ideas are usually not true ideas. Exactly why this is so is not known, but one hypothesis is that familiar and safe responses lie closest to the surface of our consciousness and therefore are naturally thought of first. Creative thinking depends on continuing the flow of ideas long enough to purge the common, habitual ones and produce the unusual and imaginative.

LIST YOUR IDEAS. When you give yourself a quota, you force yourself to list your ideas as well. Leonardo da Vinci had a mania for listing and cataloging his thoughts in little notebooks that he carried everywhere. The thousands of pages of lists that he made constitute the raw material for a huge encyclopedia on creativity. A habit to consciously cultivate is to always write or list your ideas when brainstorming. List-making will help you permanently capture your thoughts and ideas, speed up your thinking, will keep you focused, and will force your mind to dwell upon alternatives.

QUOTA. Thomas Edison guaranteed productivity by giving himself and his assistants idea quotas. His own personal quota was one minor invention every 10 days and a major invention every six months. A way to guarantee productivity of your creative thought is to give yourself an idea quota. For example, an idea quota of 40 ideas if you’re looking for ideas alone or a quota of 120 ideas if a group is brainstorming for ideas. By forcing yourself to come up with 40 ideas, you put your internal critic on hold and write everything down, including the obvious and weak. The first third will be the same-old, same-old ideas you always get. The second third will be more interesting and the last third will show more insight, curiosity and complexity.

Michael Michalko

http://www.creativethinking.net/#sthash.SXV5T2cu.dpbs

 

 

 

 

THE IMPORTANCE OF PERCEPTION AND PATTERN RECOGNITION SKILLS IN CREATIVE THINKING

Cognitive scientists understand the importance of perception and pattern recognition as a major component of creative thinking.  When you are committed and start to actively work on a problem that you are passionate about, you will start to notice more and more things that relate to what you are working on. With an infinite amount of stimuli constantly hitting our brains, we need the ability to filter that which is most relevant to us. And our mind is that filter. Often these connections can seem like coincidences, but cognitive scientists tell us it is simply that part of our brain that screens out information we are not interested in and focuses on the things that we can use. These connections give you different ways to look at information and different ways to focus on it.

George de Mestral was inspired to improve the zipper. He thought about the essence of zippers which is to fasten two separate pieces of fabric together. His question became “How do things fasten?” He became committed to the idea of inventing a better fastener and spent considerable time pondering how things fasten in other domains including nature.

One day when George was hunting birds with his Irish pointer, he traveled through some burdock thistles. The prickly seed burrs from the plants clung to his clothing and to his dog. While pulling off the burrs he noticed how they were removable yet easily reattached.

The burdock fascinated George and he imagined a fastener that mimicked a burdock. He studied the burrs under a microscope and discovered a hook system used by the burdock plant to migrate its seeds by attachment. The hooks could grab onto loops of thread or fur and migrate with the object it fastened itself to. This gave him the idea of creating a hook and loop fastener.

It was not logic that guided his thinking process but perception and pattern recognition between two totally unrelated subjects: zippers and burdocks. Logic dictates that burdocks are animate plants and zippers are inanimate manmade objects that are totally unrelated and, therefore, any relationship between the two is to be excluded. It was George’s creative perception, not logic, that recognized the common factor between a burdock and a zipper that fastens, not logic.

George envisioned two fabrics that could attach in this manner with one having a surface covered with minuscule hooks and another with hoops. Most of the experts he visited did not believe hooks could be created on the surface of fabric. However, he found a weaver at a textile plant that was willing to work with him. George discovered that a multifilament yarn weaved from velvet or cotton terry cloth created a surface of hooped threads. To create hooks, George would partially cut the hoops so they would become hooks. There was a great deal of experimentation to get the right density, thread sizes and rigidity. He eventually weaved the hook-side yarn from nylon and invented Velcro.

AN EXERCISE TO TEST YOUR CREATIVE PERCEPTION

Russian computer scientist, Mikhail Bongard, created a  remarkable set of visual pattern recognition problems to test one’s creative perception. The Bongard problems present two sets of relatively simple diagrams, say A and B. All the diagrams from set A have a common factor or attribute, which is lacking in all the diagrams of set B. The problem is to find, or to formulate, convincingly, the common   factor.

Below is an example of a Bongard problem. Test your perception and pattern recognition skills and try to solve the problem.   You have two classes of figures (A and B).  You are asked to discover some abstract connection that links all the various diagrams in A and that   distinguishes them from all the other diagrams in group B.

One has to take chances that certain aspects of a given diagram matter, and others are irrelevant.  Perhaps shapes count, but not sizes — or vice versa.  Perhaps orientations count, but not sizes — or vice versa.  Perhaps curvature or its lack counts, but not location inside the box — or vice versa.  Perhaps numbers of objects but not their types matter — or vice versa.  Which types of features will wind up mattering and which are mere distracters.  As you try to solve the problem, you will find the essence of your mental activity is a complex interweaving of acts of abstraction and comparison, all of which involve guesswork rather than certainty.  By guesswork I mean that one has to take a chance that certain aspects matter and others do not.

Logic dictates that the essence of perception is the activity of dividing a complex scene into its separate constituent objects and attaching separate labels to the now separated parts of pre-established categories, such as ovals, Xs and circles as unrelated exclusive events.  Then we’re taught to think exclusively within a closed system of hard logic.

In the above patterns, if you were able to discern the distinction between the diagrams, your perception is what found the distinction, not logic.  The distinction is the ovals are all pointing to the X in the A group, and the ovals area all pointing at the circles in the B group.

The following thought experiment is an even more difficult problem, because you are no longer dealing with recognizable shapes such as ovals, Xs, circles or other easily recognizable structures for which we have clear representations.  To solve this, you need to perceive subjectively and intuitively, make abstract connections, much like Einstein thought when he thought about the similarities and   differences between the patterns of space and time, and you need to consider the overall context of the problem.

A                                                        B

Again, you have two classes of figures (A and B) in the Bongard problem.  You are asked to discover some abstract connection that links all the various diagrams in A and that distinguishes them from all the other diagrams in group B.

SCROLL DOWN FOR ANSWER

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ANSWER: The rule is the “dots” in A are on the same side of the neck.

Learn how to become a creative thinker. Review Michael Michalko’s books http://creativethinking.net/#sthash.S

 

PROVOKE NEW IDEAS BY REVERSING YOUR PERSPECTIVE AND CONSIDERING THE OPPOSITE

 

Read the following essay from the top down.

Now reverse the way you read it and read it starting at the bottom and read up. Reading the words one way and then reversing the way you read the same words produces two contradictory viewpoints. Reversals break your existing patterns of thought and provoke new ones. You take things as they are and then turn them around, inside out, upside down, and back to front to see what happens.

In the illustration, Figure A shows two lines of equal length bounded by arrow-like angles. In Figure B, the arrow-like angles are reversed on one of the lines, which changes our perception and creates the illusion of the line being shorter. It’s not shorter, measure it and you will find it is still equal in length. The lines haven’t changed, your perception of them has.

In figure A the angles at the end of the lines seem to open up a potentially limited space. Reversing the angle seems to close off and limit the area, which changes your perception of the length of the lines.

A simple reversal of angles dramatically changes what we see in the illustration. The same perceptual changes occur when we reverse our conventional thinking patterns about problems and situations. When Henry Ford went into the automobile business, the conventional thinking was that you had to “bring people to the work.” He reversed this to “bring the work to the people” and accomplished this by inventing the assembly line. When Al Sloan became CEO of General Motors, the common assumption was that people had to pay for a car before they drove it. He reversed this to you can drive the car before you pay for it and, to accomplish this, he pioneered the idea of installment buying.

Years back, chemists had great difficulty putting a pleasant-tasting coating on aspirin tablets. Dipping tablets led to uneven and lumpy coats. They were stumped until they reversed their thinking. Instead of looking for ways to put something “on” the aspirin, they looked for ways to take something “off” the aspirin. This reversal led to one of the newer techniques for coating pills. The pills are immersed in a liquid which is passed onto a spinning disk. The centrifugal force on the fluid and the pills causes the two to separate, leaving a nice, even coating around the pill.

Mathematician-philosopher, Bertrand Russell, once astounded his colleagues by demonstrating that in mathematical argument, every alternative leads to its opposite. You can provoke new ideas by considering the opposite of any subject or action. When bioengineers were looking for ways to improve the tomato, they identified the gene in tomatoes that ripens tomatoes. They thought that if the gene hastens ripening  maybe they could use the gene to slow down the process by reversing it. They copied the gene, put it in backwards and now the gene slows down ripening, making vine ripened tomatoes possible in winter.

Peter Juroszek at the University of Bonn in Germany discovered the opposite of daylight farming and initiated nighttime farming. He found that strips of land ploughed at night grow five times fewer weeds. Wheat fields in particular grow so few weeds when night farming that pesticides are unnecessary. The seeds of most weeds need light for germination to begin, whereas the seeds of most crops can grow in complete darkness.

Reversal is the strategy used to develop Pringles potato chips. Potato chips were packaged dry in bags with a lot of air to prevent breakage. What would happen if you packaged chips while they were wet? This inspired them to think of raking leaves in the fall. Shoving dry leaves into bags is difficult; but when the leaves are wet they are soft and formable. A wet leaf conforms to the shape of its neighbor with little air between them. This was the analogy that inspired the idea. By wetting and forming dried potato flour, the packaging problem was solved and Pringles got its start.

CAN A BOOK BECOME A TREE?

Any particular thought will arouse the notion of its opposite by simply by reversing it. Then try to work the reversal into a practical, profitable idea. A publisher mused about the impact cutting down trees has on the environment and the future of the planet. A tree is cut down and the wood is made into paper which the publisher uses to print and sell books. He thought a tree becomes a book. He reversed this thought to “A book becomes a tree.”

IDEA: The project the publisher decided to pursue is to create storybooks that can be planted, and will grow back into trees. Hand stitched copies of children’s storybooks are made from recycled acid-free paper and biodegradable inks and the cover is embedded with native tree seeds.

The books are aimed at children aged 6-12 who, after reading, can plant the book and watch and nurture the tree as it grows. Each copy comes with planting instructions. The child is also urged to form a relationship with the tree by giving it a name. The publisher is also planning to have the book displayed in bookshops, where it can be seen visibly germinating.

In this case, the impossibility of growing books as plants revealed the interesting thought of planting books as seeds for trees. Imagine the joy of children as they realize the ecological importance of contributing to the welfare of the planet by planting a book after they have finished reading it and watch it become a tree. They will nurture the tree and watch it grow over the years of their childhood.

………………………………………………………………………………………………

Reversal is one of the many creative-thinking techniques creative geniuses, throughout history, used that enabled them to change their perspective to look at the same thing as everybody else and see something different.

VISIT: http://www.creativethinking.net/#sthash.SXV5T2cu.dpbs

 

 

 

An Interview with Michael Michalko about his book: Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work

Children are naturally creative. Why do so many lose that talent as they grow older?

We were all born spontaneous and creative. Every one of us. As children we accepted all things equally. We embraced all kinds of outlandish possibilities for all kinds of things. When we were children we knew a box was much more than a container. A box could be a fort, a car, a tank, a cave, a house, something to draw on, and even a space helmet. Our imaginations were not structured according to some existing concept or category. We did not strive to eliminate possibilities, we strove to expand them. We were all amazingly creative and always filled with the joy of exploring different ways of thinking.

And then something happened to us, we went to school. We were not taught how to think, we were taught to reproduce what past thinkers thought. When confronted with a problem, we were taught to analytically select the most promising approach based on past history, excluding all other approaches, and then to work logically within a carefully defined direction towards a solution. Instead of being taught to look for possibilities, we were taught to look for ways to exclude them. It’s as if we entered school as a question mark and graduated as a period.

When you have a really tough challenge and can’t see the answer, what is your favorite technique for unlocking your brain?

When I am stonewalled, I just start typing “O peaceful gloom shrouding the earth” over and over and over.  Eventually, typing this phrase over and over unlocks something in my brain and the ideas start flowing.  It’s going through the motions of writing that un-sticks my mind.

Most people presume that our attitudes affect our behavior, and this is true.  But it’s also true that our behavior determines our attitudes.  Tibetan monks say their prayers by whirling prayer wheels on which their prayers are inscribed.  The whirling wheels spin the prayers into divine space.  Sometimes, a monk will keep a dozen or so prayer wheels rotating like a juggling act in which whirling plates are balanced on top of long thin sticks.

Many novice monks are not very emotionally or spiritually involved at first.  It may be that the novice is thinking about his family, his doubts about a religious vocation or something else while he is going through the motions of spinning his prayer wheel.  When the novice adopts the pose of a monk, and makes it obvious to himself and to others by playing a role, the brain will soon follow the role they are playing.  It is not enough for the novice to have the intention of becoming a monk: the novice must act like a monk and rotate the prayer wheels.  If one has the intention of becoming a monk and goes through the motions of acting like a monk, one will become a monk.

If you want to be an artist, and if all you did was paint a picture every day, you will become an artist.  You may not become another Vincent van Gogh, but you will become more of an artist than someone who has never tried.

What makes a genius a genius? 

Geniuses do not get their breakthrough ideas because they are more intelligent, better educated, more experienced, or because creativity is genetically determined. University of California Professor Dean Keith Simonton  observed that creative thinking demands the ability to make novel combinations. If you examine most any idea, you will discover that the majority of ideas are created by combining two or more different elements into something different. Simonton’s conclusion about genius is “Geniuses are geniuses because they form more novel combinations than the merely talented.”

You talk about incubating thinking. What does that mean and how do we do it?

Incubation makes use of subconscious processing of information. It usually involves setting a problem aside for a few hours, days, or weeks and moving on to other projects. This allows the subconscious to continue to work on the original challenge. The more interested you are in solving the challenge, the more likely your subconscious will generate ideas.

Henri Poincare, the French genius, spoke of incredible ideas and insights that came to him with suddenness and immediate certainty out of the blue. So dramatic are the ideas that arrive that the precise moment in which the idea arrived can be remembered in unusual detail. Charles Darwin could point to the exact spot on a road where he arrived at the solution for the origin of species while riding in his carriage and not thinking about his subject. Other geniuses offer similar experiences. Like a sudden flash of lightning, ideas and solutions seemingly appear out of nowhere.

Modern science recognizes this phenomenon of incubation and insight yet cannot account for why it occurs. That this is a commonplace phenomenon was shown in a survey of distinguished scientists conducted over a half-century ago. A majority of the scientists reported that they got their best ideas and insights when not thinking about the problem.

Our conscious minds are sometimes blocked from creating new ideas because we are too fixated. When we discontinue work on the problem for a period of time, our fixation fades, allowing our subconscious minds to freely create new possibilities. This is what happened to Nobel laureate Melvin Calvin. While idly sitting in his car waiting for his wife to complete an errand, he found the answer to a puzzling inconsistency in his research on photosynthesis. It occurred just like that, quite suddenly, and suddenly in a matter of seconds the path of carbon became apparent to him.

Ideas came while walking, recreating, or working on some other unrelated problem. This suggests how the creative act came to be associated with divine inspiration—the illumination appears to be involuntary.

What do you know about creative thinking today that you wished you knew twenty years ago?

That creativity is a phenomena that results from a certain combination of relationships. This combination includes the principles of intention, belief, attitude, behavior, language, knowing how to change the way you look at things, knowing how to think in different ways and learning how to think inclusively without the prejudices of logic. We’ve been schooled to think of them all as separate and distinct entities so they can be described and explained. Despite the apparent separateness of these at this level, they are all a seamless extension of each other and ultimately blend into each other.

When you look at nature, contents aren’t contained anywhere but are revealed only by the dynamics. What matters to nature are the ways relationships interact, the way they cooperate and combine to form coherent patterns. In nature form and content are inextricably connected and can’t be separated. The healthy pattern of trees bending in concert creates harmony and beauty, whereas, an unhealthy pattern is destructive and ugly. With the trees, it is the combination of relationships between the wind, rain, roots and soil that forms the healthy or unhealthy relationships. With people, it is a common body of human behaviors and generalized principles from which patterns blend together to create the person.

Like nature, the contents of creative genius aren’t contained anywhere but also are revealed by the dynamics. When you look at the behaviors of creative geniuses throughout the history of the world, you will find that, like the patterns of nature, the form and contents of their behaviors are inextricably connected and can’t be separated. Creators have the intention to create, and act and speak in a positive and joyful manner. Creators look at what is and what can be instead of what is not. Instead of excluding possibilities, creators consider all possibilities, both real and imagined. Creators interpret experiences for themselves and disregard the interpretations of past thinkers. Creators learn how to look at things in different ways and use different ways of thinking. And most importantly, creators are creative because they believe they are creative and have the intention to create

Describe strategies you apply in your daily life to make it more creative.

THOUGHT WALKS.  I like to take walks around my home or workplace and the surrounding grounds. I look for objects, situations or events that you I can compare with whatever project II happen to be working on. For example, suppose your problem is how to improve communications in your company. You take a walk and notice potholes in the road. How are “potholes” like your corporate communication problem? For one thing, if potholes are not repaired, they get bigger and more dangerous. Usually road crews are assigned to repair the potholes. Similarly, unless something is done to improve corporate communications, it’s likely to deteriorate even further. An idea with a similar relation to “road crews” is to assign someone in the organization to fill the role of “communications coach.” The role would entail educating, encouraging, and supporting communication skills in all employees. And just as road crews are rotated, you can rotate the assignment every six months.

I also deliberately program changes into my daily life. I make a list of things I do by habit (little things that make life comfortable but also make it unnecessary to think. Then I take the habits, one by one, and consciously change them for a day or so. Examples are:

• Take a different route to work.
  •    Watch a different news channel.
  •    Read a different newspaper. Read foreign newspapers.
  •    Listen to a different radio station. Listen to the BBC.
  •    Change recreations. Instead of golf, try boating.
  •    Spend a full day away from all communication technology (telephone, cell, computer, radio, television, and so on).
  •    Play word games. Take a short word and expand it into several sentences using each letter of the word as the first word of each letter of each sentence. Example: The word is “Damn.” Some sentences are “Do airplanes make noise?” “Dottie ate many nuts.”
  •    Another word game I play is to describe what I’m thinking or feeling in exactly six words. Examples:
  o    “Boy if I had another year.”
  o    “Never should have bought this computer.”
  o    ”I can still create novel ideas.”
  •    Change your reading habits. Instead of nonfiction. Read fiction. Tabloids, comics, poetry,
  the bible, Koran, scientology tracts.

  When choosing from an array of creative-thinking techniques, how does one know which technique is appropriate for a certain type of problem?

  All art is a reaction to the first line drawn. No art is created until the artist draws the first line. It is same with creative thinking. Nothing happens until you start thinking. Rather than waiting until you feel in the mood or you feel comfortable with a particular technique, just start working. You may end up using one technique or a combination of several or even a technique you make up. The key is that the techniques will get you thinking fluently and flexibly which will change the way you look at the problem.

  You recommend that we relentlessly keep notes about our ideas, observations, and creative attempts. And that we record information about all the ideas, concepts and problems we are working on. How does one establish the discipline of systematically keeping notes like creative geniuses, such as Edison? What is your secret to consistently doing it?

  The secret is that it is no secret. Make it a habit to keep the written record of your creativity attempts in a notebook, on file cards or in your computer. A record not only guarantees that the thoughts and ideas will last, since they are committed to paper or computer files, but will inspire you into other thoughts and ideas.

  The simple act of recording his ideas enabled Leonardo da Vinci to dwell on his ideas and improve them over time by elaborating on them. Thus, Leonardo was able to take simple concepts and work them into incredibly complex inventions that were years ahead of their time, such as the helicopter, the bicycle, and the diving suit.

  Following Leonardo’s example, Edison relentlessly recorded and illustrated every step of his voyage to discovery in his 3,500 notebooks that were discovered after his death in 1931. His notebooks got him into habits. They enabled him to cross-fertilize ideas, techniques, and conceptual models by transferring them from one problem to the next.

  •    For example, when it became clear in 1900 that an iron-ore mining venture in which Edison was financially committed was failing and on the brink of bankruptcy, he spent a weekend poring over his notebooks and came up with a detailed plan to redirect the company’s efforts toward the manufacture of Portland cement, which could capitalize on the same model of the iron ore company.

  Whenever he succeeded with a new idea, Edison would review his notebooks to rethink ideas and inventions he’d abandoned in the past in the light of what he’d recently learned. If he was mentally blocked working on a new idea, he would review his notebooks to see if there was some thought or insight that could trigger a new approach.

  •    For example, Edison took his unsuccessful work to develop an undersea telegraph cable variable resistance and incorporated it into the design of a telephone transmitter that adapted to the changing sound waves of the caller’s voice. This technique instantly became the industry standard.

  Edison would often jot down his observations of the natural world, failed patents and research papers written by other inventors, and ideas others had come up with in other fields. He would also routinely comb a wide variety of diverse publications for novel ideas that sparked his interest and record them in his notebooks. He made it a habit to keep a lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others have used successfully on other problems in other fields. To Edison, your idea needs to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you’re working on.

  Edison also studied his notebooks of past inventions and ideas to use as springboards for other inventions and ideas in their own right. To Edison, his diagrams and notes on the telephone (sounds transmitted) suggested the phonograph (sounds recorded), which notes and diagrams, in turn, suggested motion pictures (images recorded).

  Simple, in retrospect, isn’t it? Genius usually is.

MICHAEL MICHALKO is the author of  the best-seller Thinkertoys (A Handbook of Business Creativity), which the Wall Street Journal reported “will change the way you think.” He is also the author of Cracking Creativity (The Secrets of Creative Geniuses) which describes the common thinking strategies creative geniuses have used in the  sciences, art, and industry throughout history and shows how we can apply them to become more creative in our business and personal lives. In addition, he created Thinkpak (A Brainstorming Card Set), which is a novel creative-thinking tool that is designed to facilitate brainstorming sessions. Michael’s most recent book Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work focuses on how creative geniuses combine and conceptually blend dissimilar subjects create original thoughts and ideas. http://www.creativethinking.net

 

 

HOW YOUR MIND ACTUALLY WORKS

At this very moment, you are actually moving your eyes over a white page dotted with black marks. Your mind recognizes and transforms the marks into patterns which we call words and sentences. Our minds created the patterns when we first learned to talk and read. Now we no longer see the words as patterns of black marks and lose ourselves in what we are reading.

The patterns are so hard wired in our brains that we no longer can imagine the black marks being anything else but letters, words, and sentences. Look at above title and try not to see the words and letters, but only black shapes on white paper; that is, try to see the original input that you had when you were a two-year-old. You’ll find that it’s impossible because of the word patterns stored in your brain.

The dominant factor in the way our minds work is the buildup of patterns that enable us to simplify the assimilation of complex data. We look at 7 x 7 and 49 appears automatically without conscious thought. We have no memory of how we calculated the answer.

In another example that demonstrates the effectiveness of thinking patterns, add one letter at the beginning of the following letters to make a word…..(any). What is the word? Now add one letter before the next set of letters to make a word..…(eny).

Most think of the word “many” quickly for the first set. However, some people have difficulty thinking of the word deny for the second set. The sound of the first word creates a temporary mini-pattern. As a result, you search your memory for other words with similar sounds when you are trying to think of the second word. But the problem can’t be solved unless you break this pattern and shift your thinking. And this is only one word.

Can you understand the following  sentence:

“This sentence no verb.”

You can easily understand it despite the missing verb “has.” Again your sentence pattern recognizes what’s missing and automatically fills in the blank. Habitual pattern recognition provides us with instant interpretations and enables us to react quickly to our environment.

Below are two sentences:

• Round squares steal honestly.
• Honestly steal squares round.

Both sentences use the same words. Yet we know the first one is nonsense immediately because it fits a well established word sentence pattern (adjective…noun…verb…adverb). We know immediately that squares are not round, cannot steal and it’s not possible to steal honestly. The second one is strange and makes us hesitate and think before we dismiss it. This is because the second one does not fit any word sentence pattern in our brain and we actually have to think.

Consider what happens when you read these words:

• Thief…………careless……….prison

Just three words activate a thinking pattern in your brain that relates a story about a thief who is careless, gets caught and ends up in prison.

It is known today that grouping and categorization are among the most primitive psychological processes. Thought is a process of fitting new situations into existing slots and pigeonholes in the mind. Just as you cannot put a physical thing into more than one physical pigeonhole at once, so, by analogy, the processes of thought prevent you from putting a mental thought  into more than one mental category at once. Consequently a structure like, thief, careless, prison will be persistently conceived as a careless thief who ends up in prison. You will note that the mind does not offer alternative explanations such as “A thief who is not careless will not go to prison,” or “A thief will learn not to be careless in prison.” The mind will not automatically consider alternatives because the mind cannot tolerate ambiguity.

Think of your mind as a block of ice which is frozen and polished so that it’s surface is perfectly flat. When information enters the mind, it self-organizes. It is like pouring warm water on the block of ice with a teaspoon. Imagine the warm water being poured on the ice and then gently tip the block of ice so that it runs off. After many repetitions of this process, the surface of the ice would be full of ruts, indentations, and grooves.

Soon you’ll observe that new water will automatically flow into the preformed grooves. This is how information self organizes as it enters the brain. After a while, it will take only a little water to active an entire channel. This is the pattern recognition and pattern completion process of the brain. Even if much of the information is out of the channel, as is the case about the careless thief, the entire pattern will be activated.

Following are three thought experiments that demonstrate how our thinking patterns can direct our thoughts. Please try and answer all three before you go to the answers which are at the end of the article.

THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

Don’t scroll down too fast, do it slowly and follow the instructions below exactly, do the math in your head as fast as you can. It may help to say the answers aloud quietly.

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT #1 FOLLOW these instructions one at a time and as QUICKLY as you can!

What is:

2+2?

4+4?

8+8?

16+16?

Quick! Pick a number between 12 and 5.

Got it? Write it down. Complete the next two experiments before you check your answer.

 

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT #2: Just follow these instructions, and answer the questions one at a time and as quickly as you can! Don’t advance until you’ve done each of them. Now, scroll down, but not too fast, you might miss something………

What is:

1+5

2+4

3+3

4+2

5+1

Now repeat saying the number 6 to yourself as fast as you can for 10 seconds. Then scroll down.

 

 

 

 

 

QUICK!!! THINK OF A VEGETABLE!

Check your answer when you’ve finished all three.

 

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT #3 Once more follow these instructions, and answer the questions one at a time and as quickly as you can!  Again, do this as quickly as you can but don’t advance until you’ve done each of them.

* Now, scroll down (but not too fast, you might miss something).

Think of a number from 1 to 10

Multiply that number by 9

If the number is a 2-digit number, add the digits together

Now subtract 5

Determine which letter in the alphabet corresponds to the number you ended up with (example: 1=a, 2=b, 3=c, etc.).

 

 

SCROLL DOWN

 

 

 

Think of a country that starts with that letter

SCROLL DOWN

Remember the last letter of the name of that country

SCROLL DOWN

Think of the name of an animal that starts with that letter

SCROLL DOWN

Remember the last letter in the name of that animal

SCROLL DOWN

Think of the name of a fruit that starts with that letter

Check your answer below.

 

 

 

ANSWERS TO THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS:

EXPERIMENT #1….Answer is 7

EXPERIMENT #2….Answer is “carrot.”

EXPERIMENT #3….Answer “Are you thinking of a Kangaroo in Denmark eating an orange?”

****************************************************************

MICHAEL MICHALKO is the author of  the best-seller Thinkertoys (A Handbook of Business Creativity), which the Wall Street Journal reported “will change the way you think.” He is also the author of Cracking Creativity (The Secrets of Creative Geniuses) which describes the common thinking strategies creative geniuses have used in the  sciences, art, and industry throughout history and shows how we can apply them to become more creative in our business and personal lives. In addition, he created Thinkpak (A Brainstorming Card Set), which is a novel creative-thinking tool that is designed to facilitate brainstorming sessions. Michael’s most recent book Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work focuses on how creative geniuses combine dissimilar subjects create original thoughts and ideas. http://creativethinking.net/#sthash.SXV5T2cu.dpbs