Creative Thinkering

Our special gift is the imagination to make universal metaphoricalanalogical connections between two dissimilar areas of experience

You know the “why didn’t I think of that?” feeling you get when you observe a new idea or process? We’re struck by the obviousness of the idea once we see the analogical connection

Our ancient ancestors had no schools to teach them how to think. There were no scientists, artists, philosophers, or doctors to structure their imaginations. Their imaginations were unstructured and pure. They thought the way they were born to think, naturally and spontaneously. They conceptually combined the essences, functions, and patterns they perceived

Geniuses are geniuses because they make more novel combinations than the rest of us do. As I discuss in the next chapter, this is natural creative thinking that goes back to the first humans. We are all born with this ability, and we all were once creative thinkers — before we were inhibited by education

There is a difference between knowing the name of something and understanding how it works.

New ideas are created by combining two or more dissimilar elements

Similarly, when two dissimilar subjects are conceptually blended together in the imagination, new complex patterns are formed that create new ideas

Creative thinkers form more novel combinations because they routinely conceptually blend objects, concepts, and ideas from two different contexts or categories that logical thinkers conventionally consider separate. It is the conceptual blending of dissimilar concepts that leads to original ideas and insights

Creative thinkers get variation by conceptually combining dissimilar subjects, which changes their thinking patterns and provides them with a variety of alternatives and conjectures.

How, then, can we change our thinking patterns?