CEP818 – Thinking Differently

reblogged from the wiki sparks and creativity

If there were only one way to strike the spark which could ignite genius, humans would have devised the flint and steel for that a long time ago. Our minds do not work that way—they work in multiple ways. As the Japanese Haiku master Matsuo Bashō wrote many years ago:

Four temple gates

four ways

beneath a single moon

There are many ways to ignite that spark: our ability to think does depend upon the flint and steel of words alone.

In Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People, authors Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein remind us that many of the world’s most influential thinkers found more than one way to enter their temples of innovation. Many were polymaths, artists as well as scientists, scientists within their arts.

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Physicist … and musician

Actress … and inventor [1]

Ethologist … and artist

Albert Einstein

Hedy Lamarr

Desmond Morris

Some found that ideas arrived from being able to look at a problem from multiple perspectives (perceiving), by recognizing repetition and relationships (patterning), by reducing systems and processes into basic terms (abstracting), by physicalizing thought itself (embodied thinking), through creating externalized systems (modeling), and through plain old mucking about and having fun (playing). None of these avenues necessarily exists alone, unconnected to the others. An essential part of transformative thinking is the synthesizing that can, and does, occur: a synosia of thought that has implications for educating others to be creative and for being creative in the way we educate others.

“Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can’t print the results.”Mark Twain

Most of all, it is clear that deep within the layers of thought is feeling … that insistent human force which drives thought itself—the muse, the impulse, the igniting spark.

via CEP818 – Thinking Differently.