Rethinking Thinking

By David Jiles, Ph.D.

Everyone thinks, but not all think creatively. Is creative genius limited to those rare individuals such as Einstein, Hemingway, Picasso, Tesla, Beethoven and countless others throughout the centuries or are there common secrets in their approach towards creative thinking? If there is a secret language of the mind that encourages creative thinking, what is it and can others adopt it? Yes!

This series presents a dozen secrets of the mind shared among all for whom we identify as creative geniuses. It explains, in contemporary terms and real-life examples, how others have been creatively successful. After reading this, you will not necessarily win a Nobel Prize, but you should be able to see everything in a different perspective… a creative perspective.

People in every creative endeavor use a common set of general-purpose thinking tools in an almost infinite variety of ways. These tools reveal the nature of creative thinking itself; they make surprising connections among the sciences, arts, humanities, and technologies. At the level of creative imagination, everyone thinks alike. But, as master composer Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky explained in The Poetics of Music, is that “what concerns us here is not imagination in itself, but rather creative imagination: the faculty that helps us pass from the level of conception to the level of realization.”

Productive thought occurs when internal imagination and external experience coincide. The task, simply put, is to reunite the two. The world’s most creative people have told us how in their own words and deeds; in their own explorations of their own minds at work. What they find as individuals, when taken as a whole, is a common set of thinking tools, a secret language of the mind, at the heart of creative understanding.

This series will discuss the elements of this secret language, including:

Observation
Initially, all knowledge about the world is acquired through observing, paying attention to what is seen, heard, touched, smelled, tasted, or felt within the body.

Imaging
The ability to recall or imagine feelings acquired through observation is another important tool in creative thinking. Just as observations can be made using any sense, so images can be recalled or created for any sense or sensation. Indeed, scientists, artists, and musicians alike report “seeing” in their mind’s pictures of things they have never actually seen, “hearing” sounds and songs that have not yet been made, and “feeling” the sensual properties of things they have never touched.

Abstracting
Because sense experience and sense imagery are rich and complex, creative people in all disciplines also use abstracting as an essential tool. And whether one is a painter like Picasso, a scientist like Einstein, or a writer like Hemingway, the process of paring down complicated things to simple principles is the same.

Recognizing Patterns
Simplifying what one sees often works in tandem with patterning, a tool with two parts. Recognizing patterns is involved in the discovery of nature’s laws and the structure of mathematics, but also the rhymes and rhythms of language, dance, music, and the formal intentions of the painter. Recognizing patterns is also the first step towards creating new ones. Novel pattern forming, whether in music, art, engineering, or dance, almost always begin by combining simple elements in unexpected ways. Even more interesting, there are patterns to pattern forming itself.

Analogizing
Recognizing patterns leads to analogizing. The realization that two apparently different things share important properties or functions lies at the heart of the world’s greatest works of art and literature and the most enduring scientific theories and engineering inventions.

Body Thinking
Tools for thinking are pre-verbal and pre-symbolic, and none more so than body thinking — thinking that occurs through the sensations and awareness of muscle, sinew, and skin. Well before they have found the words or formulas to express themselves, many creative people “feel” ideas emerging. Bodily sensations, muscular movements, and emotions act as springboards for more formal thought. Athletes and musicians imagine the feel of their movements; physicists and artists feel in their bodies the tensions and movements of trees and electrons, instruments and tools.

Empathizing
Empathizing is related to body thinking. Many creative people describe “losing” themselves in the things they study, integrating “I” and “it.” Actors learn to make the character they play a part of themselves. Scientists, doctors, and artists play-act “becoming” another person or an animal, plant, electron, or star.

Dimensional Thinking
Yet another tool rooted in the experience of space, is dimensional thinking, the imaginative ability to take a thing mentally from a flat plane into three dimensions or more, from earth to outer space, through time, even to alternate worlds. One of the least recognized of our thinking tools, dimensional thinking is essential to engineering, sculpture, visual art, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy — indeed, any activity that involves interpreting “pictures” in one set of dimensions as objects in another set.

Modeling
Modeling objects and concepts often requires some combination of dimensional thinking, abstracting, analogizing, and manipulative or body skill. Poets and writers pattern genres on the exemplars of earlier writers; artists make small sketches and maquettes in preparation for their masterpieces; dancers model their choreography on real people; doctors learn procedures by trying them out on specialized mannequins; engineers test their ideas on working models.

Playing
Playing, another integrative tool, particularly builds upon body thinking, empathizing and play-acting, and modeling. Playing involves a childlike joy in the endeavor at hand, irreverence for conventional procedure, purpose, or rules of the “game.” Playfully challenging the limitations of a science, and art, or a technology just to see what happens is one of the most common ways in which novel ideas are born.

Transforming
Transforming is the process of translating between one thinking tool and another, and between imaginative tools and formal languages of communication. In real life we become aware of problems through feelings of mental or bodily discomfort, but we must express the solution logically in words, movements, or equations or as an invention. To move from feelings to communication always requires a series of steps: translating the problem into images or models, searching for patterns through careful observation or experiment, abstracting out the most important material from the patterns and modeling it, then playing around with various solutions using empathizing or play-acting, and finally searching for the language that can best express one’s insight. Transformational thinking weaves the rest of the tools together into a functional whole, correlating each skill with the others in a workable fashion.

Dreaming
Dreams have always fascinated mankind. Dreams are perhaps the ultimate personal creation; for most of us they come from a part so deep within that even we, our conscious selves, have little control over them. But dreams are also the door, the flying carpet if you will, that can lead us to the untapped truths and possibilities that lie within us. With intensive dreamwork, one can easily use this knowledge to enhance creativity.

In this work I have relied upon creative individuals to describe their own thinking and have found that although their skills complement they do not replace other cognitive skills. These tools are intended to cultivate imagination along with intellect; to reinvigorate knowledge of mind with knowledge of body. To reveal in glorious detail the ways in which artists, scientists, dancers, engineers, musicians, and inventors think and create, so that the most unexpected surprises may illuminate all out lives. I invite you to explore these exciting tools and discover your creative perspective. •

© David Jiles. All rights reserved.

About the Author | More by David Jiles
David Jiles, Ph.D. latest book is Creativity and the Secret Language of the Mind (LuLu Press, 2007). In an effort to re-think thinking, he has examined the best creative thinkers e.g. Einstein, Hemingway, Picasso, Tesla, Beethoven and countless others to find common secrets towards creative thinking.

03/20/08