The Idea: Twelve
methods that will exercise parts of your brain that rarely get it, and
make you more creative and better able to understand the world.
Our minds are like our bodies --
fail to exercise them and they atrophy and break down. We live in an
age of specialization, where we are encouraged to narrow our interests
and our activities, to focus and limit ourselves to doing things at
which we are very competent. So parts of our brain get a lot of
exercise and other parts very little. What's worse, this can actually
narrow our comfort zone, the range of things we enjoy doing or thinking
about and are competent in. Many of our cultural activities and
artefacts: political debates, win/lose competitions, hierarchies, laws,
religions, 'best practices', systematization, uniforms, and monolithic
architecture and design -- all tend to reinforce 'one right answer'
thinking that discourages and ultimately excludes and prevents us from
thinking differently. Even the mental exercises we do as we get older
are designed to stem the loss of analytical skills and
memory rather than broadening
our thinking or our thinking ability. We live in a world of stultifying
sameness and uniformity: physically, ideologically, intellectually.
There is little motivation, little day-to-day need, to exercise the parts and processes of our brain that rarely get a workout.
So how can we learn to broaden our thinking, to think differently? This is not just a matter of critical thinking, creative thinking, 'outside the box' thinking. It is about opening up our minds to the world and all its possibilities. This is one of the essences of the Four Practices of Open Space,
(opening, inviting, making room, acting/realizing). But it is not at
all easy. Our brain structures are actually formed as we grow, to
reflect and accommodate the analytical and 'one right answer' thinking
that constitutes most of what we are taught when we are young.
Broadening our thinking therefore requires us to consciously will
ourselves to think about things, and think in ways, that we are not
comfortable or familiar with. It is counter-cultural, more of an unlearning
than a learning process. It is kind of like the agony that runners who
do not regularly do 'loosening up' exercises must go through to stretch
the muscles that have tightened (shortened, atrophied) in response to
the running routine.
From my own experience, some research and a couple of recent
conversations, here are twelve mental 'stretching' techniques that can
enable you to think differently. Before you consider them, you might
want to ask yourself whether you need them. They are unlikely to make
you happier, though they will probably make you more creative, and more
understanding. Remember, I'm the guy who lives to foment
dissatisfaction, so be forewarned. In no particular order, and with
some likely overlap:
- Meditation:
Or whatever 'stand still and look until you really see' attention
techniques work for you. Anything that can still the noise of the machine in our heads, anything (like Getting Things Done)
that can empty the detailed minutiae of your life from your memory and
make room for something new. Because the better you are at paying
attention, the more likely you are to be able to see and appreciate
other perspectives.
- Reconnect With Your Senses: Do exercises
that increase your awareness and the sensitivity of your senses. Most
of what you learn is perceptual rather than conceptual, and you can
learn an astonishing amount by just becoming more aware of nature, and
of yourself, and of the connection between your senses and the senses
of all life on Earth.
- Reconnect With Your Intuition: We
are taught to distrust it, but for three million years it informed us
about the world and how to deal with it successfully and happily. It's
all there encoded
in your DNA -- how to live, how to handle any situation, what to do.
The perspective you can get when your intuition provides one viewpoint
on a situation and your 'book learning' another is remarkable. It's
like suddenly seeing stereo when all your life you've only seen with
one eye. Instant depth perception.
- Analogies and Metaphors: "Science is Metaphor" said Timothy Leary. Analogies and metaphors allow
you to 're-see' something abstract as something concrete, something
conceptual as perceptual. Lakoff points out that "We cannot think just
anything - only what our embodied brains permit", and analogies and
metaphors permit us to think things we probably otherwise couldn't. My
recent "If the Shoe Were On the Other Foot" article was an example of this.
- Conversations and Interviews:
A wonderful enabler for thinking differently is the shared context that
comes from conversations and interviews. Several of my most popular
articles have been conversations with myself or with other people,
because they help people understand my thought process much better than
analytical discourse. Like everything natural, they are inefficient but
extremely effective. Interviews work the same way. Face-to-face and
recorded conversations and interviews, if they are natural and probing
and improvisational, are even better, because you learn more of the
participants' worldview from the vocal nuances and body language.
- Synthesis, Distillation and Restatement:
When you recapitulate and condense what you've read or heard, you force
yourself to use your own words to say what they had to say. You can
learn as much from this about their way of thinking, and your own, as
you can from the reading or listening experience itself.
- Reading (and Writing) Fiction: The
most important character in stories is the narrator, not the
protagonist. While empathy with the protagonist will keep you reading,
it is from understanding the perspective of the narrator, and
contrasting it with your own, that you learn the most. Here as an
illustration is an excerpt from Mark Haddon's wonderful book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (thank you to the reader who recommended this book to me) -- told from the point of view of an autistic child::
And then I thought about how for
a long time scientists were puzzled by the fact that the sky is dark at
night, even though there are billions of stars in the universe and
there must be stars in every direction you look, so that the sky should
be full of starlight because there is very little in the way to stop
the light from reaching Earth. Then they worked out that the universe
was expanding, that the stars were all rushing away from one another
after the Big Bang, and the further the stars were away from us, the
faster they were moving, some of them nearly as fast as the speed of
light, which is why their light never reached us.
I like this fact. It is something you can work out in your own mind
just by looking at the sky above your head at night and thinking
without having to ask anyone. And when the universe has finished
exploding, all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been
thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all
begin to fall towards the centre of the universe again. And then there
will be nothing to stop us from seeing all the stars in the world
because they will all be moving towards us, gradually faster and
faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon because
when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just
the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.
Except that no one will see this because there will be no people left
on Earth to see it. They will probably have become extinct by then. And
even if there are people still in existence, they will not see it
because the light will be so bright and hot that everyone will be
burned to death, even if they live in tunnels.
- Psychoactive and Other Drugs: They work for some people, and have for thousands of years. Nope, don't have any on me.
- Learning a New Language: Linguists
say all human languages are so similar than an alien would see them as
indistinguishable, but anyone who doesn't see how a language entrenches
cultural preconceptions, ideas, and ways of thinking probably has never
mastered a second one. The vocabulary, the syntax, the way in which it
is ordered, the nuances of meaning, all push you to new ways of
thinking.
- Learning Something Outside Your Comfort Zone: If
you're an artist, learn about String Theory. If you're a scientist,
learn about the aesthetics of music. The more novel and uncomfortable
and strange it is, the more it will liberate your calcified brain.
- Do Impulsive and Serendipitous Things:
Any activity that won't let you plan or anticipate, but which instead
forces you to perceive and learn quickly and pay attention and react
and live in the moment, will get you outside the centre of your own
universe and help you see and think differently. And if you can't get
yourself to do impulsive and serendipitous things, then at least read
impulsively and serendipitously. Free the genie.
- Collaboration: Not just coordination or cooperation, true collaboration.
When you have produced a truly collective work-product, you have in
many ways got inside the heads of your fellow collaborators, and that
will change you forever.
Courses in lateral thinking try to teach you how to identify and set
aside the obstacles in your own head (biases and preconceptions,
inability to concentrate or imagine, entrenched ways of thinking, fear,
conservatism, ignorance) that prevent you from thinking in truly novel
ways. These courses offer more exercises to show you how to train
yourself to think differently. But ultimately, like any difficult and
important skill, the only way to achieve mastery is to practice,
practice, practice. The twelve techniques above are, at least for most
of us, fun and engaging ways to do that.
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