This article is
provided as an example of different thinking styles by humans to wonder
about Bonobo intelligence... is the passing down of human speech of
human speech by a female bonobo to her offspring explained by looking at
'outliers' of human thinking?
How Geniuses Think
Thumbnail descriptions of the thinking strategies used by creative geniuses.
Published on September 29, 2011 by
Michael Michalko in
Creative Thinkering
How
do geniuses come up with ideas? What is common to the thinking style
that produced "Mona Lisa," as well as the one that spawned the theory of
relativity? What characterizes the thinking strategies of the
Einsteins, Edisons, daVincis, Darwins, Picassos, Michelangelos,
Galileos, Freuds, and Mozarts of history? What can we learn from them?
For
years, scholars and researchers have tried to study genius by giving
its vital statistics, as if piles of data somehow illuminated genius. In
his 1904 study of genius, Havelock Ellis noted that most geniuses are
fathered by men older than 30; had mothers younger than 25 and were
usually sickly as children. Other scholars reported that many were
celibate (Descartes), others were fatherless (Dickens) or motherless
(Darwin). In the end, the piles of data illuminated nothing.
Academics also tried to measure the links between
intelligence
and genius. But intelligence is not enough. Marilyn vos Savant, whose
IQ of 228 is the highest ever recorded, has not exactly contributed much
to science or art. She is, instead, a question-and-answer columnist for
Parade magazine.
Run-of-the-mill physicists have IQs much higher than Nobel Prize winner
Richard Feynman, who many acknowledge to be the last great American
genius (his IQ was a merely respectable 122).
Genius
is not about scoring 1600 on the SATs, mastering fourteen languages at
the age of seven, finishing Mensa exercises in record time, having an
extraordinarily high I.Q., or even about being smart.
After
considerable debate initiated by J. P. Guilford, a leading psychologist
who called for a scientific focus on creativity in the sixties,
psychologists reached the conclusion that
creativity
is not the same as intelligence. An individual can be far more creative
than he or she is intelligent, or far more intelligent than creative.
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 our 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, and work within a clearly
defined direction towards the solution of the problem. Because of the
soundness of the steps based on past experiences, we become arrogantly
certain of the correctness of our conclusion.
In contrast,
geniuses think productively, not reproductively. When confronted with a problem, they ask
"How
many different ways can I look at it?", "How can I rethink the way I
see it?", and "How many different ways can I solve it?" instead of "What have I been taught by someone else on how to solve this?"
They
tend to come up with many different responses, some of which are
unconventional and possibly unique. A productive thinker would say that
there are many different ways to express "thirteen" and many different
ways to halve something. Following are some examples.
6.5
13 = 1 and 3
THIR TEEN = 4
XIII = 11 and 2
XIII = 8
(Note:
As you can see, in addition to six and one half, by expressing 13 in
different ways and halving it in different ways, one could say one-half
of thirteen is 6.5, or 1 and 3, or 4, or 11 and 2, or 8, and so on.)
With
productive thinking, one generates as many alternative approaches as
one can. You consider the least obvious as well as the most likely
approaches. It is the willingness to explore all approaches that is
important, even after one has found a promising one. Einstein was once
asked what the difference was between him and the average person. He
said that if you asked the average person to find a needle in the
haystack, the person would stop when he or she found a needle. He, on
the other hand, would tear through the entire haystack looking for all
the possible needles.)
How do creative geniuses
generate so many alternatives and conjectures? Why are so many of their
ideas so rich and varied? How do they produce the "blind" variations
that lead to the original and novel? A growing cadre of scholars are
offering evidence that one can characterize the way geniuses think. By
studying the notebooks, correspondence, conversations and ideas of the
world's greatest thinkers, they have teased out particular common
thinking strategies and styles of thought that enabled geniuses to
generate a prodigious variety of novel and original ideas.
STRATEGIES
Following
are thumbnail descriptions of strategies that are common to the
thinking styles of creative geniuses in science, art and industry
throughout history.
GENIUSES LOOK AT PROBLEMS IN MANY DIFFERENT WAYS.
Genius
often comes from finding a new perspective that no one else has taken.
Leonardo da Vinci believed that to gain knowledge about the form of
problems, you begin by learning how to restructure it in many different
ways.
He felt the first way he looked at a problem was too biased toward his usual way of seeing things.
He would restructure his problem by looking at it from one perspective and move to another perspective and still another.
With each move, his understanding would deepen and he would begin to understand the essence of the problem.
Einstein's theory of relativity is, in essence, a description of the interaction between different perspectives.
Freud's analytical methods were designed to find details that did not fit with traditional perspectives in order to find a completely new point of view.
In
order to creatively solve a problem, the thinker must abandon the
initial approach that stems from past experience and re-conceptualize
the problem.
By
not settling with one perspective, geniuses do not merely solve
existing problems, like inventing an environmentally-friendly fuel. They
identify new ones.
It does not take a genius to analyze dreams; it required Freud to ask in the first place what meaning dreams carry from our psyche.
GENIUSES MAKE THEIR THOUGHTS VISIBLE.
The
explosion of creativity in the Renaissance was intimately tied to the
recording and conveying of a vast knowledge in a parallel language; a
language of drawings, graphs and diagrams — as, for instance, in the
renowned diagrams of daVinci and Galileo.
Galileo
revolutionized science by making his thought visible with diagrams,
maps, and drawings while his contemporaries used conventional
mathematical and verbal approaches.
Once
geniuses obtain a certain minimal verbal facility, they seem to develop
a skill in visual and spatial abilities which give them the flexibility
to display information in different ways.
When
Einstein had thought through a problem, he always found it necessary to
formulate his subject in as many different ways as possible, including
diagrammatically.
He had a very visual mind. He
thought in terms of visual and spatial forms, rather than thinking along
purely mathematical or verbal lines of reasoning.
In
fact, he believed that words and numbers, as they are written or
spoken, did not play a significant role in his thinking process.
One
of the most complete descriptions of Einstein's philosophy of science
was found in a letter to his friend, Maurice Solovine.
In
the letter, Einstein explained the difficulty of attempting to use
words to explain his philosophy of science, because as he said, he
thinks about such things schematically.
The letter started with a
simple drawing consisting of
(1) straight line representing E (experiences), which are given to us, and
(2) A (axioms), which are situated above the line but were not directly linked to the line.
Note: This
diagram is an approximation. Einstein's original sketch is in the
Albert Einstein Archives, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Einstein explained that psychologically the A rests upon the E.
There exists, however, no logical path from E to A, but only an intuitive connection, which is always subject to revocation.
From axioms, one can deduce certain deductions (S), which deductions may lay claim to being correct.
In essence, Einstein was saying that it is the theory that determines what we observe.
Einstein
argued that scientific thinking is speculative, and only in its end
product does it lead to a system that is characterized as "logical
simplicity."
Unable to satisfactorily
describe his thoughts in words, Einstein made his thought visible by
diagramming his philosophy's main features and characteristics.
GENIUSES PRODUCE.
A distinguishing characteristic of genius is immense productivity.
Thomas
Edison held 1,093 patents, still the record. He 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.
Bach wrote a cantata every week, even when he was sick or exhausted. Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music.
Einstein is best known for his paper on relativity, but he published 248 other papers.
T.
S. Elliot's numerous drafts of "The Waste Land" constitute a jumble of
good and bad passages that eventually was turned into a masterpiece.
In a study of 2,036 scientists throughout history, Dean Kean Simonton of the University of California, Davis found that
the most respected produced not only great works, but also more "bad" ones.
Out of their massive quantity of work came quality. Geniuses produce. Period.
GENIUSES MAKE NOVEL COMBINATIONS.
Dean
Keith Simonton, in his 1989 book Scientific Genius suggests that
geniuses are geniuses because they form more novel combinations than the
merely talented.
His theory has etymology behind it:
cogito — "I think — originally connoted "shake together": intelligo the
root of "intelligence" means to "select among."
This is a
clear early intuition about the utility of permitting ideas and thoughts
to randomly combine with each other and the utility of selecting from
the many the few to retain.
Like
the highly playful child with a pailful of Legos, a genius is
constantly combining and recombining ideas, images and thoughts into
different combinations in their conscious and subconscious minds.
Consider Einstein's equation, E=mc2. Einstein did not invent the concepts of energy, mass, or speed of light.
Rather,
by combining these concepts in a novel way, he was able to look at the
same world as everyone else and see something different.
The
laws of heredity on which the modern science of genetics is based are
the results of Gregor Mendel who combined mathematics and biology to
create a new science.
GENIUSES FORCE RELATIONSHIPS.
If
one particular style of thought stands out about creative genius, it is
the ability to make juxtapositions between dissimilar subjects.
Call it a facility to connect the unconnected that enables them to see things to which others are blind.
Leonardo da Vinci forced a relationship between the sound of a bell and a stone hitting water.
This enabled him to make the connection that sound travels in waves.
In
1865, F. A. Kekule' intuited the shape of the ring-like benzene
molecule by forcing a relationship with a dream of a snake biting its
tail.
Samuel Morse was stumped trying to figure out how to produce a telegraphic signal b enough to be received coast to coast.
One
day he saw tied horses being exchanged at a relay station and forced a
connection between relay stations for horses and b signals.
The solution was to give the traveling signal periodic boosts of power.
Nickla
Tesla forced a connection between the setting sun and a motor that made
the AC motor possible by having the motor's magnetic field rotate
inside the motor just as the sun (from our perspective) rotates.
GENIUSES THINK IN OPPOSITES.
Physicist
and philosopher David Bohm believed geniuses were able to think
different thoughts because they could tolerate ambivalence between
opposites or two incompatible subjects.
Dr. Albert
Rothenberg, a noted researcher on the creative process, identified this
ability in a wide variety of geniuses including Einstein, Mozart,
Edison, Pasteur, Joseph Conrad, and Picasso in his 1990 book
The Emerging Goddess: The Creative Process in Art, Science and Other Fields.
Physicist
Niels Bohr believed that if you held opposites together, then you
suspend your thought and your mind moves to a new level. The suspension of thought allows an intelligence beyond thought to act and create a new form. The swirling of opposites creates the conditions for a new point of view to bubble freely from your mind.
Bohr's ability to imagine light as both a particle and a wave led to his conception of the principle
of complementarity.
Thomas
Edison's invention of a practical system of lighting involved combining
wiring in parallel circuits with high resistance filaments in his
bulbs, two things that were not considered possible by conventional
thinkers, in fact were not considered at all because of an assumed
incompatibility.
Because Edison could tolerate the ambivalence
between two incompatible things, he could see the relationship that led
to his breakthrough.
GENIUSES THINK METAPHORICALLY.
Aristotle
considered metaphor a sign of genius, believing that the individual who
had the capacity to perceive resemblances between two separate areas of
existence and link them together was a person of special gifts.
If
unlike things are really alike in some ways, perhaps, they are so in
others. Alexander Graham Bell observed the comparison between the inner
workings of the ear and the movement of a stout piece of membrane to
move steel and conceived the telephone.
Thomas Edison
invented the phonograph, in one day, after developing an analogy between
a toy funnel and the motions of a paper man and sound vibrations.
Underwater construction was made possible by observing how ship worms
tunnel into timber by first constructing tubes.
Einstein
derived and explained many of his abstract principles by drawing
analogies with everyday occurrences such as rowing a boat or standing on
a platform while a train passed by.
GENIUSES PREPARE THEMSELVES FOR CHANCE.
Whenever we attempt to do something and fail, we end up
doing something else. As simplistic as this statement may seem, it is
the first principle of creative accident. We may ask ourselves why we
have failed to do what we intended, and this is the reasonable, expected
thing to do.
But the creative accident provokes a
different question: What have we done? Answering that question in a
novel, unexpected way is the essential creative act. It is not luck, but
creative insight of the highest order.
Alexander Fleming
was not the first physician to notice the mold formed on an exposed
culture while studying deadly bacteria. A less gifted physician would
have trashed this seemingly irrelevant event but Fleming noted it as
"interesting" and wondered if it had potential. This "interesting"
observation led to penicillin which has saved millions of lives.
Thomas
Edison, while pondering how to make a carbon filament, was mindlessly
toying with a piece of putty, turning and twisting it in his fingers,
when he looked down at his hands, the answer hit him between the eyes:
twist the carbon, like rope.
B. F. Skinner emphasized a
first principle of scientific methodologists: when you find something
interesting, drop everything else and study it. Too many fail to answer
opportunity's knock at the door because they have to finish some
preconceived plan.
Creative geniuses do not wait for the gifts of chance; instead, they actively seek the accidental discovery.
SUMMARY
Recognizing
the common thinking strategies of creative geniuses and applying them
will make you more creative in your work and personal life.
Creative geniuses are geniuses because they know "how" to think, instead of "what" to think.
Sociologist
Harriet Zuckerman published an interesting study of the Nobel Prize
winners who were living in the United States in 1977. She discovered
that six of Enrico Fermi's students won the prize. Ernst Lawrence and
Niels Bohr each had four. J. J. Thompson and Ernest Rutherford between
them trained seventeen Nobel laureates. This was no accident. It is
obvious that these Nobel laureates were not only creative in their own
right, but were also able to teach others how to think creatively.
Zuckerman's subjects testified that their most influential masters
taught them different thinking styles and strategies rather than what to
think.
Michael's website:
www.creativethinking.net
