Genius Thinking
Academics have tried to measure the links between intelligence and genius. But intelligence is not enough.
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.
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.
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, they identify new ones.
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 and graphs. In the renowned diagrams of daVinci, 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 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.
GENIUSES PRODUCE.
A distinguishing characteristic of genius is immense productivity. Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents, still the record. Bach wrote a cantata every week, even when he was sick or exhausted. Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music. 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 are geniuses because they form more novel combinations than the merely talented. A genius is constantly combining and recombining ideas, images and thoughts into different combinations in their conscious and subconscious minds.
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.
GENIUSES THINK IN OPPOSITES.
Geniuses are believed to be able to think different thoughts because they could tolerate ambivalence between opposites or two incompatible subjects.
Scientists 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.
GENIUSES THINK METAPHORICALLY.
Aristotle considered metaphor a sign of genius, believing that 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.
GENIUSES PREPARE THEMSELVES FOR CHANCE.
Whenever we attempt to do something and fail, we end up doing something else. As simple as it seems, it‘s the first principle of creative accident. We may ask ourselves why we have failed to do what we intended. 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.
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.
Psychology Today
No comments:
Post a Comment