This is something that i had been thinking over and studying for a while. I felt that we don't really assimilate much knowledge in the current educational system. You went to school and listened to your teachers because you had to. The focus was and still is, on getting through with good grades and getting a job. Something has to set off the spark in you towards real comprehension. While the stimulus maybe external and momentary (like that one teacher who made the subject interesting) the follow-through and continuation has to be from within i.e. self-motivating. As the saying from martial-arts goes;
"to show one the right direction and the right path, oral instructions from a master are
necessary but mastery of the art comes only from one's own incessant self-cultivation".
If you look at geniuses/scientists/philosophers they all have a unique way of looking at things. They come up with original creative thought by a deep understanding of concepts and the ability to see inter-relationships among them which others have missed. What techniques/modes of thinking can we employ to attain such understanding ?
- Have a full and deep understanding of concepts at an intuitive level before you represent/manipulate them using symbolic logic (i.e. mathematics). Symbols without an understanding of what they represent at a conceptual level create more confusion than clarification. This is the heart of abstraction.
- Look at a concept from different perspectives and through each of them imagine what other concepts they maybe related to. No concept exists in isolation. They always exist in a network of related concepts.
- So what is a concept? It is an abstraction of a class of "things" (the class can be a set of n or 1 "thing"). The "thing" itself can be material or purely made up in mind. As long as it can have a distinct identity (i.e. can be separately held in mind from others) it is a valid "thing".
- Eg 1: A single apple fruit is a thing. However we do not usually care about one single apple but deal with the whole class of apples. We identify certain properties of all apples like color, texture, taste, etc. and abstract it out as the concept "apple".
- Eg 2: As another example i can imagine the concept of "gravitational force". I cannot see or feel it but can think of it as distinct from any other force and can calculate/measure it.
- How do we define/model/understand a concept?
- Think visually. Imagination is the single greatest tool we have. Pictorially imagining something is key to understanding it. This needs to be practiced regularly. By imagining it try to feel the concept as a sensation. This feeling is what cements retention in the mind.
- Use analogies to define a concept. The mind has difficulty with abstractions and concepts for which there are no physical world things. But by using analogy to real world things the concept becomes more concrete in our mind and thus starts taking a distinct identity of its own and becoming clearer. Also since concepts always exist in a network of other concepts inter-relationships between them become visible too.
- Use some symbolic notation (eg: mathematics, pictures, graphs etc.) to represent concepts and manipulate them. This concretizes the idea further and helps communicating it to others.
The above, in my opinion, IS the secret to creativity.
