YOU'RE SMARTER
THAN YOU THINK
by Dudley Lynch
---------------
* POLICE IN a midwestern city were stumped. A fast-moving
burglary team kept breaking into clothing stores, stripping the
garment racks like hungry piranhas and slipping away before
police could respond to the alarm systems. Was there any way to
stop them-or at least slow them down?
Suddenly, one detective had an idea. "Alternate your hanger
hooks," he told the city's merchants. "Turn one toward the wall,
and the next toward the aisle-all the way down the rack." When
the next alarm went off, police caught the hapless thieves still
removing garments one at a time.
* An old frame church in New England stood in desperate
need of exterior paint, so the minister recruited a half-dozen
volunteers from his congregation. But he couldn't get them to
show up for the job-until he had a devilish inspiration. He
divided the building into six segments, then, in bold letters
three feet high, painted a volunteer's name on each segment.
Shortly thereafter, each recruit dutifully arrived to paint his
segment, fulfil his pledge-and avoid all that public notoriety.
* Not long ago, when I was pushing my wife's stalled car
with my own, our bumpers locked. With a strong friend, I tried
to bounce the bumpers loose. No go. Next I tried a jack. That
didn't work either. Then my wife suggested backing my car up on
the curb and leaving her smaller car at street level. Eureka!
The cars immediately sprang apart.
We've all met people like this, with an uncanny knack for
solving problems, and we wonder how they do it. They don't
appear to be geniuses;yet, somehow, they think differently from
the rest of us.
Over the last 15 or 20 years, social scientists have been
taking their first serious look at this power of creative
thinking, and have written more than 1500 doctoral theses and
2000 books on it. On available evidence, scholars now believe
creativity is far more common than previously thought. In fact,
most researchers claim there is a spark of genius in each of us,
waiting to be freed.
Here, from experts in several fields, are five tips for
freeing your creativity potential:
Rekindle childhood curiosity. A man I know spent an hour trying to rescue his young son's pet frog from the bottom of a narrow shaft on their property. He used a long stick, then a
rope with a loop at the end, then an open-ended can on a string.
Nothing worked, and he finally gave up. Minutes later, his five-
year-old son appeared at the front door-with the frog! The boy
had hit on the idea of flooding the shaft with a garden hose and
floating the frog to the surface.
In the wild kingdom of their imagination, children are
forever coming up with creative solutions. Unlike adults,
children have an open pipeline to the seat of creativity: the
right hemisphere of the brain. But when they start school, the
"left brain"-the seat of logic-begins falling victim to the
fears, rules, obligations and concerns of the adult world and,
before long, imagination is in retreat.
What sets the creative person off from the rest of us is
that he or she has somehow managed to hold onto a childlike
curiosity and an unbounded sense of creative possibility. To
help rekindle your own curiosity, start by widening your horizons-especially your reading horizons. Ray Bradbury, a
prolific writer of science fiction, stuffs his mind with
everything he can lay his hands on-essays, poetry, plays,
lithographs, music. "You have to feed yourself information every
day," he says. "When I was a kid, I sneaked over to the grown-up
section in the library. Now, to make sure I'm fully informed,
I often go into the children's section."
Ask the right question. For months, a group of YMCA Indian Guides had planned a "father-and-son" weekend in the wilds, where they hoped to make plaster casts of animal tracks. When the weekend finally arrived, it poured rain, and no one could go out. Then one imaginative leader had an idea. Why not use the plaster to make casts of each father's hand, along with that of his son. "It was one of the best things we ever did," a YMCA official recalls. "It saved the weekend."
The idea would never have developed if the leader who thought of it had stayed with the obvious question:"How can we make plaster casts in the rain?" They couldn't, of course. The
"right" question was: "How can we have fun with the plaster we've
bought?"
Dr. Frederic Flach, New York psychiatrist and leading
authority on creativity, says that restating the question can
often be the first step toward discovering the solution. "Instead of asking, 'Should I get a divorce?'" suggests Dr.
Flach, "you might ask, 'Does it make more sense to be on my own?'
Similarly, instead of wondering,'Should I quit my job?' you might
ask,'To what degree does the work I am doing reflect my basic
interests?'"
Angelo M Biondi, executive director of the Creative
Education Foundation, likes questions that begin, "In what ways
might I...?" He recently offered advice to a friend in business.
Head of a small company, the friend was debating whether or not
to fire an unproductive assistant. A better question, Biondi
suggested, might be:"In what ways might I improve this employee's
performance?" That led to questions about why the employee was
having trouble;the employer soon discovered that his assistant
had marital problems that were diverting him from his work. A
family counsellor saved the marriage-and the man's job.
Put ideas together. More often than not, creativity is the spark that's struck from pairing two or more existing ideas. SES ASSOCIATES, a Cambridge, Mass., "think tank," was asked by a
major food manufacturer to find a better way to package potato
chips. So SES associated two ideas:potato chips and wet leaves.
Why leaves? Because the first question the SES creative types
asked was:"What is the best packaging solution you ever saw?"
Someone said the bagging of wet leaves. "Try to shove a load of
dry leaves into a bag, and you have a tough time," he explained.
"You are packing air, just the way the potato-chip manufacturers
do. But if the leaves are wet, you can pack a lot of them in."
Good idea, the researchers thought, and they tried packing
wet potato chips. But it didn't work;when the chips dried in the
package, they crumbled. That led to the development of a tougher
chip that, when wet, could be pressed into a uniform shape.
Today, this product is recognized by millions of Americans as
the potato chips that come in a can instead of a bag.
William Gordon, president of SES, stresses that such
creativity cannot happen without "the emotional willingness to
risk failure." In other words, even the craziest of ideas should
be considered, since every truly original idea may look a little
crazy at first. Thomas Edison, a man with 1093 American patents
in his name, once confessed: "I'll try anything-even Limburger
cheese!"
Sleep on it. When faced with an intractable problem, try putting it completely out of your conscious mind;let it incubate.
At the moment you least expect it, a creative solution may pop
up.
In 1865, German chemist Friedrich Kekule fell asleep puzzling over the structure of the benzene molecule. Kekule dreamed of thousands of atoms dancing before his eyes, some forming patterns and twisting like snakes. Suddenly one snake grabbed its own tail. In a flash, Kekule awakened with the idea of a losed-chain structure of benzene- a brilliant scientific discovery.
Others have also hit on their best ideas while their mental
engines were idling. It was said of Mozart, for example, that
his music wrote itself while he travelled, strolled or dozed.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dennis Gabor says that, like
Einstein before him, he gets his best ideas while shaving. Then
there was seven-year-old Susie, whose problem was simply that the
braided string belt had been pulled out of her pajama bottoms.
How on earth, she wondered, can I ever thread it back through
again? She put the problem out of conscious mind. A short time
later, as she was getting an ice cube out of the freezer, an idea
suddenly hit her. She could wet the belt, freeze it in a circle,
then guide it through the pajama opening. It worked!
Practice. Like jogging or speaking a new language, using creative techniques may feel awkward until old habits have been unlearned. To help, try some of the following creative
calisthenics. For example:Write three-word phrases beginning
with each letter of the alphabet ("Buy better bargains" or "Tell
tall tales"). Devise a new, witty definition for these words:
a bore, a politician, an expert, a grapefruit, a revolution,
hope, patience, lust. Make a list of five blue foods, or 15 ways
to use a feather, or six new names for the United States of
America. Or try this: think how it might feel to be say, a
stapler, or a Volkswagen, or a fish. Then write down what you
think.
Most of all, develop and practice a "passion for living."
Pablo Picasso marvelled at everything. "I look at flies, at
flowers, at leaves and trees around me," he said. "I let my mind
drift at ease, just like a boat in the current. Sooner or later,
it is caught by something."
By being alert to what is around you, your mind and
imagination can't help but begin to stir in new, mysterious ways.
"The larger the island of knowledge," said the late clergyman-
scholar, Ralph Sockman, "the longer the shoreline of mystery
surrounding it." And, somewhere behind that shoreline, pushing
it out toward the horizon, is our power of creativity.(#)
SIMPLIFY! SIMPLIFY! by Thoreau
GOING HOME by Hamill
THE ART OF PAYING A COMPLIMENT by Adams
PUT YOUR BEST VOICE FORWARD by Price
THAT VITAL SPARK--HOPE by Whitman
BUT WHAT USE IS IT? by Asimov
NO WONDER by Sangster
MAKE AN APPOINTMENT WITH YOURSELF by Finkel
HEARING IS A WAY OF TOUCHING by Lagemann
THE SPECIAL JOY OF SUPER-SLOW READING by Piddington
HOW TO SELL AN IDEA by Wheeler
I'M A COMPULSIVE LIST-MAKER by Bluestone
HOW TO RELAX by Kennedy
THE ONE SURE WAY TO HAPPINESS by Callwood
TOO MUCH SEX, TOO LITTLE JOY by May
HOW TO BE A BETTER PARENT by Homan
FIVE WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR LUCK by Gunther
THERE IS SAFE WAY TO DRINK by Chafetz
TAKE MUSIC INSTEAD OF A MILTOWN by Marek
VIEW FEATURE RECIPE
ENTER CUISINE CORNER
Under construction but accessible too.
(Recommended)
ENTER CHILDREN'S ROOM
Specially adapted short stories for young people of all ages, from all over the world, by Amy Friedman.
(Very good fables.)
ASCEND TO THIRD FLOOR
Heavy stuff that were lifted by several decades to its present location, ZDS' third floor.
You can't find writers who can still keep their distance from their topics like these two.
(Highly recommended for the philosophical. Not too easy to digest in one sitting. Anyway, it's better than tons of history and anthropology books.)
DESCEND TO FIRST FLOOR
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