Thinking Creatively

Isobel Fletcher de Tellez, London,UK

Edward de Bono wrote: 'On the whole, education does a poor job at equipping people to think.' There are occasions when it seems that the better 'educated' a person is, the less he is able to think. Specialised knowledge, facts, and the ability to quote opinions, even in interesting combinations, are not at all the same as skill in thinking.

Many writers and commentators have isolated typical behaviour of creative people - people who think. Some of their parameters are worth considering in the light of teacher and learner roles. Here are some relevant ideas for you to apply to your own situation.

'Creative people extrapolate from the known to the unknown'
This is creativity by association - imagining how what we have might be transformed into what we don't have but need. If Guttenberg had not helped with the wine harvest... If Newton had not sat down under his apple tree...If Archimedes had not taken a bath...

'Creative people see two possibilities in one thing.'
Books on Psychology abound in pictures that can be seen several ways: the old hag or the beautiful young woman, heads facing one another or the outline of a vase. These are referred to as 'optical illusions' but in fact there is no illusion or falsity at all - just two valid possibilities coexistent in one image.The Dutch artist Escher drew people climbing or descending one staircase that appears to go up in one direction and down in another. His two-dimensional images enable the perspective of three to be seen at one and the same time, with a single line acting as an ambiguous reference for either of two interpretations.

In language, puns make the fusion of two ideas into a joke and metaphors reveal the similarities between disparate things. For Shelley, poets are the supreme example of the creative thinkers:

'Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension.' (A Defence of Poetry 1821)

Creative people find similarity in disparity
This is perhaps the converse of the above. Just as a mathematical mind readily sees the determining factor in a series, a creative mind can find some relationship or common feature between any two or more objects.

The ninteenth century poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote with enthusiasm of this ability, which he equated with the Imagination:

'This power reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea with the image; the sense of novelty and freshness,with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possesssion, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter... (Biographia Literaria 1815)

Creative people do not strive after their creation.'
The 'Magic Eye' pictures that were popular a few years ago require a relaxation of the eye muscles to 'see' another picture beyond the pattern - not being distracted by the obvious, but allowing something further to emerge. People who cannot let go of the usual control of their eyes cannot see the further image. Similarly, people who hold inflexibly to tenets or beliefs that they have long held prevent new arrangements occuring.

Inactivity may be uncreative or it may be an incubation period that enables fruit to ripen, bread to rise, or wine to mature. Douglas Adams, an acclaimed comedy writer, apparently took up to five baths a day as displacement activity rather than sit down and write his material for radio. But when he did sit down to write he produced masterpieces.

I was explaining to a friend that my father had been working on a machine for the past year. He was present and he added "Twenty one years, actually."

The poet John Keats wrote: 'It is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it - and this leads me on to another axiom. That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.' (Letters)

He also wrote an Ode to Indolence!

'Creative people can tolerate ambiguity'
Seeing the two images in the one means that you must be able to switch back and forth at will and not let the coexistence of the two images trouble you. This creative tension, like dramatic tension in a play or suspense in a novel, is in itself a fertile source of creativity - holding both the original and a parody in the mind at once; seeing both images in the 'optical illusion' as valid as each other ; acknowledging the literal and the metaphorical meaning at the same time.

In Algebra and Geometry one can get quite a long way with several unknown quantities by rearranging the known and unknown values. In Logic, too, ideas can be manipulated using unknown constants but you must tolerate a long period of not knowing before you arrive at further knowledge by elimination and deduction. In all these cases, the answer seems impossible to find at the beginning , but eventually, after a period of imperfect but emerging information, the answer is self-evident.

'Creative people do not accept the Yes/No duality'
Western philosophy and logic has developed the norm of assuming that what is not right is wrong, what is not black is white, whoever is not guilty is innocent. Edward de Bono (better known for the concept of Lateral Thinking) wrote a book on the difficulties of this approach. He posits a term PO as an interim possibility between yes and no - that state again of positive tension where more than one possibility is allowed equal weight. "PO is designed to deal with ways of looking at things and with changing these ways to find better ones. PO has a creative function, not a judgement function like the yes/no system. PO is used to alter and change concept packages, not to process them."

'Creative people find new things in the old.'
There is nothing new under the sun. It is the human lot to improvise with what is available on Earth in nature. A violin was once a tree, and a cat and horse lent parts of their anatomy to complete the instrument. Both a Chippendale desk and a beer barrel were also trees where birds built their nests and spiders ran along the branches. On inspection, most new things reveal themselves to be compilations of raw materials or cunning adaptations.

The life-saving instruments for calculating longitude made by John Harrison in the eighteenth century were adaptations of the clock. It was his adaptation, rather than one of the many crack-pot machines that used direct astronomical measurement, that yielded results. Anything new will come out of something that already exists - and probably something that you already know.

Listen to any eight year old telling 'Knock Knock' jokes and you will see how readily the emerging intellect revels in ambiguity, needs and enjoys seeing one thing as another. It is by building on this creativity that the education of the child will flourish.