To see things differently than other people, the most effective solution is to bombard the brain with things it has never encountered before.
- Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently by Gregory Berns
The secret is to get into the habit of feeding your mind with unusual and diverse input.
If ideas are about connecting the dots, you’ll obviously have a more valuable mind if you’re storing more dots in it.
- How to get to great ideas by Dave Briss
Curiosity is the foundation of creative thought. It is what fills the mind with raw pieces of knowledge that we can shape into something new.
- How to get to great ideas by Dave Briss
Information is valuable only when it stays in your head, so you can use it when you need it.
- How to get to great ideas by Dave Briss
It seems almost obvious that breakthroughs in perception do not come from simply staring at an object and thinking harder about it.
Breakthroughs come from a perceptual system that is confronted with something that it doesn’t know how to interpret. Unfamiliarity forces the brain to discard its usual categories of perception and create new ones.
- Gregory Berns
They key to “think differently” is to perceive things differently, through the lenses of a trailblazer. And to see things through these lenses, you must force your brain to make connections it otherwise would have missed.
In order for your imaginations to operate at peak levels, however, those nuerons have to fire at maximum output. So, bombard your brain with new experiences.
Use analogies and metaphors to initiate a creative process and to think differently about a problem. By finding the similarities between two things that are unalike, your brain makes new and sometimes profound connections. Using analogies is an effective technique to help listeners understand new concepts. Seeing something novel in a familiar light allows him to make creative connections.
Keep in mind that your brain will fight you every step of the way. By keeping in mind, you can understand to overcome it.