Cultural blocks

1) Taboos

Ping-pong ball exercise

Taboos can remove entire families of solutions from the ready grasp of the problem-solver. This is not a tirade against taboos. Taboos usually are directed against acts that would cause displeasure to certain members of a society. They therefore play a positive cultural role. However, if the acts that would offend is imagined rather than carried out, the acts are not harmful. Therefore, when working on problems within the privacy of your own mind, you do not have to be concerned with the violation of taboos.

2) Fantasy and refection are a waste of time, lazy, even crazy

3) Playfulness is for children only

Fantasy, reflection, and mental playfulness are essential to good conceptualization. These are properties that seem to exist in children, and then unfortunately are to some extent socialized out of people.

Many psychologists have concluded that children are more creative than adults. One explanation for this is that the adult is so much more aware of practical constraints. Another explanation is that our culture trains mental playfulness, fantasy, and reflectiveness out of people by placing more stress on the value of channeled mental activity. We spend more time attempting to derive a better world directly from what we have than in imagining a better world and what it would be.

4) Problem-solving is a serious business and humor is out of place

Three domains of creativity:

a) Artistic originality (the "ah!" reaction)

b) Scientific discovery (the "aha!" reaction)

c) Comic inspriation (the "haha!" reaction)

One of the essentials of creative thinking is to bring together ideas that are not ordinarily combined.

Humor is present in all sorts of ways and is important, because not only is it inseparable from new and original solutions, but decreases perception of risk.

5) Reason, logic, numbers, utility, practicality are good; feeling, intuition, qualitative judgement, pleasure are bad

Effective conceptualization requires the problem-solver to be able to incorporate all of these characteristics-the use of reason and logic, as well as intuition and feeling.

6) Any problem can be solved a scientific thinking and lots of money

Left-handed and right-handed thinking.

Reaching for knowledge with the right hand is science. Reaching for knowledge with left hand is art.

An emphasis on either type of thinking is a cultural block.

Science depends both upon logical controlled progress (right-handed) and breakthroughs (often somewhat left-handed).

Primary creativity: creativeness which comes out of the unconscious, and which is the source of new discovery of ideas which depart from what exists at this point.

Secondary creativity: I am used to thinking of two kinds of science, and two kinds of technology. Science can be defined, if you want to, as a technique whereby uncreative people can create and discover, by working along with a lot of other people, by standing upon the shoulders of people who have come before them, by beiing cautious and careful, and so on. That I will call secondary creativeness and secondary science.

7) Everyone should be like me

8) Cyber is better

9) Tradition is preferable to change