Lateral Thinking For Creativity and Innovation Using A Technique Called REST

Lateral Thinking does for your mind, what electricity does for a light bulb. It is the juice that powers creativity.

Lateral Thinking is a term created by Edward de Bono to describe a process of looking at problems from different angles or perspectives. By doing so you may find an innovative solution that would otherwise remain hidden from view.

The theory surmises the more you look at a problem from different directions, the better your chance of finding a way to solve it.

There are only 3 ways innovation can occur:

1) Something never before seen is created, for example the transistor.

2) Something that exist is repurposed for a different use such as using microwaves to cook food or

3) Something existing is improved by incorporating another existing product or service in whole or in part like the first steam powered automobile.

History has shown of the three, the combining of two existing products or services in whole or in part is the most common method used to inspire new ideas that advance our human experience!

The problem with all of these methods is often the inspiration comes by "chance" after long brain bleeding concentration.

Typically it goes something like this: you spend enormous brain power pouring over a problem you are trying to solve. You go over the problem countless times, like a dog chasing its tail and you get nothing. You're just about ready to throw in the towel when, as if by some weird magic you have an epiphany! The solution to your problem appears with absolute clarity.

In most cases, these revelations are stimulated by some random appearance of something totally unrelated.

What's really maddening is discovering the solution to a perplexing problem, was so obvious in hind sight that you kick yourself for being so blind to see it.

I call it my "Homer Simpson" moment where I slap my forehead and say "Doh!"

Why is that? Why do we miss the obvious so often?

Our minds are well trained in logical thinking. We have been educated and socialized in a world where logical thinking is required to function.

Our natural creative thinking ability has diminished to a pitiful impotent level either from lack of development and/or lack of use. Only a lucky few managed to keep their creative minds flourishing through to adulthood.

For most people there is a disconnect between the analytical left side of the brain and the creative right side of the brain.

Our brain contains ninety billion neurons with a potential of one hundred trillion unique connections. New connections are made with each new thought generated by our experience and imagination.

Our mind can not distinguish between the two. We have lots of experiences to form new connections from but as adults we have very little connections created by using our natural creativity, our imagination!

Thinking laterally stimulates our imagination creating new connections linking your logical left side of your brain to your creative right side.

A powerful mind is created when there are plenty of connections between the two sides.

Although opposite to each other Lateral Thinking and Logical Thinking work hand in hand. Lateral Thinking inspires while Logical Thinking implements.

Once your mind embraces the process of lateral thinking, it quickly learns its OK to use the accumulated knowledge you have and combine it in new, often crazy ways to inspire ingenious solutions for any problem you face.

There is a technique called REST (Random External Stimulus Technique) that inspires creative thinking.

Rather than waiting for "chance" to inspire your creativity you can train your mind to look for inspiration.

The biggest challenge you will have to learning the Random External Stimulus Technique is your own logical mind. Your journey to become more focused, smarter, even a genius requires that you practice being absolutely silly!

Yep, get insanely silly!

For starters, expect to be ridiculous, your logical mind has been in control for so long you'll resist this and may even feel embarrassed. So practice intensely alone. Have fun, laugh at yourself, but seriously push your imagination!

You will be amazed at how exhilarating the experience is!

Just like exercising requires you push your body well beyond what you do the rest of the day, exercising your creative mind requires the same.

Lateral Thinking develops your creativity. For fun solve this problem using REST.

Practice by randomly picking something around you right now. Do this before reading further...

... OK you picked something?

Now using this object as inspiration try to solve this problem:

How many numbers are in ZERO? I'll give you a hint,there are more than 64,000 numbers in ZERO! Tell me how this can be?

The best way to get started is to write down all the characteristics and origins of the random source of inspiration you picked. Write down everything you know about it while thinking of the problem. Use your uncensored wild imagination, without judgment on the outcome. Makeup stories that may answer this question and write them down regardless how stupid or idiotic they may sound or appear.

Remember this is just practice.

If you really want to have fun with this do some research on the random item to learn more about it.

Once you have exhausted all your crazy ideas and wrote them down, look at them with a logical mind for something that may show some merit or spark a legitimate idea.

The important "must" in this exercise, is the source of your inspiration, it must be totally random!

If you try to pick something that you think (logically) is better to use as stimulus you lose the opportunity to train your mind.

If you come up with the solution to this problem please let me know, I would love to hear from you. You can reach me at my website listed below.

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Mental Blocks, Do You Recognize These 10 Mental Blocks to Creative Thinking?

Creative thinking is necessary in many cases. Whether your trying to solve a tough problem, start a business, or write an article creative thinking is critical. People need to "think outside the box" when it comes to creative thinking. We are such creatures of habit. We don't like to think differently than others because we don't want to be thought of as strange or different. But it's those strange and different people that make a difference in this world.

Here is a list of 10 metal blocks that will keep you from being creative.

1. Trying to Find the "right" answer. One of the worst aspects of formal education is we have been taught to find the right answer. In real life there may be more than one right answer. Many of us form mental blocks when looking for the right answer when more than one answer is available.

2. Logical Thinking. Not only is there more than one right answer, life can be very illogical. If you are a logical thinker it is a mental block to your creativity. Think in metaphors and it will help you communicate the illogical things of life.

3. Following Rules. Rules are very important at times, but they can also be a destructive force and a mental block to creativity. People don't like to think outside the rules. Many celebrate the rebels of life but few are brave enough to emulate them.

4. Being Practical. I am a very practical person. I will not do something if it doesn't have a practical use. This is good sometimes but it can also be a mental block to creativity. Try to approach a problem with "what if" and go out and do the crazy thing instead of being so practical.

5. Play is not work. Allowing your mind to be at play is perhaps the most effective way to stimulate creative thinking. Most people, however, disassociate play from work. You've heard the expression "work hard and play hard." All you have to do as a creative thinker is realize they are the same thing.

6. That's not my job. We live in a very specialized world it is so easy for us to think, "that's not my job." When you are in business for yourself and getting those creative juices flowing everything is your job.

7. Being a "serious" person. I am a very serious person. Sometimes it is a mental block for me. I get too serious and I'm not able to think. If you have to take on the persona of a fool to be creative, then do it.

8. Avoid Ambiguity. We are all ambiguous to some degree. However, we want to divide complex situation into black and white boxes. This can lead to disaster. It's an innate characteristic of the human psychology to desire certainty, but it's the creative thinker who rejects the false comfort of clarity when it's not really appropriate.

9. Being wrong is bad. Because of the way we are taught in school, we hate being wrong. Thomas Edison was wrong 1,800 times before getting the light bulb right. The best thing we can do is learn from our mistakes. But we let being wrong become a mental block and we don't learn from the mistakes we make. Ask yourself, what can happen if I'm wrong? Not much. But great things can happen if you dare to be wrong and learn from your mistakes.

10. I'm not creative. You are denying that you are human if you deny that you are creative. We're all limitless creative, but only to the extent that we realize it. Stop telling yourself that you aren't creative. It's a lie.

Of you want to have success in your life you need to overcome the mental blocks that keep you from that success. Being a creative thinker is one sure way to success.

https://ezinearticles.com/?Mental-Blocks,-Do-You-Recognize-These-10-Mental-Blocks-to-Creative-Thinking?&id=9371586

Wisdom Is Synthesized Positivism and Skills Summed Up

Wisdom is a term not understood in all the seriousness and comprehensiveness it involves and deserves. Rather in a loose manner, many a time and by many an individual, wisdom is treated as something equivalent to smartness. Being smart is only a small part of wisdom. Wisdom encompasses every aspect of our whole life. It reflects and manifests through every pore of the entire life we live from the time we cross childhood. Our eating, our dating, our affluence, our idiocy - practically every filament of our being has something to do with the wisdom we acquire and cultivate.

Wisdom is the sum total of one's intelligence, knowledge, experience, logic, and sense of proportion. This list of ingredients is not final! Surely, there is the spice of what is known as lateral thinking that adds to the recipe called wisdom.

Knowledge is basically information we gather through education, observation and experience. Intelligence is the fruit of knowledge. Intelligence makes us discrete, selective and cautious. Through intelligence, we arrive at solutions to complications we confront in personal and professional spheres.

Experience is the byproduct of a transaction we handle. Deft management of matters is skill. Skilful control of life's transactions with experience as the background is maturity. If a tube light in our bedroom is not glowing, checking up what is wrong - whether the fault lies with the starter or the tube or the supply switch - is knowledge. Setting right is skill before applying the commonsense of reassuring supply. And doing the whole job using proper gloves and tester is maturity!

Knowledge need not end after the education curriculum is completed. What remains after completion of study is education. Acquiring knowledge traverses essentially through the labyrinthine channels of:

i) Agreeing with what is taught

ii) Being neutral

iii) Opposing what is being imparted &

iv) Getting changed with what is taught and learnt.

Seeing beyond the opaque and visible can be termed as logic. Logical thinking and behavior lead us to safe and comfortable destinations in life. Logic functions as a speed breaker in our tumultuous and speedy journey of life. 'How can it be like this?' is the fundamental query in bringing in logic into life.

The other important component of wisdom is lateral thinking. Lateral thinking is extending thought and planning with a bit of unconventionality. At times lateral thinking could appear as being over smart.

Nevertheless, a pinch of lateral thinking certainly adds to the flavor of life. Trying it in recommended doses need not be shunned.

To sum up, wisdom is the total of lateral thinking, logic, presence of mind, experience, intelligence and knowledge. The sequence of these components could be however shuffled depending upon the situation

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How Brain Training Games Work To Improve Cognitive Skills

As parents, many of us are not much in favor of allowing our children to play games especially video games. We prefer that they go out and play in the mud as it results in healthy physical, social, emotional and mental development. You are partially correct in doing so, but labeling all video games as bad is also not right. Many of the video games on the market that you can now download to your PC and smartphones are designed to work as brain training games. They have proved quite helpful in case of children with learning disabilities as they help develop and improve on various cognitive skills.

Coordination

When your child plays a video game, he or she is not only staring at the computer screen inactively. The action on the screen provides a lot of mental stimulation to which the player must react. It establishes a pattern of co-ordination between the vision, audio and motor movement. Players automatically try to coordinate their hand movements with what they see or what they hear.

Brain Speed

Playing involves a lot of input either in the visual or auditory form. Studies proved that people who played video games frequently were able to process the input material faster than others. This happens because the signals registered by the senses involved stimulate the brain and keep it working. The absence of such stimulation in the brain causes degenerative changes (brain atrophy) and that explains the decrease in brain speed as one grows older. This further leads to a decline in memory.

Logical Thinking and Problem Solving

Most video games particularly puzzle and strategic games are timed. You have to complete a certain task in a given amount of time or a limited number of moves. This forces a player to think strategically and logically in order to work through the problem at hand. He does not only have to think; he has to think quickly and that is what makes the difference. He can further carry these skills into his everyday life. Games like Sudoku need you to work through logical deduction while Tetris is all about pattern recognition skills.

Attention

Decreasing attention spans are another major issue today. It is hard to stay focused on something for more than 2 minutes. Video games particularly action video games engage the sustained attention and focus of the player for longer periods of time as they work towards achieving a particular goal. Such practices help rewire the brain and increase attention spans in the long run.

Memory

Video games as brain training games go a long way to enhance memory. It includes both visual and auditory memory as well as short-term and long-term memory. You might wonder how. It is in the form of remembering instructions or the key combinations needed to move your characters and the likes.

Thus, online and video games can give your brain a much-needed workout. However, not all games have the same brain benefits. Therefore, you need to ensure you are playing the right one.

If you feel like you want to enhance your brain power for quick memory recovery, better productivity at work, and great improvement in your general well-being, find here the 5 best FREE apps for a quick boost.

Click Here to Download Your FREE Guide

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Why Worry? Here's How to Break the Habit

The great diversity of human emotions brings stimulating and positive variety to our lives, enhancing our emotional adventure, and facilitates meaningful and uplifting social interactions. We grow from this range of emotion and define ourselves as human because of it. Some emotions, however, can obstruct our paths to happiness, and there are some effective ways to free ourselves from these hindrances without losing what defines us as human.

Controlled levels of stress can become powerful motivators in times of laziness or complacency, and can bring valuable attention to our intuition. Coming to terms with the time constraints and limitations of our lives can certainly become influential in our desire to make positive change; however, we can do far more good with another way of thinking. Worry is far less defined than a healthy wake-up call. Worry allows cortisol to flood the brain and counter-productively cloud and distort our mental processing. In extreme cases, over-worrying can cripple the mind into inaction. We can achieve far more with intentful, positive, logical thinking.

Time spent worrying is time that could otherwise be invested positively, for example in reducing the probability of the worrying event occurring in the first place! My goal isn't to remove all worry from the world, or explain how we should feel in life, but to offer a few methods and techniques to practice controlling and minimizing this unproductive feeling, and to help build a more peaceful, productive and happy frame of mind.

It is understood that emotions and thoughts are entirely internal to our own minds (no one else can directly access our thoughts), and we interact only through external actions and experiences. Therefore, our internal thoughts are purely that: internal and exclusively ours. No one else can get in there and force you to think anything; it’s your mind. Awareness of one’s thoughts is an important fundamental capability, developed best through meditation. When we understand the properties of the emotion, we can practice training the mind to respond more effectively. Awareness leads to understanding, practice leads to control.

Worry spawns from the mind’s interpretation of external factors – past events that have happened and future events that we predict will occur. The human mind is in fact the only known entity capable of considering these two perspectives.

Let’s first look at future perspective worry, which can be divided into two categories: inevitable future events, and potentially avoidable future events.

Future Event Worry

Firstly, if there is a solution to the problem, it follows that all efforts should be focused on discovering and implementing the said solution. Worrying can cost irretrievable time. So, it's preferred to observe the environment and consider the best approach to maximize the chances of obtaining your preferred outcome. This way, whatever happens, we can be reassured that we have tried our hardest and done our best.

Secondly, if there is no solution to the problem, or if your very best efforts were not good enough to change the course of destiny, you must remember that there is no personal failure. It was an inevitable future event all along. We must accept the nature of reality, come to terms with the situation, and understand that there is no benefit to spending any time worrying—it's inevitable. Instead, our efforts can be redirected to make the most of the countless other things that are within our influence.

The ultimate goal here, is complete control over how you interpret all events, as this renders the entire concept of worry, irrelevant. Until then, however, we have a second tool to disarm worry: it involves re-framing our perspective with the question “Is it possible that this event may not even occur?”

If you catch yourself worrying about a possible future event (the week ahead perhaps), remind yourself that firstly, it's not happening right now, and that there is a chance it may not happen at all.

Any number of events could change the expected future, from winning the lottery to jury duty, an unexpected power-cut, to alien invasion or strike action. There are infinite potential interruptions to your expected future that may unfold far better than the original expected path.

A study in Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy found that 85% of the things we worry about end up having positive or neutral outcomes. Even when the outcome is negative, 79% of the time, the subjects felt they handled it better than they thought they would.

What shame to lose that unique irretrievable time worrying about something that never occurs! That we cannot tell the future can be a gift.

Furthermore, worrying can lead to unforeseen circumstances far worse than the original source of worry. Old age and retirement are certainly high-probability events (though not guaranteed), yet a life spent worrying about them increases the chances of stroke, heart attack, and is linked to the progression of dementia. Not only does the original event not occur, but something worse has grown from the worry!

So we can replace future worry with dedicated efforts, with a clear mind, to do all we can to make the happiest life we can for the present moment and for the future.

Past Event Worry

The other main source of worry is from our interpretation of past events. Just as with our blindness regarding the future, we are unable to see alternative outcomes of past events. Looking back with regret or worry that we did the wrong thing is similarly unsound, as the alternative outcome could have sparked unpredictable events leading to far greater suffering—the apocalypse of all life might sound like an exaggeration but we genuinely cannot know!

Accepting our total ignorance of these “alternative outcome universes” can be very effective in alleviating worry and unlocking the present moment for better use.

We are also products of our environments. The decisions we make are based on an opinion formed by all past experiences, so if we begrudge ourselves or others for decisions that were made, remember that at the time of the decision, we knew far less about how things would pan out than we know now.

If we worry, or if we focus on living a happy peaceful life, the past remains unchanged, but the present can be very different.

The Best Practice

For this reason, holding a present mindset becomes invaluable. It is the only perspective we can control. Since worry is typically the fear of an unknown, we must simply accept our ignorance and take the best possible actions using the knowledge we have now. If actions are taken based on what is known, we can rest assured that we did our best. If there is a solution, this approach will find it. If there is no solution, providing we do our very best, this approach absolves all guilt, worry, self-doubt and negativity. The event is simply unavoidable.

As the story goes, around 2500 years ago, a woman in India lost her son to illness and was devastated. Overwhelmed with emotion, she went to see the spiritual teacher, Gautama Buddha, hoping he would work his famous magic and bring the boy back to life. He agreed to help her in exchange for a small bag of sesame seeds. As she was leaving, he explained that the seeds must come from a household that had never experienced death. Encouraged by the Buddha’s willingness to help, she ran into town and asked her neighbors for seeds. These were abundant and a resident was happy to supply her. The lady then remembered the requirement that they come from a household in which no one had died. The resident she was dealing with solemnly replied, “Oh, sorry, my father died in this house two years ago.” Empathetically, she left and tried the next house but faced a similar experience. After countless conversations unsuccessfully searching throughout the village, she finally understood. Death is inevitable. Impermanence is the law of nature. There are some things we simply cannot avoid.

For those situations, we benefit from accepting the laws of nature and understanding the nature of the law in order to make the most of this moment we are living in. You have the option to control your thoughts and live now, taking proactive decisions, free from worry. For practical techniques to train your mind to make the most of every moment, to regain control of the thoughts, try some mind-cleaning techniques. These exercises also purge the stress hormone cortisol from the brain and reduce the adrenaline in the blood.

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