Accidental Genius: How To Think
dextronet.com
dextronet.com
It is my experience that "The art of thinking" comes in many shapes.
Some people are very clear in their thinking others are very messy. Some people need to speak rather than think, some people need to think rather than speak. Some people need to Doodle, some do 100 ideas in 10 minutes other do 10 ideas in 100 minutes.
I appreciate the purpose and the methods of the book. I am sure it's a fantastic way... for some people.
It's not necessarily for everyone.
No post on HN will ever resonate with everyone. Take that as a given, because every post could just as well have a disclaimer like this.
You're taking it too far by saying that no concepts are universally applicable to human beings.
If I made a post saying "We need to eat to live a healthy life", would that not be a universal truth? If it doesn't resonate with some people (e.g. some quibble: "We can puree our food and drink it" or "intravenous injection works for me", and ignore the serious disadvantages of both choices) is the scientific truth of "we need to eat to live a healthy life" not true?
Relativism to an extreme degree is next to nihilism.
What do we need to eat? What is a healthy life? Who are we? etc.
It's not really about relativism it's about asking those questions.
Anyway, way to far from OT.
If this fact were debatable, it would be a different story.
We need to eat 3 meats or 5 meals or meat or vegetable are specific manifestation of universal facts that we need to eat.
This book tries to teach what author think can help you in thinking creatively which is an answer to how question.
You may or may not like it and it may or may not be applicable to you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj4y0EUlU-Y#t=146s
He does a great job of communicating this, despite our interpretive differences. (Though perhaps it's just very well spoken for my interpretation and just the opposite for someone else out there.)
He always leave me humble and exited at the same time.
His way of thinking about things are so rare even among the contemporary "great thinkers". He treats everything as an experiment and show what it really mean to be a careful thinker.
Once I got into the habit of doing them, I saw three other benefits: 1) I no longer needed stupid to-do lists, 2) Because I did them right when I woke up, before I was conscious enough to be self-conscious, I was brutally honest with myself, and got rid of my obnoxious depression, and 3) The daily practice really improved my writing.
Journaling really is a better form of meditation. I wish I'd gotten into the habit sooner.
I have always written a lot, but I never did it as religiously as morning pages. I wrote a wiki in 2004 where I keep all my thoughts/notes -- it's about 1000 wiki pages now (probably 2000 without deletions). Before that I kept a diary but it wasn't really for "ideas", more "complaints" :)
Right now I feel like I have enough ideas and it's about execution... but I do think there is something valid to the approach.
It's also similar to what happens when you write down your dreams first thing in the morning (or even during the night if you wake up after them). I tried this when I was 15. My mind was blown.
I started remembering 7 or 8 dreams a night. I would go to sleep for 50 minutes and it would feel like I experienced 8 hours of time in my dream. It was really disorienting (and interesting). I don't remember but I think it took about 2 weeks of writing before that happened.
So this is another example of writing changing your brain. Your brain wants an audience (or more accurately, your subconscious does, and the subconscious is where ideas are generated). If you write down your dreams, you'll start having/remembering more of them. If you write down more ideas, your brain will generate more of them and follow more associations.
Deliberately plunging my brain back into the places and situations I'd been in recreated the super-stimulated "traveling brain" state. I think the act of reliving and reinforcing the memories made them even more vivid now several years later than they otherwise would have been.
I believe the key aspects of the process were both the deliberate memory churning and the typing--the physical transfer of the brain activity. Maybe my ~80 WPM typing speed happened to be a good match/governor for my recall rate, too.
Now this wouldn't be at all practical on a day-to-day basis since day-to-day life details are so repetitive, but I could for sure see the benefits of picking some out of the ordinary event or encounter and drilling back through it to discover what else your brain has to offer. I can also see the potential in trying it for a known future event for planning purposes.
I don't think I could write in a notebook anymore -- my handwriting has atrophied and my hand would cramp up... :(
AFAIK, it comes from Julia Cameron's book, "The Artist's Way".
I got bored the second day. I didn't write down anything interesting, my free writing was so boring I didn't bother to read it after. Maybe I need more guidance like this book provides. Typically I write things down when I get an idea during thinking, not to do a writing exercise.
Checked out the post and followed with 20 minutes of Freewriting on 750words.
I don't think it should all be interesting. Actually that is the point. If you write down enough stuff most of it will be crap, just like most ideas. But eventually something good will come out. Also, if nothing good comes out- at least you have gotten better at writing and clarity of thought.
That site has some cute charts that try to measure your mental state, I was curious to see what they'd show. I lasted 7 days, at the end charts got way off and I gave up.
In it he talks about doing a writing exercise while counting down from 100 simultaneously. That really preoccupies the limiting consciousness and lets stuff come out.
I'm suitably impressed to keep trying it out to see what else I can do with it, if not to experiment a little - it is very much like monkeys at typewriters.
Anyone else feel this is like "intellectual improv"?
Once I have a good enough start point, I try and write down my thoughts in an email to (a possibly imaginary) a colleague who may be interested in what I have to say. The very fact that I now have an audience acts like a filter and helps me get to the crux of my idea very quickly. Writing for an audience also makes you evaluate what ideas may be relevant and what irrelevant.
Its even better if you have somebody you can use as a soundboard to talk about your ideas. Of course, thats not always possible (and is very obnoxious!), so the email method works better for me.
For a fiction writer, the difference may be negligible. For a rocket scientist, it's a matter of life and death. Literally.
Sure there is a lot of logical thinking involved but some of the real insights where not based on the logical progression of thought in fact they where based on breaking them. Exactly to deliver insights outside the realm of the logical axioms.
Randomness is not as valuable as logic when working towards a specific end. That is, if you already know the beginning and the end, using randomness to find the path between them is probably the slowest and least likely to bring results.
I am not sure why you think logic is so central here. Of course you need logic, but it will only work if your premise is correct and IMHO if you are trying to solve a problem then most of the time it's your premise that's wrong not the logical reasoning that springs from it.
But yes one of the questions is whether you have a truly free will (my guess is no)