Mindframe

When he was in his early teens, Albert Einstein received a gift from a family friend: a series of illustrated science books with the catchy title of Naturwissenschaftliche Volksbucher ( People’s Books on Natural Science ), by Aaron Bernstein. In Einstein: His Life and Universe , Walter Isaacson quotes Einstein as having later described it as “a work which I read with breathless attention." In the first volume of Bernstein’s popular science series, he asked the reader to imagine a bullet shot through the window of a fast-moving train. Bernstein postulated that anyone examining the bullet’s exit on the opposite side of the train would conclude the bullet must have been shot at an angle. Bernstein’s point was that, because the earth is hurtling through space, light would exhibit the same refracting properties going through a telescope lens as the bullet passing through the train windows. And that this outcome would always be the same regardless how fast the source of the ligh...

Want to be more creative? One promising path to creativity is what's called analogous thinking. This approach suggests often you can reach the best solution to one problem by looking at what already exists in a different but somewhat relevant field. By adapting elements of those works to your own purposes, you can create something new, exciting, and effective. It’s estimated that “perhaps 80% of creative ideas” follow this formation. The key is clever recombinations. Years ago, composer, actor, and rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda noticed striking parallels between Robert Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton and the classic hip-hop narrative. The result was Hamilton , a hip-hop biographical musical narrated by Aaron Burr, Hamilton’s political rival and eventual killer. It’s a fresh take on the monumental genius and equally monumental egos of our founding fathers, capturing the 18th century revolutionary spirit for new generations of Americans. (Miranda is not the first to fi...

Scientists trying to get to the core of creativity encounter a very basic problem at the outset. Unlike, say, size, or time, creativity is extremely difficult to measure. It’s even difficult to define. Frequently, people searching for a creativity-judging metric focus on what’s called “divergent thinking”. This is the ability to come up with a large number of solutions to a given problem. It’s the “no wrong answers” school of brainstorming. Divergent thinking is all about casting the widest possible net, and then gauging success from overall net size. There are arguably some benefits to this approach. For one thing, since divergent thinking concerns itself with the sheer amount of ideas generated, measuring it is as simple as counting.  What do these experiments look like? Imagine someone hands you a paper cup and asks you to think of as many uses for that cup as you can. Someone with a knack for divergent thinking would be off and running: a drinking vessel, a fly ...