This is part three in a five part series about 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People. I’m summarizing parts of the book Sparks of Genius as well as sharing some tips and resources that you can use to explore these tools more on your own.
Here’s the link to part 1 – Sparks of Genius: The First Two Thinking Tools
Here’s the link to part 2 – The Next Three Thinking Tools: Analogizing, Abstracting and Recognizing Patterns.
Today, I’ll summarize the next three thinking tools, Forming Patterns, Body Thinking and Empathizing.
I hope you enjoy learning about these tools and practice using them with your family to strengthen your own creativity.
Thinking Tool #6 Forming Patterns
Summary: Forming patterns is juxtaposing one element or operation with another in a consistent way where the pattern is much more than the sum of its separate parts.
I loved the quote in the book by artist Bridget Riley. She says, “One always begins by understanding the things one has already experienced. That’s how one starts to find out something new.”
The more things, ideas, people and places children can experience, the more they’ll be able to create patterns and expectations in their minds of how things work. And the more experiences, the more complex and interconnected those patterns will be.
We can create patterns out of almost everything. Even the greatest literature relies on patterns – investigating patterns in human behavior and drawing conclusions from them. The more children play with patterns in one area such as music or math, the more they’ll be able to transfer that pattern recognizing and forming ability into whatever area they are working on.
One of the keys to innovating in every discipline is learning to create patterns. It’s not about the complexity of the pattern but rather the cleverness and unexpected ways the objects or ideas are used.
My favorite quotes from the book (I couldn’t decide on just one!): “The more patterns we invent to circumscribe, define, and express our experience of the world, the more real knowledge we possess and the richer we are in understanding.”
“The key is to build up, by means of predictions or even vague intuitions, a sufficient sense of what should be present in a particular situation so that absence becomes anomalous and therefore strikingly interesting.”
Tips:
– Play with as many pattern and machine toys as you can. Some ideas are: Pattern blocks, Tangrams, K’nex, Zoob, Legos, Mindstorms, Tinkertoys, Keva, and Snap Circuits.
– The book had a great idea of buying a variety of filters, screens, or other regularly patterned woven materials from the hardware store and to create collages or complex arrangements in which moiré patterns emerge.
Resources:
– Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices
– Aha! Aha! Gottcha Insight This book by mathemagician Martin Gardner is great for pattern forming, 2 and 3 D puzzles and much more.
Thinking Tool #7 Body Thinking
Summary: Body thinking is when you use your muscles, physical tension or touch in order to think or create. According to the book, thinking with the body depends on our sense of muscle movement, posture, balance and touch.
We’re often most aware of using physical movements in our learning when we first learn a new skill, whether it’s a new sport, riding a bike, learning a new craft or art, or playing a new instrument. As we get better at that skill, those physical movements become familiar to us, so we’re not as aware of them as we were in the beginning.
We often think about body thinking as something we’re physically doing, but those who are great at body thinking can imagine touch, movement or body tension as easily as another person can imagine a scene from a book or the melody of a favorite song.
It also goes much more beyond physical movement, too. It’s about people who can feel things viscerally – in other words, they feel things deeply in their gut as both something physical and emotional at the same time.
In order for kids to have the type of body thinking where they can clearly imagine physical movements in their body without actually moving, they must build up a large store of physical movements and body sensations to draw from.
When kids have to sit still in chairs most of the day, they are not building up a huge store of these physical memories. They also aren’t learning to connect how they feel to what they are learning.
“Body thinking combines objective and subjective ways of knowing. Only when the thing we manipulate is no longer “other” but an extension of “I” does it obey our will and desires.”
My favorite quote from the book: “Doing and remembering how it feels to have done is inseparable from learning to think with the body.”
Tips:
– Modern Art Movement Collect as many modern art pictures as you can. Look at each piece and then choreograph a body movement that expresses what you feel as you look at each piece.
– Pattern Passion For a week, try to jot down all the things that bring you the most pleasure. Also, jot down the things you really didn’t like to do. Look closely at the lists and see if you can find patterns. If you spend some time at this, you’ll see that many of the things you like to do have connections between them. Connections are a type of pattern. This is the pattern you want to weave in your life….doing more of these things.
Resources:
– Behind the Scenes –The Complete Series This is a ten part series with Penn and Teller where they introduce creative people and how they work. This series really highlights all the thinking tools.
– Helen Keller in her Story – A DVD
Thinking Tool #8 Empathizing
Summary: Author Alphonse Daudet observed that “You must enter into the person you are describing, into his very skin, and see the world though his eyes and feel it through his senses.” This is what it means to empathize.
It’s easy to see how being able to empathize would help writers, artists, musicians, and actors, but the book makes a great case how historians, veterinarians, philosophers, physicians and even scientists all benefit from letting whatever they are working on become a part of them, too.
When kids learn in an abstract way about real human problems and ideas, they are not allowed to embrace their emotions and ability to empathize. If you can understand how people behave or the true essence of scientific principals, you’re in a much better position to come up with new and creative ways to solve those problems.
Of course the best way to practice empathy is through play-acting, something young children are naturally driven to do. It’s incredibly amazing to me that in almost all school situations, the very ability that is so strong in children- emphasizing- that could help them the most in understanding complex human problems is almost wiped out altogether.
Instead of sharing stories and situations with kids and giving them lots of time to play on their own, kids are rushed from one activity to another without having a chance to take what they’ve learned and to literally let it sink into their bones.
Reading wonderful literature, allowing tons of time for play, participating in and watching great theater, and traveling to foreign places that allow children to see how other people live and what’s important to them, are all important ways kids and adults and strengthen their ability to empathize.
Favorite quote from the book: “Understanding is most complete when you are not you but the thing you wish to understand….In fact, when it comes to empathizing, the whole world is a stage for the imagination.”
Tips:
– Play Emulation Charades: Write down twenty different animals, each on its own index card. Then write down twenty different situations you can think of….like running through a park or swimming across a river. Shuffle the cards. Each person needs to choose one animal card and one situation card to act out. Everyone else must guess their animal and what situation the animal is in.
– Read great historical fiction. Discuss what you would have done in the same situation. Talk about what the character must have been feeling.
– For small children, after reading a picture book, act it out afterwards (although in my experience, little children will naturally do this without any prompting from you). A few months ago, my kids wanted me to read aloud a Beatrix Potter book while they acted out the story. Then they read a story aloud and I had to act out the story.
Resources:
– National Geographic- Kratt Brothers: Be the Creature We started to watch this fascinating series about two guys who try to be like the creatures they’re investigating. They roll in the mud to protect themselves against flies, eat the same foods they see the chimpanzees eat and build a beaver dam from sticks and logs.
– On Stage: Theater Games & Activities for Kids
– The Painter and the Wild Swans A painter empathizes with the swans he paints, becoming one.
Photo Credit: Todd A. Porter
In what ways do you use Forming Patterns, Body Thinking or Empathizing in your family? Do you have any resources you can share?