Cultivate creative thinking

There are methods to follow. A good way of thinking can better trigger inspiration and gain creative ideas. After training and finding out the appropriate ways of thinking, and forming a good habit of thinking, you will greatly improve your creativity and make you smarter.

1. Empathy. The vast majority of creative ideas are due to changes in thinking. You should take a look at everything from different perspectives, positions, and groups. Think about it and you will often find unexpected discoveries. The special perspective also determines the level of creativity. Reverse thinking is a special case. For example, to develop a product, you should take yourself as a service terminal, consider the customer and intermediate links, and check every link to see if it can be done differently from others. You can also think of yourself as a competitor, think about their situation, and ask more about this. In turn, ask why it is not. In this case, you may find problems and make improvements.

2. Same request. Make more comparisons and compare them from different angles, both to find their similarities and their differences. It must be meticulous and comprehensive, so you will not miss any nuances (The details are very important ). So it is best to list one of them and compare them. There must be the same internal mechanism, which is more likely to be the most basic problem. Most people prefer to seek for difference, while thinkers prefer to seek for the same, and find out the common and the essence from the ever-changing complex things, so as to better understand the differences. The difference may be the entry of thinking, a clue. following it, we may further break down the characteristics of things and discover patterns, which is easy to understand.

3. decomposition and synthesis. For example, if you can break down the things you are interested in into smaller ones, the better. You can break down the big problems into numerous small problems and carefully examine each problem, you may find a breakthrough or open up new territories. For example, graduate students can break down multi-cell behavior to single-cell level or even single-molecule level. This will certainly encounter many technical problems, but it may also inspire you to establish a new technical system, in addition, you can also ask yourself to raise 200 or more questions in your own research fields. These 200 questions will certainly have a spark of your thoughts. Einstein once said that raising a question is often more important than solving a problem, because the proposal of a key question often shows that you are aware of the breakthrough to solve the problem.

4. unconventional thinking. Imagine what the ideal state will be, what the extreme conditions will be, what the special crowd will need, the starting point of time and the terminal situation, or infinitely exaggerating and narrowing down and turning it into a lazy, what will happen if you make mistakes intentionally, and wait when you are extremely small, extremely multi-pole, and so on. These thoughts may simplify or expand your problem. For example, if you develop a product, you may think that if a child gets it, it may be bumpy and damaged on the battlefield, and the bad guy wants to destroy it, can your product be innovated in this respect.

5. artistic. It is a kind of creativity that you can give more artistic or social significance to ordinary and inconspicuous things, such as being interesting and deeply interested. It is an aesthetic idea to simplify complex formulas, make common things more exquisite, optimize combinations, and save energy and light. Making simple things into complex structures and diverse functions is also an amazing art. Therefore, to do anything, you should try to make it very interesting or meaningful.

6. Add new features. Combination is also a kind of creation, so always think about whether you can give more features to your product and whether you can integrate different things.

7. Random connections, that is, brainstorming, are a divergent thinking. Put a lot of irrelevant things in one piece, let them combine them randomly, contact them randomly, and then screen and analyze them to inspire thinking and find inspiration. Therefore, sometimes you can walk around or flip irrelevant books or chat with irrelevant people, which may inspire your thinking. You don't have to stay in a certain place until you think about your work. My mentor often taught us that eating is also a job. I hope we can meet more researchers while eating, and exchange some information intentionally or unintentionally.

8. Think about social needs. As long as it is a requirement, it is worth thinking carefully. In fact, an important indicator of creativity evaluation is its social significance, including theoretical, technical, and actual needs. Therefore, we must expand our thinking, examine all aspects of social needs, and cannot establish an association. For example, not only do lab work for basic biological research, but can we expand whether we can contact people's livelihood, such as spam, oral hygiene, food monitoring, and bio-energy. You can also first examine social needs and then see which ones can serve as your own research breakthroughs.

9. Transplant ideas. It is a method of divergent thinking, that is, to apply the ideas and methods in other fields to their own focused fields, or to expand their own ideas and methods to other fields, that is, cross-discipline, even the subject is at the level of philosophy. Another kind of habit is to remember what you think first, and then constantly improve it. Then you will think about whether it can be applied to the relevant field or a wider field, the second is practical considerations, such as the possibility of using daily life or medical research, the possibility of applying for patents, developing products or industrialized production. In this way, we will even bring out more matching problems, and our thinking will become more active.

10. Image Thinking. You must try to express all kinds of meanings in graphs, because image thinking can reproduce the prototype of things and easily discover the spatial details that are easily missed in words and the logical conflicts between time and space. Therefore, when thinking about problems, you may wish to draw more pictures, build models, and use your imagination to fill in the gaps in thinking. You can also use an image to compare the results. Imagine what it looks like and what kind of internal structure it may look like? Alternatively, you can establish certain symbols for logical operations, and intuitively understand problems and discover contradictions.

11. Pay attention to conflicts. The problem is opportunity. Instead of escaping, we should regard it as an opportunity to make a breakthrough. Every time you encounter a problem, you 'd better ask yourself if there is something institutional hidden in it. Don't give up easily. Remember it first, and then try to propose various ideas and analyze and eliminate them one by one.

12. mathematical. Try to establish a mathematical model to quantify and standardize everything. After all, many things in the world cannot be quantified, which is both a challenge and an opportunity to exert creativity. For example, it is difficult to quantify bio-medicine, but there is a quantitative relationship in some aspects. Many people do not consider this relationship, and the research may be far from the actual situation. More than a decade ago, Peter box liked to ask how many specific protein molecules exist in a cell. What is the geometric probability of this protein binding with other molecules, the effect of changes in a protein volume on the final effect is significant, and several quantitative change models are proposed. These models can be designed for experimental verification. However, few people in the biomical community have been thinking about these issues, but now they are gradually realized that their ideas are still advanced.

13. predict the future. You can imagine how people will live and work in 20 years. Then, they will focus on specific areas and refine the prediction results to serve as the goal of your research. For example, in the computer industry, in the future, it will be a great integration of functions. A handheld computer can satisfy almost all your information processing work, such as making phone calls, watching TV, surfing the Internet, education, consulting, service, and instrument control. Therefore, one innovation in this industry is continuous integration. Today there are iPhone and Ipod, tomorrow there may be i100, and the day after tomorrow there may be iall, you can control cooking and watching children. Now, the task is to develop and improve around this. It is inevitable to make more and better products than iPod functions. For other fields, ideas can also be advanced. For example, there are so many mysteries of the human body that few people may ask about. Although technically difficult, it is not impossible to design experiments for research, you can determine the target at least, and you can explore it step by step. Only in this way can you think more than others and make a big breakthrough.

14. Pay attention to the latest technology ideas. New technologies and ideas are actually the best growth point of creativity. We must be keenly aware of the latest information and understand the latest developments. His box's first reaction to new things is that this is an opportunity for me to innovate. I must think about whether I can go further or expand on this basis for my use. Even if such an idea has no practical value, remember it and use it as a kind of thinking training. Therefore, the more you do not understand it, the more you need to contact it, the less you are interested in it. (preferences are sometimes a mindset ). Because the new technology must be imperfect, there is too much space to expand, and the chance of getting new ideas is higher.

15. Logical deduction. When I was reading a book, one of my mentors once made me feel free to think about all kinds of questions and encouraged me to boldly imagine that I did not consider any technical feasibility, or was it so absurd, first, establish hypotheses based on existing materials, and then boldly deduct, find evidence, and constantly improve. If there is no evidence, use your imagination to fill it and leave a vacancy. For example, if your model is correct, it will certainly have many derivative features, and you can design and verify these features. If it is incorrect, a lot of information will be corrected during verification. Therefore, we must first have a model or hypothesis. Whether it is right or not, it is always better to have a model or hypothesis. With this feature, we will continue to present and refine our analysis. So at that time, I was the fastest growing, learned a lot, and put forward many ideas that I was surprised.

16. Philosophical Thinking. Philosophical learning is always beneficial, because philosophy is the result of induction and universal. It subconsciously uses philosophical thinking to analyze specific problems and often can better understand the nature of things and trigger inspiration. For example, we need to learn to analyze problems in a dialectical, systematic, and dynamic manner, analyze system elements from different levels, and study their structural characteristics and information control mechanisms. It can also be applied from specific research objects to other places, or even to a higher level or philosophical level. Some people dislike philosophy and think that it doesn't matter if you don't learn it. In fact, this is also a form of emotional decision-making, because the key is whether you will use it, or if you use it, you think it is useless. For example, philosophical thoughts such as the dissipation structure of the biological points may consider the self-organization mechanism in the Life phenomenon, study the self-organization center, and guess the system operation mechanism, therefore, he may think of unexpected possibilities.

17. The speech is better than the speech. Most of the time, you can only experience some things in person to form a unique insight in some aspects. The same is true for writers who do scientific research. For example, the scientists who created the vascular suppression treatment of tumors discovered that clinically tumor vascular Hyperplasia is related to prognosis, and it is hard for many radiologists who only stay in the laboratory to understand this, there is no way to talk about discovering new rules. Therefore, sometimes it is not necessary to have mature ideas to do it, but to discover and explore the progress while doing so. Many American scholars do this.

18. jump out of the box. Subconsciously ask if your thinking model is a fixed trend. Can you jump out of it? In this case, you may be able to perceive your limitations and take your thinking to another angle or direction. You may even be able to ride freely across the sky and across the sea to break through the regular world.

19. Think of yourself as God. This is the inspiration from my uncle. Although he has not studied it, It is very enlightening. For example, for biomedical research, do not always turn around in your own circles, read a lot of literature, but think of yourself as God. Think about it If you design your own human body and the world, what will happen. There are many problems that cannot be explained using the current theories. Many people do not dare to touch them, but they are also the nodes of breakthroughs in human cognition. Only by perceiving the rules that may happen in the world, you can use your imagination to fill the gap between facts and knowledge, so that you can look down on your research field from a height. Of course, not ordinary people can achieve this kind of thinking, and they need to work hard and be skillful.

20. Learning to be considerate, learning to collect data and ideas, accumulating basic knowledge and resources, and becoming an expert in a certain field and exploring the frontier of research are the basis for creating thinking, so hurry up and add to favorites.