Twelve Ways to Think Differently

Ini saran untuk "olah otak" agar otak kita tetap "sehat", serupa
dengan kebutuhan "olah raga" menjaga kesehatan tubuh kita.
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"From my own experience, some research and a couple of recent
conversations, here are twelve mental 'stretching' techniques that can
enable you to think differently. Before you consider them, you might
want to ask yourself whether you need them. They are unlikely to make
you happier, though they will probably make you more creative, and
more understanding. Remember, I'm the guy who lives to foment
dissatisfaction, so be forewarned. In no particular order, and with
some likely overlap:

1. Meditation: Or whatever 'stand still and look until you really
see' attention techniques work for you. Anything that can still the
noise of the machine in our heads, anything (like Getting Things Done)
that can empty the detailed minutiae of your life from your memory and
make room for something new. Because the better you are at paying
attention, the more likely you are to be able to see and appreciate
other perspectives.
2. Reconnect With Your Senses: Do exercises that increase your
awareness and the sensitivity of your senses. Most of what you learn
is perceptual rather than conceptual, and you can learn an astonishing
amount by just becoming more aware of nature, and of yourself, and of
the connection between your senses and the senses of all life on
Earth.
3. Reconnect With Your Intuition: We are taught to distrust it, but
for three million years it informed us about the world and how to deal
with it successfully and happily. It's all there encoded in your DNA
-- how to live, how to handle any situation, what to do. The
perspective you can get when your intuition provides one viewpoint on
a situation and your 'book learning' another is remarkable. It's like
suddenly seeing stereo when all your life you've only seen with one
eye. Instant depth perception.
4. Analogies and Metaphors: "Science is Metaphor" said Timothy
Leary. Analogies and metaphors allow you to 're-see' something
abstract as something concrete, something conceptual as perceptual.
Lakoff points out that "We cannot think just anything - only what our
embodied brains permit", and analogies and metaphors permit us to
think things we probably otherwise couldn't. My recent "If the Shoe
Were On the Other Foot" article was an example of this.
5. Conversations and Interviews: A wonderful enabler for thinking
differently is the shared context that comes from conversations and
interviews. Several of my most popular articles have been
conversations with myself or with other people, because they help
people understand my thought process much better than analytical
discourse. Like everything natural, they are inefficient but extremely
effective. Interviews work the same way. Face-to-face and recorded
conversations and interviews, if they are natural and probing and
improvisational, are even better, because you learn more of the
participants' worldview from the vocal nuances and body language.
6. Synthesis, Distillation and Restatement: When you recapitulate
and condense what you've read or heard, you force yourself to use your
own words to say what they had to say. You can learn as much from this
about their way of thinking, and your own, as you can from the reading
or listening experience itself.
7. Reading (and Writing) Fiction: The most important character in
stories is the narrator, not the protagonist. While empathy with the
protagonist will keep you reading, it is from understanding the
perspective of the narrator, and contrasting it with your own, that
you learn the most. Here as an illustration is an excerpt from Mark
Haddon's wonderful book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time (thank you to the reader who recommended this book to me)
-- told from the point of view of an autistic child::

And then I thought about how for a long time scientists were puzzled
by the fact that the sky is dark at night, even though there are
billions of stars in the universe and there must be stars in every
direction you look, so that the sky should be full of starlight
because there is very little in the way to stop the light from
reaching Earth. Then they worked out that the universe was expanding,
that the stars were all rushing away from one another after the Big
Bang, and the further the stars were away from us, the faster they
were moving, some of them nearly as fast as the speed of light, which
is why their light never reached us.

I like this fact. It is something you can work out in your own mind
just by looking at the sky above your head at night and thinking
without having to ask anyone. And when the universe has finished
exploding, all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been
thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all
begin to fall towards the centre of the universe again. And then there
will be nothing to stop us from seeing all the stars in the world
because they will all be moving towards us, gradually faster and
faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon because
when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just
the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.

Except that no one will see this because there will be no people left
on Earth to see it. They will probably have become extinct by then.
And even if there are people still in existence, they will not see it
because the light will be so bright and hot that everyone will be
burned to death, even if they live in tunnels.

8. Psychoactive and Other Drugs: They work for some people, and
have for thousands of years. Nope, don't have any on me.
9. Learning a New Language: Linguists say all human languages are
so similar than an alien would see them as indistinguishable, but
anyone who doesn't see how a language entrenches cultural
preconceptions, ideas, and ways of thinking probably has never
mastered a second one. The vocabulary, the syntax, the way in which it
is ordered, the nuances of meaning, all push you to new ways of
thinking.
10. Learning Something Outside Your Comfort Zone: If you're an
artist, learn about String Theory. If you're a scientist, learn about
the aesthetics of music. The more novel and uncomfortable and strange
it is, the more it will liberate your calcified brain.
11. Do Impulsive and Serendipitous Things: Any activity that won't
let you plan or anticipate, but which instead forces you to perceive
and learn quickly and pay attention and react and live in the moment,
will get you outside the centre of your own universe and help you see
and think differently. And if you can't get yourself to do impulsive
and serendipitous things, then at least read impulsively and
serendipitously. Free the genie.
12. Collaboration: Not just coordination or cooperation, true
collaboration. When you have produced a truly collective work-product,
you have in many ways got inside the heads of your fellow
collaborators, and that will change you forever."
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/05/18.html#a1150