Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People

500 Pages·2001·23.758 MB·English

by  Michele Root-Bernstein, Robert Root-Bernstein

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Preface
Epigraph
Rethinking Thinking
Schooling the Imagination
Observing
Imaging
Abstracting
Recognizing Patterns
Forming Patterns
Analogizing
Body Thinking
Empathizing
Dimensional Thinking
Modeling
Playing
Transforming
Synthesizing
Synthesizing Education
Notes
Bibliography
Minds-On Resources
Illustration Credits
Index
About the Authors
Copyright © 1999 by Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New
York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Root-Bernstein, Robert Scott.
Sparks of genius : the thirteen thinking tools of the world’s most creative
people / Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-395-90771-3
1. Creative thinking. I. Root-Bernstein, Michèle. II. Title.
BF408 R66 2000
153.3'5—dc21 99-048005

eISBN 978-0-547-52589-1
v2.1115

“Burning the Small Dead,” by Gary Snyder, from The Back Country,
copyright © 1968 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of New
Directions Publishing Corp. “1(a,” copyright © 1958, 1986, 1991 by the
Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904–1962
by E. E. Cummings. Edited by George J. Firmage. Reprinted by permission
of Liverlight Publishing Corporation. Last stanza of “Two Tramps in Mud
Time” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem.
Copyright © 1936 by Robert Frost. © 1964 by Lesley Frost Ballantine, ©
1969 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Henry
Holt and Company, LLC.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
OVER THE LAST TWENTY YEARS many people have encouraged, influenced, and
supported our exploration of the imagination and its tools for thinking. We
thank all of them, and particularly Robert Gray, the late Raffi Amram, Tom
Rodriguez, Diane Newman, and Steve Fraser. During the more recent writing
of this book, we have been greatly helped by many persons staffing
museums, libraries, associations, and publishing houses, especially Janet
Hicks of the Artists Rights Society in New York. Many individuals have been
generous with their materials, among them Bill Cambry, Patrick Dillon, Gerd
Fischer, Nat Friedman, Steve Heidemann, Benoir Mandelbrojt, Ron Meyer,
Desmond Morris, Claes Oldenburg, Roger Penrose, Vernon Reynolds, Helen
Samuels, Doris Schattschneider, Todd Siler, and Ken Snelson. Among the
many colleagues with whom we have discussed tools for thinking, the arts in
education, and arts-sciences interactions, we wish to mention Sharon
Friedler, Julian Gresser, Paul Heltne, Scott Shanklin-Peterson, and Mark
Slavkin. A number of people kindly read and commented on the manuscript.
Thank you, Mort and Maurine Bernstein, Alan Brody, Stephen Edelglass,
Linda Caruso Haviland, Richard Kaplan, Eric Oddleifson, and Todd Siler.
We appreciate your time and effort.
Finally, we gratefully acknowledge close friends and family members who
haven’t minded our shoptalk too much. And especially we thank our
teenagers for putting up with preoccupied parents, late meals, and a
continuous gloss on dinner conversation. “Empathizing,” we’d say in
response to homework assignments, good books, or piano practice. “Pattern
forming, body thinking, imaging.” Meredith and Brian simply rolled their
eyes, good-natured to the end.
PREFACE
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT creative thinking. Creative thinking in all fields occurs
preverbally, before logic or linguistics comes into play, manifesting itself
through emotions, intuitions, images, and bodily feelings. The resulting ideas
can be translated into one or more formal systems of communication, such as
words, equations, pictures, music, or dance only after they are sufficiently
developed in their prelogical forms. Regardless of the infinitely diverse
details of the products of this translation (paintings, poems, theories,
formulas, and so on), the process by which it is achieved is universal.
Learning to think creatively in one discipline therefore opens the door to
understanding creative thinking in all disciplines. Educating this universal
creative imagination is the key to producing lifelong learners capable of
shaping the innovations of tomorrow.
Because our approach to creative thinking is integrative and
transdisciplinary, we have had to unravel certain strands of disciplinary
knowledge in order to posit a new fabric of unified understanding. A new
synthesis is necessary, not only in order to understand thinking itself, but for
pedagogical and social reasons as well. Ever-increasing specialization is
clearly leading to a fragmentation of knowledge. People today have so much
information and so little grasp of its origins, meanings, and uses that overall
comprehension has frayed beyond repair. Even as specialized knowledge
increases, communication between fields decreases. Within fields experts
address larger and larger problems in smaller and smaller bits. Modern
society faces a dark age in the midst of intellectual plenty, a paradox that can
be resolved only by reintegrating knowledge in new ways and by training a
new generation of Renaissance people to weave new syntheses for
themselves.
Such an intellectual enterprise requires both cognitive and educational
foundations. Our project therefore has both warp and woof. We must
comprehend the nature of creative thinking (the warp) if we are to devise an
educational system capable of training creative thinkers (the woof). In the
opening chapters we prepare the loom, discussing, first, current
misunderstandings about the nature of creative thinking, then the barriers our
current educational system raises to creative thinking.
We weave the fabric of the book from the experiences of the century’s
greatest minds, who explain how they think about thinking and how they
learned how to think. People in every creative endeavor use a common set of
general-purpose thinking tools in an almost infinite variety of ways. These
tools reveal the nature of creative thinking itself; they make surprising
connections among the sciences, arts, humanities, and technologies. At the
level of creative imagination, everyone thinks alike.
By restructuring our cognitive categories to emphasize the unity of creative
thinking, we formulate a new conception of knowledge and, correspondingly,
a new form of education. In the concluding chapters of the book, which deal
with the ways in which ideas are transformed and synthesized during the
creative process, we demonstrate how the warp and woof yield an integral
tapestry of understanding. The final chapter suggests concrete ways in which
our cognitive restructuring can be implemented through specific educational
reforms.
The wonder of the resulting intellectual fabric is that like real fabric, it can
be transformed into an almost infinite number of things. Our new material is
not, therefore, an end in itself, but the stuff from which future artists and
scientists, humanists and technologists, will fashion their world.
One final note: following the Notes and Bibliography is a section of
Minds-On Resources that will help readers to practice and develop the
thinking tools we describe in the text. This book is but a beginning.
Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with
it. For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of
achieving full realization of this find. What we imagine does not
necessarily take on a concrete form and may remain in a state of
virtuality, whereas invention is not conceivable apart from its actually
being worked out.
Thus, what concerns us here is not imagination in itself, but rather
creative imagination: the faculty that helps us pass from the level of
conception to the level of realization.

—Igor Stravinsky, The Poetics of Music
1
Rethinking Thinking
EVERYONE THINKS. But not everyone thinks equally well. For real intellectual
feasts we depend on master chefs who have learned to mix and blend and
savor an entire range of mental ingredients. It’s not that what they do in the
kitchen is any different from what we do, they just do it better. We like to
suppose master chefs were born that way, yet even the most promising
individuals spend years in training. It follows that we, too, can learn the tools
of the trade and thereby improve our own mental cooking. This process,
however, requires us to rethink what gourmet intellection is all about. And
rethinking shifts our educational focus from what to think to how to think in
the most productive ways possible.
Our tour of mental cookery begins in the kitchen of the mind, where ideas
are marinated, stewed, braised, beaten, baked, and whipped into shape. Just
as real chefs surprise us by throwing in a pinch of this and a handful of
something else, the kitchens of the creative imagination are full of
unexpected practices. Great ideas arise in the strangest ways and are blended
from the oddest ingredients. What goes into the recipes often bears no
resemblance to the finished dish. Sometimes the master mental chef can’t
even explain how she knows that her dish will be tasty. She just has a gut
feeling that this imagined mixture of ingredients will yield a delicious
surprise.
Gut feelings don’t make obvious sense. Consider, for example, the
experience of young Barbara McClintock, who would later earn a Nobel
Prize in genetics. One day in 1930 she stood with a group of scientists in the
cornfields around Cornell University, pondering the results of a genetics
experiment. The researchers had expected that half of the corn would produce
sterile pollen, but less than a third of it actually had. The difference was
significant, and McClintock was so disturbed that she left the cornfield and
climbed the hill to her laboratory, where she could sit alone and think.
Half an hour later, she “jumped up and ran down to the field. At the top of
the field (everyone else was down at the bottom) I shouted, ‘Eureka, I have
it! I have the answer! I know what this 30 percent sterility is.’” Her
colleagues naturally said, “Prove it.” Then she found she had no idea how to
explain her insight. Many decades later, McClintock said, “When you
suddenly see the problem, something happens that you have the answer—
before you are able to put it into words. It is all done subconsciously. This
has happened many times to me, and I know when to take it seriously. I’m so
absolutely sure. I don’t talk about it, I don’t have to tell anybody about it, I’m
just sure this is it.”
This feeling of knowing without being able to say how one knows is
common. The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal is famous
for his aphorism “The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know.” The
great nineteenth-century mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss admitted that
intuition often led him to ideas he could not immediately prove. “I have had
my results for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.”
Claude Bernard, the founder of modern physiology, wrote that everything
purposeful in scientific thinking began with feeling. “Feeling alone,” he
wrote, “guides the mind.” Painter Pablo Picasso confessed to a friend, “I
don’t know in advance what I am going to put on canvas any more than I
decide beforehand what colors I am going to use. . . . Each time I undertake
to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space. I never know
whether I shall fall on my feet. It is only later that I begin to estimate more
exactly the effect of my work.” Composer Igor Stravinsky also found that
imaginative activity began with some inexplicable appetite, some “intuitive
grasp of an unknown entity already possessed but not yet intelligible.” The
Latin American novelist Isabel Allende has described a similarly vague sense
propelling her work: “Somehow inside me—I can say this after having
written five books—I know that I know where I am going. I know that I
know the end of the book even though I don’t know it. It’s so difficult to
explain.”
Knowing in such ambiguous, inarticulate ways raises an important
question. McClintock put it this way: “It had all been done fast. The answer
came, and I’d run. Now I worked it out step by step—it was an intricate
series of steps—and I came out with what it was. . . . It worked out exactly as
I’d diagrammed it. Now, why did I know, without having done a thing on
paper? Why was I so sure that I could tell them with such excitement and just
say, ‘Eureka, I solved it’?” McClintock’s query strikes at the heart of
understanding creative thinking, as do the experiences of Picasso and Gauss,
of composers and physiologists. Where do sudden illuminations or insights