Reading Response 3 – Purpose of Lateral Thinking

In this chapter, the author explored the reasons behind the need for lateral thinking and also pointed out why creativity, humor and insight cannot be easily trained. He first mentioned the self-coding / pattern making and self-organizing nature of our mind and then used the resulting jelly model of our memory surface to visualize our brains’ processing of new information. We have a tendency to fit them to existing patterns. Humor and Insights, however, are basically restructuring the patterns. However, they are sudden and cannot be predicted. For my personal experiences, the sense of humor comes to me like an electric shock when I see something that I can make humor on. This points to his description of the inherent disadvantages of this system caused by the great advantages of it which makes us tend toward using and relying on it. Lateral thinking can tackle especially three of them: it can help escaping cliche patterns, remixing information into ideas, and restructuring. The use of random stimulation can be effective on our self maximizing memory surface as it creates new patterns actively. Disruption and provocation can help dividing and diverging existing patterns.

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