The first thing I think to read online. How do people think text

Dmitry Chernyshev

How do people think

Publishing house "Mann, Ivanov and Ferber"

Moscow 2013

Information from the publisher

Chernyshev D. A.

How do people think? / Dmitry Chernyshev. - M.: Mann, Ivanov and Ferber, 2013.

ISBN 978-5-91657-801-0

In the phrase "creative thinking" the main word is thinking. It is a creative act in itself. Everything new, interesting, complex is food for the mind, and the surrounding world supplies this food in abundance. And you can process the material into new ideas using the techniques from this book written by the famous Russian blogger (40,000 readers!) Dmitry Chernyshev, whose work as a creative director in an advertising agency has been associated with the daily generation of ideas for almost a decade and a half.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright holders.

Legal support of the publishing house is provided by the law firm "Vegas-Lex"

The creation of new ideas is an operation accessible to everyone and quite simple: it is enough to know in what concentrations to mix the obvious and the impossible.

Clear thinking requires courage, not intelligence.

Thomas Sas

This book is an attempt to understand how people think.

It must be admitted that people think extremely rarely. The vast majority of everything that the average person does throughout his life, he does almost without thinking, based on very simple algorithms. For example, a man gets up (the alarm rang - I need to get up, lie down for a few more minutes and get up), go to the toilet (turn on the light, open the door, raise the toilet seat, pee, flush, lower the toilet seat, close the door, turn off the light), get dressed (Where is the second sock? Are these socks already dirty or can I wear them for another day?), Washes, makes the bed, turns on the TV, cooks breakfast, goes to work ... and all this without thinking at all. Arriving at work, a person often cannot even remember how he arrived. It is rather difficult to call it thinking. It's just a sequence of constantly repeating actions. As Niels Bohr said, "You don't think, you're just logical." This is all very correct - these are remarkably working, thousands of times proven algorithms. But not very interesting. By creative thinking, we will understand the creation of something new, which did not exist before, or the solution of a specific problem.

Imagine that you walk up to your door, take the key out of your pocket and try to insert it into the keyhole. The key is not inserted. You turn the key over to the other side and try again. The key doesn't work again. You look at the key - this is your key to your apartment. Look at the door - this is your apartment. And only at this moment you leave the state of automatism in which you were, and you start to think - you try to understand what happened. And your imagination starts to work. This book is about creative thinking. Because there is no other way of thinking except creative thinking.

There are two main approaches to creativity. Some people believe that this is something given to a person from above. Connection to the noosphere. Revelation. Illumination. Miracle. And any attempt to understand this miracle, hidden under the cover of secrecy, is doomed to failure. I believe that creative thinking is a technological process that can and should be learned. And it is available to anyone.

Unfortunately, few of us know about the American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915). Meanwhile, this is a genius who laid the foundations for the scientific organization of labor. He showed that the basis of any skill is a set of fairly simple repetitive operations. Previously, many masters jealously guarded the secrets of their profession and did not try to systematize them, and often just write them down. In guilds of craftsmen, new members took an oath not to divulge the intricacies of their craftsmanship. And many discoveries already made were inaccessible to the uninitiated.

For example - tongs, a surgical instrument to facilitate childbirth. They were invented by the English physician Peter Chamberlain at the beginning of the 17th century. They helped women in labor with a difficult course of childbirth and in a critical situation could save both the woman and the child. The Chamberlains kept the invention a closely guarded secret for decades. When the doctor came to the woman in labor, he demanded that everyone leave the room, and the woman was blindfolded. It is difficult to even imagine how many lives could have been saved if not for this secrecy.

Dmitry Chernyshev

All rights reserved. No part of the electronic version of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet and corporate networks, for private and public use, without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Legal support of the publishing house is provided by the law firm "Vegas-Lex"

The creation of new ideas is an operation accessible to everyone and quite simple: it is enough to know in what concentrations to mix the obvious and the impossible.

Clear thinking takes courage

not intellect.

Thomas Sas

This book is an attempt to understand how people think.

For example - forceps, a surgical instrument to facilitate childbirth. They were invented by the English physician Peter Chamberlain at the beginning of the 17th century. They helped women in labor with a difficult course of childbirth and in a critical situation could save both the woman and the child. The Chamberlains kept the invention a closely guarded secret for decades. When the doctor came to the woman in labor, he demanded that everyone leave the room, and the woman was blindfolded. It is difficult to even imagine how many lives could have been saved if not for this secrecy.

In 1911, Taylor wrote the monograph Principles of Scientific Management. He walked behind the workers with a stopwatch, built graphs of the degree of their fatigue and, on the basis of the data collected, showed how to increase labor productivity several times (in the Soviet Union, the Stakhanov movement would grow from the principles developed by Taylor). Taylor proved that the fairest pay system is piecework. Workers, on the other hand, have always fought against piece work. There was even a saying, "Piecework is deadly work." Those who began to work harder and better had their machines damaged, claiming that they were leaving their comrades without work. Taylor proved that this was not so: “The vast majority of workers hitherto believe that if they began to work at the highest speed available to them, they would cause enormous harm to all their fellow workers, depriving them of work. In contrast, the history of the development of any branch of industry shows that every improvement and improvement, whether it be the invention of a new machine or the introduction of improved methods of production, resulting in an increase in the productivity of labor in this industrial branch and in a reduction in the cost of production, always in the end account, instead of putting people out of work, gave work to more workers.

Because of the active promotion of piecework wages, labor unions began to fight Taylor. In the United States, a campaign of "universal contempt" was launched - one of the most vicious in the history of the country. Meanwhile, it was the application of Taylor's methods that helped the United States bring victory in World War II closer. Hitler counted on the fact that America did not have enough transport ships and destroyers to cover them in order to transfer large military forces to Europe. The Germans relied on submarines - more than a thousand of them were built - and sank almost 800 Allied transport ships. Taylor's methods made it possible to train first-class welders and shipbuilders from unskilled workers in just two to three months. Previously, this took several years. And the production of ships was put on the conveyor.

I want to desacralize the process of creative thinking. Show that it consists of a set of simple and understandable algorithms that anyone can learn. When you were little and gave the wrong answer, your parents may have said to you, “What if you think about it?” They used the word "think" but didn't explain what it really meant. I want, following Einstein's advice "Everything should be simplified as long as possible, but no more", try to explain what it means to "think".

I've run many seminars in which the participants came up with two or three hundred ideas related to any subject chosen for brainstorming. It seems to me that just reading the book is not enough. It's like a lecture - just listening is not very effective. You can't learn how to do something without trying it. Therefore, the book will have many tasks typed in a different font, like this:

Imagine, for example, that the Earth is at war with an alien mind not with weapons, but with ideas, and you urgently need to teach thousands of people how to generate ideas in industrial quantities. What will you start with?

This is the first task.

I have a personal dislike for a lot of books that consist of one idea and two or three facts. And everything else is a story about how the author came to this wonderful idea. I don't really like it when a thought that can be expressed in one paragraph is stretched to a whole book. That is why there will be a lot of ideas and facts in the book. This may make it difficult to read. Hopefully, the book will work like a flint—and chisel out a few ideas. I think it's worth reading it with a pencil.

I tried to come up with an alphabet of thinking. It seems to me that this can simplify both inventing something new and explaining how a person came to this or that idea. In addition, an idea expressed graphically is remembered much better. And, perhaps, the creation of an alphabet of thinking will make it possible to refute Ludwig Wittgenstein, who believed that the boundaries of our language mean the boundaries of our world. Maybe the alphabet will allow you to first perform mental operations, and only then find a verbal analogue for the result obtained.

Some of the main ideas in the book will be repeated several times. Don't let that bother you. It's just that their importance to me is so great that if you remember only them from the whole book, I will consider my task completed.

Thinking alphabet

Philosophy is the struggle against the witchcraft of our intellect through language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

All kinds of mind traps. From admiration for authorities and public opinion to persistence in one's own opinion and wishful thinking.

A cloud of meanings and associations surrounding any word.

The intersection of two clouds of meaning. The vast majority of new ideas are in the area of this intersection.

Constant change in both the world around us and our ideas about it.

Classification of the reality around us. The desire of a person to put everything on the shelves.

Deconstruction. Analysis of any object or concept into its component parts.

Searching for something new and interesting in disassembled parts.

Combinatorics. List of options.

Contrast/war. Potential difference.

Aikido principle. Use of existing energy flows for own purposes.

Changing the size and number of objects. Changing their functions.

Inversion. Changing the meaning to the opposite.

Constructor. Object structure.

Chaos. A random selection of options.

Third Eye. Change of point of view.

Black hole. The absence of an object or part of it.

Formulation of the problem statement.

Relentless effort. Transition to a qualitatively new level.

Guided Dreams.

Why do you need to think?

The missing link in the chain between an animal and a real person is most likely you and me.

Konrad Lorenz

Thinking is a very costly process. Our brain makes up only 2% of our body weight, and at rest consumes about 10% of all energy in the body. When a person begins to think intensively, energy consumption increases to 20-25%.

As soon as a person has learned something new, he stops thinking about it. It's like riding a bike - everything is done "on the machine". And even thinking about how to maintain balance is not worth it - you can immediately fall. In the event of real danger, when a person has only three options - freeze, run or attack, a slight mental delay can cost a life.

But thinking makes a person much stronger. Education teaches him to look for non-standard options. This was well understood even by slave owners. Alberto Manguel, in The History of Reading, writes that in the 18th century a law was passed in South Carolina strictly forbidding all Negroes, whether slave or free, from learning to read. Nobody canceled it until the middle of the 19th century. “The first time you were caught reading and writing, you were flogged with an oxhide whip, the second time you were relied on a nine-tailed whip, and the third time you were cut off the phalanx of your index finger.” It was common throughout the South to hang a slave who taught his fellows to read.

As far back as the end of the 19th century, there was a theory that learning a lot is harmful. In the United States, the report "The relationship between education and insanity" was published. After studying 1741 cases of insanity, the author concluded that in 205 cases it was due to occupational overload - "education lays the foundation for many cases of mental illness." The educators were concerned that the children did not learn too much. They strove to shorten their study hours, as long breaks prevented damage to the mind. The echoes of these prejudices have survived to our time.

At school, the simplest topics were discussed for months. Bright and talented children got bored, and they slowly faded. No, there were, of course, exceptions - a talented teacher could perform a real miracle. But how many have you met? Two? Three? If more, consider yourself very lucky. As a rule, they were not very liked in the team. Against their background, the squalor of the other teachers became clearly visible.

Remember the boredom and monotony of the lessons. The teachers worked according to the manuals, thought and said in clichés: “Have you forgotten your head at home?”, “I hear everything”, “The call is not for you, but for the teacher”, “Everyone will jump from the roof, and will you jump too?” , “Tell everyone, we’ll laugh too”, “Maybe you can teach a lesson?” ...

Longing continued at the institute. It was easy to get there. Outrageous competitions existed only in a few prestigious universities, while the rest took almost everyone.

But our children will have to compete not only with their classmates, but with the whole world. With millions of smart Indians, Chinese, Singaporeans, Jordanians, Mexicans, Brazilians ... And the difficult Russian language is not at all a salvation from this competition. I'm not talking about hard physical labor. Not about the work of a janitor in the winter, which will be given to an unrequited Tajik, and not about harvesting, which will be taken by a Vietnamese. No. I'm talking about intellectual and creative specialties.

Do you need beautiful packaging for your product? The Moscow design studio will take 10-20 thousand dollars for this work and in a month will show you three options. In Singapore, talented guys will do it three times faster and cheaper. And no worse. Artists on the Arbat promise to paint your embellished portrait for $50? Through a webcam, a Chinese artist will do it for a dozen (payment by card, drawing via the Internet).

There will be mobile anti-crisis governments that will solve the problems of entire countries. An excerpt from the portfolio of some "Rurik International": "We are not connected with your mafia, your officials and your oil lobby. We solve your problems! In four years we were able to pay off Greece's external debt, and in six years we increased Slovenia's GDP by 42%…”

All this will be. It is impossible to avoid this, but you can prepare for it. And the ability to invent dramatically increases your chances in the competition.

The world is changing very quickly. The very notion of completed higher education will soon disappear. Because it's complete nonsense. Education can only be incomplete. A person must learn new things all his life. Otherwise, it will simply be uncompetitive.

We often misrepresent Darwin. He never said that the fittest survive. The world in this case would be inhabited only by tyrannosaurs and saber-toothed tigers. “It is not the strongest who survive, but the most receptive to change.”

Twitterization of thinking

No matter how your life goes, your mind will protect you more than your sword.

Keep it sharp.

Patrick Rothfuss

There is another very good reason to train your brain. We are witnessing a tectonic shift in human thinking - in the way people think. More precisely, in how they process information.

Usually, when talking about memory, it is divided into short-term and long-term. Or, if we draw parallels with a computer, operational and permanent. Our "RAM" is responsible for the ability to think logically, analyze and solve problems, regardless of previous experience. Permanent memory is the accumulated experience and the ability to use the acquired knowledge and skills.

More recently, permanent memory has dominated. The schoolchildren kept pieces of the Bradis table, physical constants, formulas, dates of events and numbers of CPSU congresses in their heads. Large volumes of text and hundreds of poems were memorized. Now, when almost any information is at arm's length, it all depreciates very quickly. In a good institute, you can bring any source of information to the exam - it is much more important not to remember it, but to be able to work with it. (I remember the story of how a student brought his friend, a graduate student, with him to the exam. “You said - anyone!”) RAM begins to outweigh the constant. Who will remember the date of the battle of Cannes, if, if desired, the answer can be found in a few seconds? How many phone numbers can you remember now? Your memory has been relaxed by a notebook on your phone? And your parents memorized numbers in dozens.

Today, in order to obtain a license, London taxi drivers must know the location of 10,000 streets in order to find the fastest route for the passenger. Tomorrow this knowledge will hinder them. Because the navigator will find the shortest path much better. Including traffic jams and accidents.

Maybe your children will work in a specialty that does not yet exist. And then change it several times. It will be more important not to be able to learn something once (ram it into a permanent memory), but the ability to quickly relearn. Perhaps we are the penultimate generation that massively studies foreign languages. Especially considering how fast machine translation is developing. And all this is a whole layer in the mind, a skill that greatly affects a person’s thinking. On one side of the scale there are two or three languages that the vast majority of people manage today, on the other - the possibility of communication / reading in any of the existing (or dead) languages. The only difference is that you kept the learned foreign language in your head. And they thought using the possibilities of this language.

A very interesting thing is happening before our eyes - the narrowing of the areas for imagination. You can make a conditional rating in which a person is a co-author of a work of art.

In the first place in the ranking is music (without words) - in it all the images and emotions are in the listener's head. The second is literature. The reader invents the characters himself. The third is theater. Only there do you believe that the swaying piece of cloth is the sea. The invention of television and computers led to the fact that there were things more interesting than books and theater. This is very noticeable in how much children have changed and how they prefer to spend their free time.

And on TV (cinema) there is very little space for co-authorship. Remember the old films - the action in them developed quite slowly and there was time to empathize with the hero (and empathy is, in a way, co-creation). Now, special effects and a very eventful plot of the film leave little room for empathy. The main thing here is to follow the plot.

And even in computer games, everything is already chewed for the player. Maximum realism. There is nothing to think. And the brains rest.

Here is a screenshot of the computer game Rogue (1980). Dungeon crawl. Opponents were designated by letters: C - centaur, Z - zombies, etc. The scope for the player's imagination was maximum. Not like in modern computer games.

It's kind of like moving from a village to a city. There is no shortage of physical work and walking in the countryside. Citizens have to go to the gym for this. The same thing happens with our cognitive abilities. In conditions when a person does not need to train his memory to memorize a large amount of information that is always at hand, mental abilities weaken. Invention allows you to always keep the brain in good shape.

It is too difficult to assess the scale of the coming changes. We are part of the process and cannot look at it from the outside. Nevertheless, some things can be predicted now.

The number of large texts will be reduced in the literature. It will be too difficult for the reader to keep them in his head. The storyline will be simplified. The number of main characters will be reduced. For comparison: in the classic Chinese novel "Dream in the Red Chamber" there are about forty main characters and almost 500 minor ones. And this is relatively recent - the 18th century. Twitterization of consciousness cannot pass without a trace.

The same will happen in cinema. The ball will be ruled by sequels and series. Stories with familiar characters. And after a few generations, difficulties with understanding the classics will begin. Too strange for an unprepared reader will be the feelings and relationships of the characters.

It is much more difficult to predict what will give us the inevitable increase in RAM. Most likely, relations between people will move to a qualitatively new level. People will become emotionally more developed. The brutal ideal of a man will become a thing of the past, and progress in empathy and intuition, multiplied by technical capabilities, will lead human communication to some kind of telepathy.

Gregor Reish. Margarita Philosophica, 1503. Two dogs Veritas (Latin "truth") and Falsitas (Latin "falsehood") pursue a hare Problema (Latin "task"), logic, armed with the sword of syllogism, hurries behind

Interestingly, this is far from the first tectonic shift that is happening in consciousness. For example, the advent of the book has radically changed human thinking. Memory has a “crutch” that people have learned to use very well. Although there were philosophers who sharply opposed the institution of the book. The book weakens the memory. The book is too dangerous. She cannot choose her reader. And it is completely unknown in whose hands knowledge can fall.

All the really good ideas I've ever come up with came to me while I was milking a cow.

Grant Wood

The most important element of creative thinking is you (let me remind you, just in case, that there is no other thinking except creative thinking). First of all, you must know yourself very well. Know what you like and when you think best.

The first will help you reward yourself for a good thought and, as a result, enjoy it. After all, the main condition for progress in any field is to enjoy the work that you are doing.

And the second stimulates the thought process. For example, Schiller was brought into a creative state by the smell of rotting apples, Zola tied himself to a chair, Wagner liked to hold silk in his hands, Charlotte Bronte peeled potatoes, Agatha Christie washed dishes. Milton, Rossini, Leibniz, Kant and Descartes worked while lying in bed, Beethoven poured ice water on his head. When Balzac lived in poverty, he wrote on the bare walls the names of objects that he would like to see in his house: “tapestry”, “Venetian mirror”, “chest of drawers”, “painting by Raphael”. This inspired him.

Someone thinks well during the rain, someone - sitting by the fireplace. The British believe that almost all great scientific discoveries were made in one of the three b - bus, bed, bath (bus, bed, bath).

Smells play a huge role in inspiration. It can be the smell of freshly cut grass, rotting leaves, or the smell of ozone. For example, the "cannon king" Alfred Krupp was inspired by the "healthy rural air." More specifically, the smell of manure. He connected the working room and the stable with ventilation.

The method of denying yourself something you love works very well. It can be a chocolate bar, pistachio ice cream, a computer game or a fishing trip. Postpone pleasure until you come up with something interesting. And the reward will seem more desirable to you. And you will enjoy the thought process. Because the reward follows.

You can inspire yourself and others in any way you want. Difficulties can also inspire. Difficulties are challenges. In 1914, in order to find people to participate in the Imperial Transantarctic Expedition, Ernest Shackleton printed an ad in British newspapers: “Seeking companions for a dangerous journey. Small salary, cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. The likelihood of returning home is low. Honor and recognition in case of success. Sir Ernest Shackleton.

It was not possible to achieve the goal then. One of the two ships sank, covered in ice. But Shackleton managed to save the entire team - not a single person died.

In 1940, in his first speech as Prime Minister, Winston Churchill inspired the nation to fight against the Nazis by saying: "I have nothing to offer (to the British) but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

Salvador Dali wrote about Catalan fishermen who decorate altar statues with their catch - dying lobsters. The spectacle of agony makes them sympathize with the passions of the Lord with special force. Lobster fishermen inspired compassion.

Another great source of inspiration is PURPOSE. The more interesting it is, the faster your brains will work. If you can, come up with the most interesting goal of all possible. Raise your stakes. Compare, for example, the trip of the Musketeers to England for pendants (saving the queen, and hence the whole of France) with a trip to England in order to drink English beer. What plot is more interesting to think about? If you are, for example, an employee, and the task before you seems boring and uninteresting, try to imagine that this is your business. And that you mortgaged your apartment. And if you fail to do your job today, tomorrow you will have nowhere to live. Greatly stimulating.

A person can do a favorite thing for an order of magnitude longer than an unloved one. And he will be much better at it. JK Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, had a good recipe for a happy life, consisting of just two points:

1. Choose an activity that you enjoy the most in the world.

2. Find people willing to pay money for it.

When you are seriously passionate about something - philately, Kabbalah or annelids - you begin to feel that the world is helping you. You are like a puzzle trying to attach any object to your world. And when the puzzle matches even a little, you think that this is a Sign. And it moves you forward. Conclusion: get involved. Believe in what you do. And the whole world will work for you.

There is no reason to go to a job you hate. In this case, you are simply throwing your life into the trash can. And she is priceless. The chance of you being born is practically zero. Imagine the huge number of accidents that led to your birth. Your parents could not meet and not fall in love with each other, anything could happen to you dozens of times. Multiply it now at least for several generations. Add wars and disease. Neither you nor I should have been alive. Treat your life like an awesome, incredible gift. Our life is so arranged that we can only waste it. You cannot now, while you are in a bad mood, not live, but later, when it improves, live the accumulated. It is up to you to decide how to spend such a precious resource as time.

Borges had a beautiful metaphor in his lecture on Buddhism. He wrote about the probability of becoming a man: “Of all the fates that fall to people (you can become a spirit, a plant, an animal ...), the most difficult is to be a man, and we must use it ... Buddha imagines a turtle at the bottom of the sea and a bracelet floating on the water. Once every six hundred years, the tortoise sticks its head out, and very rarely does its head stick into the bracelet. And the Buddha says, “It is no more common than with the turtle and the bracelet that we become human.”

There was a good exhibition in New York a few years ago. The camera was loaded with film, put on the self-timer and thrown off the skyscraper. He flew, spinning, and shot what accidentally fell into the lens - windows, people in the windows, walls, a piece of the sky. And then crashed on the asphalt. The photographs taken by the camera in flight became the exposure. It seems to me that this photo session is a good metaphor for our life. Nobody asked us if we want to be born. Do these parents? In this country? Is it at this time?

No. We were just thrown from a skyscraper - fly. And the maximum that we are capable of is to make the photo session interesting.

But, on the other hand, we are very lucky with time and era. We have forgotten what serfdom is. And there was no more corporal punishment in our school. We should not fall to our knees when the first person of the state passes by. We can choose our own profession. And marry for love. And for a lot of what a person now does completely freely, there used to be severe punishment. And yet a person has the right to a dignified old age. He does not need, as in the "Legend of Narayama", to knock out his front teeth with a stone so that the children can take him to die on the sacred mountain.

We were born in an empire and saw its collapse. Perhaps we will still have time to catch the collapse of another empire, which now seems invincible. We had a chance to cross the line of two millennia and survive a dozen of the promised ends of the world. We have been able to learn more in our lives than any person in previous generations - to see the world through the eyes of a bee and hear how whales talk. From the point of view of the people of the 19th century, our possibilities are even difficult to imagine.

In a few seconds, we can find the answer to almost any question (if the answer exists). We can find any book or look at any work of art, no matter how far they are from us. With the help of computer translation, we can very quickly understand the meaning of what is written in any language: Arabic, Basque, Welsh, Dutch, Danish and so on alphabetically. We can talk to people on another continent and travel almost anywhere in the world. We can accurately navigate in space and count with lightning speed. We can record any sound and capture any view. We can become eyewitnesses of the event anywhere in the world live ... And that means we have much more opportunities to do something worthy.

But the availability of knowledge leads to an interesting effect - people stop appreciating it. There is a law: the less information comes to a person, the more important it is for him. The ability to easily get an answer to any question reduces the number of people who want to ask a question. There is a theory that it is the ability of a person to ask questions that distinguishes him from animals.

I was once inspired by the story of the American physicist Michio Kaku: “Light elements (with an atomic weight lower than iron) can be synthesized in a white dwarf. Then, after billions of years, the star collapses, creating huge pressures that actually push electrons into the nuclei. As a result, the temperature jumps to trillions of degrees. Gravity energy causes an explosion, creating a supernova. High temperature synthesizes elements with an atomic weight higher than iron. This means that the Sun is not the "mother" of the Earth. The temperature of the Sun is only so high that the process of hydrogen nucleosynthesis with the formation of helium is possible. This means that our true "mother" sun was an unnamed star (or cluster of stars) that died billions of years ago in a supernova explosion that saturated nearby nebulae with elements above iron in atomic weights that make up our bodies. More precisely, our bodies are made of stardust, stars that died billions of years ago.”

Your value lies primarily in your uniqueness. There is a good Hasidic story about Rabbi Zusya. Before his death, Zusya said: “In another world they will not ask me:“ Why were you not Moses? They will ask me: “Why were you not Zusya?”

The pleasure of creativity

When my daughter was seven years old, she asked me what I do at work. I replied that I teach children to draw. She was perplexed: "You mean they forgot how it's done?"

Howard Ikemoto

Play is the best way to enjoy creativity. If a child is offered to constantly run around the field with the ball from one goal to another, then he will get bored pretty soon. But he can play football for hours. So, you need to turn creativity into a game.

The game is all about the rules. And rules are limits. To ask a person to come up with something is to confuse him. Limitations are great for waking up the imagination. Hemingway once came up with a story in just six words: For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn. And immediately it became interesting. A whole genre of such stories has emerged. Then Frederick Brown wrote The Shortest Scary Story Ever Written: “The last man on earth was sitting in a room. There was a knock on the door."

Tonino Guerra once made a bet that he could make a full-fledged film with a plot in ten seconds. Here's what happened: “A woman is watching TV. There is a broadcast of the launch of the spacecraft. As the time counts down to the start: 10, 9, 8… - the woman picks up the phone and spins the dial. At the very moment when the screen shows the launch of the rocket, she says into the phone: - " He left…”

A very useful thing is to take and change any constant. Try, for example, to imagine what society would be like:

What if humans had a tail?

– if the words were visible?

In the 50s of the last century, the American writer Roger Price came up with a good game - drudles (Droodle). This is a symbiosis of two words - doodle + riddle (riddle - a riddle, doodle - abstract doodles that a person draws while talking on the phone).

As a rule, it is a square with several simple geometric shapes. And with many possible versions.

For example:

The elephant is slowly coming out of the fog.

Two worms are sunbathing on a desert island.

The head of an almost bald man through the eyes of a bird.

The imprint of the pig's patch in the passport.

Drudles were very popular. They were used as a test for creative thinking and the ability to look at a situation from different angles. Frank Zappa had a drudle on the cover of his 1982 CD: Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch. Another possible interpretation is that the pyramid mother is feeding her child.

Try it yourself.

For starters: four elephants sniffing an orange

Interestingly, not only fair play develops the imagination of children. For example, a lot of people completely independently figure out how to cheat in the game "Battleship" (not to finish drawing one single-deck ship in order to insert it later into the last free cell). We dealt with it like this: one player draws the field and ships with a pen, and the other with a pencil. And when the game starts, the opponents change their writing instruments.

Somehow we came up with a new verb - "donkey-stomp". This is when one player digs a hole for another, but falls into it himself.

A very useful exercise is to take well-known games and change the rules in them. For example, in chess. A game of chess is usually seen as a metaphor for a single battle. The pieces remain themselves, and only the pawn has a chance to "pump" - reaching the end of the board, it can turn into any piece (except the king).

Or you can look at a chess game as a multi-year campaign in which each piece can rise to the rank of field marshal. It is ridiculous to compare the combat experience of the rook at the beginning of the game with its own experience in the endgame, when it has already smashed the enemy's rear or passed through the "mill".

To play, you need two sets of chess pieces and one felt-tip pen. When a pawn, for example, eats an enemy pawn, a mark (badge) is placed on it with a felt-tip pen. Eats two pawns - turns into a bishop or knight. It's the same with other figures: in order to move to a higher level, they need to score the missing points. So, for example, a bishop, eating an enemy knight or bishop, turns into a rook. Approximate value of pieces: knight/bishop = three pawns; rook = five pawns; queen = two rooks. The queen, having doubled her combat experience, turns into a super queen - she can walk like a knight and fly over her pieces. At the same time, the strategy of the game changes: other things being equal, it is the "pumped" pieces that are attacked.

And you can add an element of chance to chess. Before each turn, you roll a die. And you can only move with the piece that you get. For example: one is a pawn, two is a knight, three is a bishop, four is a rook, five is a queen, six is a king.

Painting by Adrian van de Venne dedicated to children's games. Written clearly under the influence of Brueghel. It would be interesting to make an evolutionary tree of children's games: how they appeared, changed and then were replaced by more interesting games

The history of children's games and their influence on the child's imagination is very curious. Unfortunately, there are not very many materials on this topic. Children have only relatively recently come to be regarded as something worthy of study. If I am not mistaken, the first European literary work, the main character of which was a child, is The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837). In the three-volume British Encyclopedia of 1768, 40 pages are devoted to diseases of horses, 40 pages to algebra, nothing to children.

Many children's games came from the world of adults - for example, from Victorian England (in between social events, balls, theaters, wars and music, people also had long evenings).

The game "Poor Kitty" - the host got on all fours and began to crawl between the guests, plaintively meowing. The one to whom he crawled up and began to rub against his leg had to pat him on the head (scratch behind the ear) and say with a completely stony face: "Poor pussy." If at the same time he smiled or laughed, then he himself became a poor pussycat.

The game "Sculptor" - one person (model) took some kind of pretentious pose, and the host tried to put everyone else in the same position (it seems to me that this is a very politicized game).

The game "Musical Chairs", which we played back in the pioneer camp, also came from England. This is when everyone starts walking to the music around the chairs, which are one less than those playing. When the music stops, everyone quickly sits down on the nearest chair. The one who lacks a chair is out.

As well as all kinds of charades, forfeits, riddles (Queen Victoria was very fond of the game of riddles), anagrams, burimes, blind man's buffs ...

There are now 44 toys in the US National Toy Hall of Fame. They are selected based on four criteria: widespread acceptance, durability (more than just a fashionable toy), stimulation of the imagination and creativity, and revolutionary (toys that have influenced the entire toy industry):

3D glasses View-Master

Bike

Kite

"Magic screen" with an erasable image

Truck

wooden horse

Wooden constructor (Lincoln Logs)

"Gum for hands" Silly Putty

Railway

Game Jacks

Atari 2600 game console

Game Boy battery-operated game console (we had some analogue was “Just you wait!”) Toy oven (Easy Bake Oven)

Potato head toy

Slinky Spring Toy

Constructor Tinkertoy

Doll "Rag Annie"

Metal constructor

"Monopoly"

Board game-walker (Candy Land)

Plasticine (more precisely, Play-Doh)

Teddy bear

Empty cardboard box

Roller Skates

jump rope

Skateboard

Scrabble

Soldiers (G. I. Joe)

Glass balls

Trolley (Radio Flyer)

Tricycle

Hula Hup

colored crayons

Jack in the Box

Please note that one of the best toys of all time was recognized as an empty cardboard box.

Instructions for the correct use of Mary Oliver's life:

1. Pay attention.

2. Be surprised.

3. Talk about it.

The most popular entertainment for children in the United States at the beginning of the last century was crayons. The average child spent about 28 minutes a day drawing and erasing.

Children love to copy adults. They have no one else to imitate. Yuri Bondarev's book "School through the Ages" describes the games of the first pioneer detachments of the city of Livny in the 1920s.

"Red spark" - two run away from their pursuers. The task of the evaders is to return to their original place without being caught by the pursuers.

"Secret meeting" - a group of guys hides in a forest and whispers a conversation. The task of the other group is to discreetly find the conspirators.

“Throw aptly” - a caricature of the enemy of socialism is tied to a peg, for example, a priest, Mussolini, Poincaré, etc. Playing from fifteen steps, as in towns, they throw sticks at these targets.

"Streets and lanes" - two groups depict employees of the Cheka and speculators. "Chekists" catch and arrest "speculators".

Many new children's games have been remade from the old ones. For example, the game "Red Flag" is actually the old game "Kite and mother hen". Three groups of players participated in it - the workers of the USSR, foreign workers and capitalists. Foreign workers lined up behind the capitalist, each holding his hands on the belt of the previous one. The worker of the USSR tried to give one of the red flags he had to the last foreign worker in the chain, and the capitalist prevented this. When a foreign worker received a flag, he fled to the USSR. When all the foreign workers ended up in the USSR, everyone shouted "hurrah!", and the capitalists ran away.

It is interesting that in Finland it is not the child who is punished, but his favorite toy - they put it in a corner, lock it up ... This affects the delinquent child much more strongly.

“There are times in life when people have to hold on and there are times when they have to let go. Balloons are designed to teach young children to understand the difference."

(Terry Pratchett).

“My responsibilities include training young actors to work in comedy roles. These roles are based on what we call the image of the Clown. This Clown is in each of us, and everyone can discover the comic side of his "I". Imagine that most of us have a being that we call a "total idiot" and we try to hide it all the time. In the first lessons, we are looking for this creature, and then we look at what image can be formed on this basis, what type of idiot it will be.

(Mark Bell, actor and teacher of plastic arts at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art).

Imagine yourself in your mother's womb. You are practically floating in weightlessness. You are growing fast. Hear the mother's heart. Sometimes you hear the echoes of the outside world. You probably feel the taste of what your mother eats in your own way.

I doubt you can see anything, but maybe your brain generates some kind of color spots. Then it becomes crowded in your cozy world, your limbs constantly rest against something, and then ...

And then - birth. Boom! Blinding bright light, pain, fear, all kinds of colors, very loud sounds, blood, gravity and a cut umbilical cord. You are in a world about which you know absolutely nothing. You are surrounded by some huge creatures. And you have only a few basic skills. And you begin to get used to the world around you.

And since you have nothing to compare it with, everything seems right and logical to you. If you were born among cannibals or in a slave-owning society, you would also believe that everything in this world is just. It is difficult for a person to question the structure of the world - their sizes differ too much. I am sure that in three hundred years our familiar world will seem backward and miserable.

At first, there are only your own for you. And all your problems are related to food and sleep. Then the world starts to expand. At arm's length. Then you start to roll over. Then crawl. Walk. There are dangers in the world from which you are protected. And you begin to gradually create a map of the world. It has warm and cold. Dry and wet. Edible and inedible. Soft and hard. Dull and sharp. Safe and dangerous. Yours and others. White and black. Good and bad. Beautiful and ugly. You start classifying.

Classification

Anna Akhmatova divided people into two categories:

Coffee-cat-Mandelstam,

Tea-dog-Pasternak.

Isaiah Berlin in his essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (1953) wrote that there are two types of people:

The fox is a cunning creature, able to invent a million complex strategies to stealthily attack the hedgehog,

The hedgehog is simple and unwieldy.

The fox waits, silently hiding at the crossroads of paths. The hedgehog goes straight into the paws of the fox. “Yeah,” the fox thinks, “so you got caught!” She jumps out from behind cover and rushes towards the hedgehog. The little hedgehog, sensing danger, looks up and thinks: “Well, again, will she really never learn anything?” And it turns into a prickly ball, becomes a sphere with sharp needles sticking out in all directions. The fox, leaning towards his victim, sees what protection the hedgehog has erected, and refuses to attack. Back in the forest, she begins to develop a new way of attack. Every day the battle of the fox and the hedgehog is repeated, and, despite the sophisticated cunning of the fox, the hedgehog always wins.

Foxes strive for several goals at the same time and see the world in all its complexity. They "scatter about, trying to achieve a lot at once, their thinking is not united by a concept or vision." Hedgehogs, for their part, simplify the world by reducing it to a simple organizing idea, principle, or concept that ties everything together and guides their actions. No matter how complex the world is, the hedgehog reduces all questions and problems to a simplified, sometimes even primitive, idea that the hedgehog understands. For the hedgehog, everything that does not fit into his own concept does not matter. But this does not mean at all that the hedgehog is stupid. Against. He knows that the essence of the deepest understanding is simple.

Berlin wrote that, for example, Shakespeare and Pushkin are foxes, while Dostoevsky and Nietzsche are hedgehogs.

The ancient Greeks had three main types of love:

Eros - passionate love-hobby, the desire for complete physical possession of a loved one.

Ludus - love is a game, a game for fun. In such love, feelings are quite superficial. So much so that treason is allowed on both sides.

Storge - love-friendship based on tender, warm, reliable relationships.

And their combinations:

Pragma (ludus and storge). Calculated love. With elements of benefit (not necessarily material).

Agape (eros and storge). Selfless and sacrificial love.

Mania (eros and ludus). Love is an obsession.

Hindus believed that love passion has ten stages: contemplation, thoughtfulness, insomnia, emaciation, uncleanliness, dullness, loss of shame, insanity, fainting, death.

Italo Calvino about books:

Books written for anything but reading.

Books already read that didn't need to be opened because they belonged to the already read category before they were written.

Books that you would gladly read if you had several lives, but, alas, there is only one life.

Books that you intend to read, but must read other books first.

Overpriced books that you'll have to wait to buy until they're doubled down.

Books that you could borrow from someone. Books that everyone has read, so we can assume that you read them too.

Books you've been planning to read for a long time.

Books you've been looking for years without success.

Books about what you are doing at the moment.

Books to keep on hand just in case.

Books you could put off, say, until the summer.

Books missing from your bookshelf next to other books.

Books that suddenly arouse a burning and not entirely justified interest in you.

Books read a long time ago; now it's time to reread them.

You constantly pretended to read these books: it was time to actually read them.

In 1950, General Motors tried to simplify the conversation between mechanic and customer. To do this, experts divided all the sounds that a car makes during breakdowns into seven types.

1. Rattle, crackle, rumble (Rattle). A series of sharp sounds, as if something solid is being shaken in an iron can. This noise usually occurs when one broken part hits another.

2. Heavy blow, dull sound (Thump). A dull sound with which a soft object beats a hard one. For example, the noise of a flat tire.

3. Creak, squeak (Squeak). The piercing sound of two metal parts rubbing against each other. The sound can be harsh and turn into a screech. As a rule, indicates a lack of lubrication.

4. Clang, grinding (Grind). A continuous metallic sound made by the grinding of metal on metal. This sound may be coming from the gearbox.

5. Knock, noise, blow (Knock). A higher pitched sound than a thud. As a rule, it comes from the crankshaft. The sound is higher than the sound of a running engine.

6. Scrape, scratching (Scrape). The sound produced by rubbing two parts. Screech of brakes.

7. Hissing, whistling (Hiss). The sound of air escaping under pressure, the sound of boiling water in a hot pan.

In the essay-story "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins", Jorge Luis Borges describes "a kind of Chinese encyclopedia" called "Heavenly Empire of Beneficent Knowledge", which contains a classification of animals, according to which animals are divided into:

Belonging to the emperor;

Embalmed;

Tamed;

milk pigs;

fabulous;

Stray dogs;

Included in this classification;

running around like crazy

Countless;

Drawn with the finest camel hair brush;

Broke a flower vase;

Similar from a distance to flies.

A quote from Xu Zeshu, who lived in the 15th century and listed options for when tea is appropriate:

“Tea can be drunk at such a time:

When you are idle

When you listen to boring poems;

When thoughts are confused;

When you beat the beat while listening to a song;

When the music stops;

When you live in solitude;

When you live the life of a learned man;

When you talk late at night;

When you are engaged in scientific research during the day;

In the marriage chambers;

Hosting a learned husband or educated singers;

When you visit a friend who has returned from distant wanderings;

In good weather;

At dusk;

When you contemplate the boats gliding down the canal;

Among sprawling trees and bamboos;

When flowers bloom;

On a hot day near the lotus bushes;

Burning incense in the yard;

When the younger ones left the room;

When you visit a secluded temple;

When you contemplate the streams and stones that make up a picturesque picture.

Development

An adult creative person is a child who survived.

Ursula Le Guin

In the first three years, a person learns 80% of everything that he learns during his life. He begins to see and hear, crawl, walk and run, taste and smell, speak and understand.

The child develops at a fantastic rate. By the age of four, he, as a rule, already knows how to speak his native language perfectly without an accent (and if he is lucky with multilingual parents, several), read, and has an excellent understanding of the structure of the world around him. Moreover, he already knows how to manipulate adults. Just imagine for a second: against a small person, the life experience of two adults and all the power of modern pedagogy. And a four-year-old child easily beats them.

This speed of development is primarily due to the fact that the child asks questions all the time - about 400 a day. Asking questions is one of the most important things to develop. Because it means willingness to know the answers. And that means learning.

And do not be embarrassed that the child does stupid things. He must do them. Your task is to help him do interesting (and safe) stupid things.

It happens that parents give a child, for example, an expensive doll. And he tears off her arms and legs, and then swaps them. Parents are upset - why did you ruin a new toy? Meanwhile, this is not barbarism - this is the real beginning of creativity. The child wanted to know how the toy works, and he:

Took it apart;

Looked at the result of his efforts;

And then he created a new toy that did not exist until then. This is the basic process of thinking - creating something new.

1. Parsing into parts (deconstruction) we will denote with a hammer sign

2. The ability to disassemble the world around you into its component parts is extremely important. But the most important thing is to find fundamentally new, unfamiliar elements in a pile of disassembled. The isolation of this new (analysis) will be denoted by the magnifying glass

Faced with completely unknown things, a person first tries to protect himself from the new: this cannot be. So, for example, when the first skin of a platypus was sent to England, zoologists decided that it was a hoax - some taxidermist sewed a duck's beak to the skin of an animal that looked like a beaver. No one believed that a mammal could lay eggs and also be able to produce poison.

Disbelief in the new is a completely understandable defensive reaction. A person feels very uncomfortable when the unknown invades his understandable and habitable world.

For example, Carl Linnaeus was upset that mushrooms were destroying his coherent system of classification of flora and fauna. He called the entire group of mushrooms chaos and united them under the name "mystery". And in a Latin work on grammar of the 12th century, grammar was regarded as an invention of the devil, because it teaches, in particular, the declension of the word "God" in the plural.

3. Creation of a new (synthesis) - denoted by the sign of the constructor

Simplifying a little, we can say that the whole world consists only of objects and ways of their connection with each other. Moreover, very often the methods of communication become more important than the objects themselves.

In kindergarten, I loved to draw. The drawings were very ordinary. For example, a house.

He always had a pipe, a door and a window. A door - so that you can enter the house, a window - so that it is light in the house, and the smoke shows that someone lives in the house.

And then my friend came up, finished drawing just a few lines, and a miracle happened!

Drawing from flat became voluminous. From very childish to almost adult. I learned what perspective is.

In fact, all childhood is filled with such discoveries: how to lift a heavy thing with a lever, how to tie shoelaces in a bow, how to melt lead from batteries, how to make a carbide bomb, how to assemble a boiler from a piece of wire, two blades and an eraser, how to ride a bicycle without how to grow blue vitriol crystals, how to make a crossbow, how to use a shard of a light bulb to remove grades in a diary, how to make a smoke bomb from ping-pong balls, how to stick a worm on a hook, how to throw knives, how to make a telephone from two matchboxes and threads, how to make a fire with one match, how a mechanical block works when lifting weights ...

And to guess that if one block is not enough, then you can put several of them, a person can independently.

You never start solving a problem from scratch. All your previous life gives you a lot of algorithms that you will apply in practice.

I once looked at drawings from a medieval bestiary. All those griffins, centaurs and cynocephals. And it struck me that these creatures are nothing more than known animals taken apart, which were simply assembled in a different order. In fact, this is a very simple children's designer, from several simple forms of which you can create a huge number of new creatures.

A very interesting question arises: is it possible, in principle, to come up with something that has no analogues in the world around us? Most likely, this is impossible. But by combining existing options, we are constantly pushing the boundaries of our imagination.

Structure

Reality is infinitely complex for our understanding.

We must simplify.

Aldous Huxley

Knowing the world is a bit like a city map that a novice driver has in his head. He knows several different routes. And then he drives a new road, and the scattered pieces of the city are combined for him into one familiar area. Man begins to systematize the world. Look for patterns. Settle in. Lay it out on the shelves.

Compare two quotes. Their structure is the same.

“Fiction was invented the day Jonah came home and told his wife that he had been gone for three days because he had been swallowed by a whale.”

(Gabriel Garcia Marquez).

“Literature was not born on the day when from the Neanderthal valley shouting: “Wolf, wolf!” - the boy ran out, followed by the gray wolf himself, breathing down his neck; Literature was born on the day when the boy came running with a cry: “Wolf, wolf!”, And there was no wolf behind him”

(Vladimir Nabokov).

It is human nature to simplify. It's unavoidable. We have a huge number of simple answers to complex questions in our heads. This saves energy and creates the illusion of knowledge. In the explained world, life is more comfortable and safer. Great Simplifiers of the World and their Universal Answers are needed.

For example:

“What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and all that?” 42 (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

What is the main driving force of society? Class struggle (Karl Marx).

What did the world come from? From fire (Heraclitus of Ephesus).

What did the world come from? From the water (Thales of Miletus).

What did the world come from? From the earth (Xenophanes of Colophon).

What did the world come from? Out of the air (Anaximenes of Miletus).

Who created the Universe?(The God).

What is the essence of being? World Will (Arthur Schopenhauer).

Why did some animals survive and others not? Natural selection (Charles Darwin).

What is the world made of? From monads (Gottfried Leibniz).

What constantly influences our consciousness and behavior? The Unconscious (Sigmund Freud).

Having understood how the plot frame works, it can be changed beyond recognition.

O'Henry has a Christmas story called Jimmy Valentine's Message. In it, a professional burglar saves a girl locked in a safe, risking jail time. Everything ends well.

This story is based on real events. The bugbear, sitting in prison, is promised to be released if he urgently opens a safe with important documents of some senator. To better feel the castle, Jimmy Valentine's prototype cuts off the skin on his fingertips. When he opens the safe, he is imprisoned again, saying that it would be crazy to let such a dangerous person go free. The bugbear in prison goes crazy.

In Leskov’s “The Sealed Angel”, in order to save the icon of the guardian angel, the Old Believer crossed from one river bank to the other along the chains of an unfinished bridge during a stormy ice drift.

The story is also based on real events: during the construction of a chain bridge across the Dnieper in Kyiv, a Kaluga bricklayer during Easter crossed the chains of an unfinished bridge from the Kiev coast to Chernigov. Only not for the icon, but for vodka, which was sold cheaper there.

The Secret History by Procopius of Caesarea (circa 550) tells the story of Dead Souls:

“One cannot, of course, pass over in silence what he [Justinian] did to the soldiers, over whom he placed the meanest of all people, ordering them to collect as much money as possible from this source, and they were well aware that the twelfth part of what they get will go to them. The name was given to them logothetes. Every year they did the following. According to the law, a soldier's salary is not paid equally to everyone in a row, but the young and those who had just begun military service were paid less, those who were already experienced and in the middle of the soldier's lists were higher. For those who have grown old and are about to leave the service, the salary was even higher, so that later, living already in a private life, they would have enough means for subsistence, and when they happen to finish the days of their lives, they could leave something to their household as a consolation. then from their own funds.

Thus, Time, constantly allowing warriors of lower levels to ascend to the places of the dead and those who left the service, regulated the salary received by each from the treasury on the basis of seniority. However, the so-called logothetes did not allow the names of the dead to be removed from the lists, even if many died at the same time for various reasons, especially as happened during numerous wars. In addition, they did not replenish the soldier's lists for a long time, and they did this often. As a result, things turned out for the state in that the number of soldiers in active service became less and less; for the surviving soldiers, by the fact that, pushed aside by the long dead, they remained in a rank lower than they deserved, and received a salary less than what would have been given to them in accordance with their rank; for the logothetes, by the fact that all this time they allocated Justinian a share of the soldiers' money.

In Borges, all literary plots are reduced to four main ones:

On the assault and defense of the fortified city (Troy);

About the long return (Odysseus);

About the search (Jason);

On the suicide of a god (Odin, Attis).

Georges Polti proposed 36 plots to which famous plays are reduced:

The rescue;

Revenge pursuing crime;

Revenge close for close;

Hounded;

Sudden misfortune;

Someone's victim;

Courageous attempt;

kidnapping;

Mystery;

Achievement;

Hatred between loved ones;

Rivalry between relatives;

Adultery accompanied by murder;

Madness;

Fatal negligence;

involuntary incest;

Involuntary killing of a loved one;

Self-sacrifice in the name of the ideal;

Self-sacrifice for the sake of loved ones;

A victim of boundless joy;

Sacrifice of loved ones in the name of duty;

rivalry of unequals;

Adultery;

Crime of love;

The dishonor of a beloved being;

Love that encounters obstacles;

Love for the enemy;

Ambition;

Fight against god;

groundless jealousy;

Judgement mistake;

Remorse;

newly found;

Loss of loved ones.

Scott Adams, comic book writer about engineer Dilbert, who loves technology more than people, has an interesting formula for funny: humor can be extracted from any situation using the 2 out of 6 rule. To make anything funny, you need at least two of the following:

Cute (cute)

Naughty (immoral)

Bizarre (weird)

Clever (smart)

Recognizable (recognizable)

Cruel (cruel)

The comic is at its best when the cute Dogbert does something cruel in a smart way to recognizable ones.

Two more whales

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

In addition to games, children's imagination stands on two more whales - these are fairy tales and riddles. Let's start with fairy tales.

Tolkien wrote that any magical story has three functions: escape from reality, consolation, and a happy ending. But he did not mention the most important thing - fairy tales awaken the imagination. There is a very important qualitative leap in the development of a child - when he starts to lie. Or invent. Begins to cheat in games. Usually, faced with this, parents are very upset. But in fact, this is a breakthrough into a new dimension, the realization that instead of a single reality “how it really was”, there is an infinite number of other realities “how could it be”. In addition, a huge number of beautiful things are built on deception / inventing: fiction, theater, painting, cinema, politeness ...

The first to apply the principle of deconstruction to fairy tales was our outstanding philologist Vladimir Propp. In the book Morphology of a Fairy Tale, he showed that a huge number of fairy tales are built according to the same schemes.

I will try to explain using the example of two such different stories as “Geese Swans” and “The Lord of the Rings”.

First, a world close to perfection is described.

“Geese-swans” - the classic “once upon a time ... we will bring you a bun, sew a dress, buy a handkerchief” / Tolkien has this sweet Hobbitania.

Then an important prohibition is violated: the girl did not obey her parents' order “do not leave the yard” / Isildur saves the ring, which he was supposed to destroy.

Notes

The vocabulary of an American child aged 6-14 in 1940 is 25,000 words. Today - 10,000 words.

In the United States in the 1960s, fathers spent an average of 45 minutes a day talking to their children. Today - 6 minutes.

End of free trial.

Pages:
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Current page: 1 (total book has 13 pages) [accessible reading excerpt: 3 pages]

Dmitry Chernyshev

Legal support of the publishing house is provided by the law firm "Vegas-Lex"

The creation of new ideas is an operation accessible to everyone and quite simple: it is enough to know in what concentrations to mix the obvious and the impossible.

Clear thinking takes courage

not intellect.

This book is an attempt to understand how people think.

...

Imagine, for example, that the Earth is at war with an alien mind not with weapons, but with ideas, and you urgently need to teach thousands of people how to generate ideas in industrial quantities. What will you start with?

This is the first task.

Thinking alphabet

Philosophy is the struggle against the witchcraft of our intellect through language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

All kinds of mind traps. From admiration for authorities and public opinion to persistence in one's own opinion and wishful thinking.

A cloud of meanings and associations surrounding any word.

The intersection of two clouds of meaning. The vast majority of new ideas are in the area of this intersection.

Constant change in both the world around us and our ideas about it.

Classification of the reality around us. The desire of a person to put everything on the shelves.

Deconstruction. Analysis of any object or concept into its component parts.

Searching for something new and interesting in disassembled parts.

Combinatorics. List of options.

Contrast/war. Potential difference.

Aikido principle. Use of existing energy flows for own purposes.

Changing the size and number of objects. Changing their functions.

Inversion. Changing the meaning to the opposite.

Constructor. Object structure.

Chaos. A random selection of options.

Third Eye. Change of point of view.

Black hole. The absence of an object or part of it.

Formulation of the problem statement.

Relentless effort. Transition to a qualitatively new level.

Guided Dreams.

Why do you need to think?

The missing link in the chain between an animal and a real person is most likely you and me.

Konrad Lorenz

Longing continued at the institute. It was easy to get there. Outrageous competitions existed only in a few prestigious universities, while the rest took almost everyone.

All this will be. It is impossible to avoid this, but you can prepare for it. And the ability to invent dramatically increases your chances in the competition.

Twitterization of thinking

No matter how your life goes, your mind will protect you more than your sword.

Keep it sharp.

Patrick Rothfuss

There is another very good reason to train your brain. We are witnessing a tectonic shift in human thinking - in the way people think. More precisely, in how they process information.

A very interesting thing is happening before our eyes - the narrowing of the areas for imagination. You can make a conditional rating in which a person is a co-author of a work of art.

And even in computer games, everything is already chewed for the player. Maximum realism. There is nothing to think. And the brains rest.

It is too difficult to assess the scale of the coming changes. We are part of the process and cannot look at it from the outside. Nevertheless, some things can be predicted now.

Dmitry Chernyshev

Legal support of the publishing house is provided by the law firm "Vegas-Lex"

The creation of new ideas is an operation accessible to everyone and quite simple: it is enough to know in what concentrations to mix the obvious and the impossible.

Clear thinking takes courage

not intellect.

Thomas Sas

This book is an attempt to understand how people think.

How do people think Dmitry Chernyshev

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Title: How People Think

About the book "How People Think" Dmitry Chernyshev

Have you thought about what you think? How are your thoughts formed and then turned into actions? But Dmitry Chernyshev thought. And not in vain, because a wonderful, but completely ambiguous, book “How People Think” was born.

Dmitry Chernyshev is a blogger. Many readers of the book notice that it is written as a long post. But why can't that be her highlight? The world today is already impossible to imagine without social networks, video blogs, LJ blogs. This is how we live today.

Many people think that there is no sequence, no connection in the book. And if you think about it, how does a modern person think in general? The same passages, jumping from thought to thought. We are accustomed not to think about the situation, but to find at once a dozen explanations and the same number of solutions for it.

The book "How People Think" is filled with a lot of interesting expressions. Sometimes we forget about the little things, we just do not pay attention to them. We guess about something, but again we cannot fully comprehend it.

Dmitry Chernyshev collected in his book "How People Think" all the most interesting and exciting things that we think about almost every day. This book is a real treasure of thoughts about everything in the world.

You can not just read the book, but outline or highlight for yourself the most interesting moments of it. Here, each thought flows smoothly into another. The author not only writes interesting things, but also gives reason to think, reflect on various things that we don’t remember at all or simply don’t think about to the fullest.

The book How People Think is amazing. She has a lot of fans, each of whom found something very important for themselves in her. Of course, like any other such work, the book has been subjected to numerous criticisms. And that's good, so it's a success.

The book "How People Think" should not just be read, but read into it, understood, imbued. Yes, at first glance it is difficult, but we assure you that in the end you will discover a lot of interesting and useful things for yourself.

Here you will find many phrases of famous people that very well explain many of our actions, words and thoughts. The whole book is a total catchphrase. Dmitry Chernyshev collected all the best and supplemented it with his thoughts and statements. The author has written a work that will not only bring pleasure from reading, but also help to rethink many things.

We recommend Dmitry Chernyshev's book to everyone, because we all live in the same world and at the same time, filled with technology. “How People Think” will tell about what a modern person is and how exactly he thinks.

On our site about books, you can download for free or read online the book “How People Think” by Dmitry Chernyshev in epub, fb2, txt, rtf, pdf formats for iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle. The book will give you a lot of pleasant moments and a real pleasure to read. You can buy the full version from our partner. Also, here you will find the latest news from the literary world, learn the biography of your favorite authors. For novice writers, there is a separate section with useful tips and tricks, interesting articles, thanks to which you can try your hand at writing.

Quotes from the book "How People Think" by Dmitry Chernyshev

A person can only be responsible for what he said. But, as a rule, he has to answer for what he heard.

The very notion of completed higher education will soon disappear. Education can only be incomplete. A person must learn new things all his life.

All people think the same way. The only difference is that one person at some point stops thinking, while the other continues.

If a conclusion is a place where a person is tired of thinking, then stereotypes is a place where a person has not even begun to think.

There is no other way of thinking but creative thinking.

The game is all about the rules. And rules are limits. To ask a person to come up with something is to confuse him. Restrictions awaken the imagination.

The biggest danger awaiting your ship is the traps of meanings. These are reefs and shoals. The interlocutor listens attentively until you reach some key word: politics, painting, anarchy, feminism, the death penalty, contemporary art, parenting ... And then he turns on his own idea of the subject. Cloud of meanings surrounding this word. And from that moment on, he no longer listens to you - he wants to tell you his own story.

In a census taken in England and Wales, when asked about religion, 61% answered "Christianity", although the question in the same questionnaire "Are you a believer?" only 29% answered in the affirmative.

We ourselves drive ourselves into a framework from which we are afraid to go.

It is believed that in the game of "rock-paper-scissors" there is a winning strategy: during the second round, a person subconsciously shows what could defeat him in the past.

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