A question for everyone who thinks for a living, especially coders and creative types.
I mean thinking in abstract terms and problem solving, not doing mental arithmetic or deconstructing last night’s CSI.
How do you get your brain to start turning over. Do you have any usefull habits (apart from drinking coffee) that start signals firing? How do you steer thoughts in useful directions? Generate new ideas? Recognise good ideas?
I don’t want to push this in any particular direction so I won’t post mine straight off.
And my email. And I eat my breakfast. And my lunch.
And when the back of my mind informs the front of my mind that I have a clean streamlined mental picture of how I’m going to do my stuff, I go for it.
If I really need to jumpstart the process to get in the mode more quickly, I randomly review some old work — no particular piece for very long, just enough to reacquaint myself with how I accomplished this or that challenging task.
Coffee is only step one. I listen to talk radio or news programs. That is a good way to find out what is going on in the world around you. Being aware of the world around you will get your gears spinning.
I write out notes. Often I never look a them again—and sometimes they’re completely illucid—but it’s helpful for me to get the question down in black and white, then try to break it down into subquestions, to identify all the issues and sift it down into bite-sized chunks. I can get into this unproductive, demoralizing little loop where my mind jumps from problem 1 to problem 2 to problem 3 to problem 2 to problem 3 to problem 1 . . . Once I can get things down on paper, I can see that the problem isn’t as overwhelming as I thought, and I can tell myself, okay, neurons, listen up: we’re going to concentrate on problem 2, and we don’t have to think about problem 1 and problem 3, and we don’t have to worry about forgetting about them, because it’s all down on paper.
I sometimes use Mindmapping. It’s not as formal as an outline, so you can get stuff out of your brain and onto the paper quickly. You don’t have to worry that you’ll forget something, because you can always jump around and go back to different topics, but in the end it’s still organized in a meaningful way.
Sometimes I use the whiteboard, which is a great medium . . . except for the fumes, which I find are less conducive to Deep Thought than to drawing big colorful spirals and paisley patterns . . .
I start out with a blank brain and assume a completely ignorant mental posture. I then start asking questions about the situation at hand: What’s that? What’s it do? How’d it break? What happened when it broke? Stuff like that.
For real tricky problems I reviwe all the known facts about a situation and then do something unrelated for a couple hours. Read the Onion, surf the Dope, chat up the hottie in the next cubicle…then, like, “presto” the answer or a path to the answer pops into my head, kinda like how AHunter3 put it, “the back of my mind informs the front of my mind that I have a clean streamlined mental picture of how I’m going to do my stuff.” Apparently not everyone can set chunks of their brains aside to do this kind of thinking unmonitored. Those who can know exactly what I’m talking about. I can have a problem on my mind and not even realize it until the answer is delivered. the only clue I have is that I’m vaguely distracted…like when Windows is running kinda slow & using up your processor but the Task Manager swears up and down that no other applications are running. Hm… seem to have wandered a bit. Sorry.
Almonds for breakfast. It’s like pouring gas on a fire. I haven’t had almonds for a long time…
I’m another white board user. I found when I did maths and my Latin homework on a vertical surface, I did better at them. Something about the change in perspective, no doubt.
Aha! That’s one I use. Bring on the coloured pens.
I don’t use a whiteboard but I do draw a lot of stuff. Diagrams, stick men, doodles. I don’t find formal notations***** to be any use for clarifying thoughts, but somehow almost incoherent scribbling helps to push things into place. And writing notes that will never get read, I guess that sets up an (ahem) internal dialogue which gets closer to the best trick.
Explain the problem to another person. Hasn’t everyone done this? Corner someone by the coffee machine and explain your problem at them. It helps a bit if they know what you’re on about but it doesn’t seem to be necessary for this to work (since you’re really talking to yourself). Writing this I’m now wondering if there’s a Lisa type program out there that will play the listener/victim role.
I’ve thought about getting a set of Oblique Strategy cards though I’m not sure how applicable they’d be to what I do.
***** Does anyone actually use UML?
I jot everything down, and I draw lots of diagrams. That’s the only way I really get myself to think.
Another thing I find, is talking to someone. I end up rambling on and on to the other half about a paper I’ve just read and either don’t get, or think is rubbish, but can’t pin down why, usually, within ten or so minutes, I’ve figured out what the problem is. Being relaxed also helps, many times I’ve come up with ideas whilst in bed, and on one actually decided that I needed pencil and paper near my bed so I could jot these things down.
Talk. Not type. To myself as well as to somebody else. Mutter for a while, then subject my poor boyfriend to a detailed explanation of what I’m trying to do. Don’t multitask until my brain has gotten to the point where it won’t let go of some aspect of the problem. THEN go and do laundry, get dinner, or whatever else presents itself… and see if my brain’s figured it out by the time I’m done.
Inwardly question everything, especially instances of absolute terms like ‘always’, ‘never’ etc - for example, if someone asserts “decapitation is always fatal”, try to imagine scenarios (however far-fetched) where this statement might not be true.
When studying something, try to imagine how it could have been done if some component or property of it simply didn’t exist - how would things be if the geometric figure we call a ‘circle’ simply didn’t exist? (and wheels etc. were impossible to make).
And, I have to confess, I have a tendency to sometimes look at the world as a collection of objects with sub-objects, properties, methods and events (like in programming); to hammer a nail into wood, it is necessary to use the hand(left).finger.grip method on the nail.shaft, then adjust the nail.position and nail.orientation so that nail.point.position aligns with suitable values of wood.surface.co-ordinates(x,y), then use the hand(right).finger.grip method on hammer.handle and execute the arm(right).swing method, bringing hammer.head.face to meet nail.head.top. Bad example, but perhaps you get the idea.
Picture the problem in your head - some people find this difficult I really seem to be able to imagine what’s happening, the flow of whatever. Imagine trying to explain the problem to someone else. I like to try to take the mental map in my head of what’s going on, and consider how I would draw it (or even actually draw it).
Add the complexities… extend outwards from the specific part you’re thinking of, to the related bits, and even unrelated bits that give you a big map of what’s going on in your head. Work out your answer if someone were to ask about part of it. Imagine that you’re trying to get all the information in your head, into their head. Once you’ve done it, you will have taken it from the back of your head, to the front. Now you can think about it.
Gosh, all of that sounded like something from the little book of calm, or similar.
Well, you may like to try reading Dreaming the Future to find out some of Cliff Pickover’s ways of coming up w/ new ideas. Note, that he doesn’t use psychic methods, but uses stuff like tarot cards to come up w/ new ideas by making associations he wouldn’t have thought of before.
Actually, being a Dull and Unimaginative Scientist, I only use one color. The goal is to get stuff down fast, and switching colors takes time. What’s using different colors supposed to accomplish, anyway?
The more boring the meeting, them more likely I would be to use multiple colors. I guess when I think about it, I can imagine how color-coding would be useful.
For research: Blue=changes or additions to computer programs, red=research to do at the library, green=questions to ask other people, etc.
Or blue= things I need to do at the office, green=things I can do at home, purple=running errands . . .
Usually my mindmaps are glorified to-do lists, as you can probably tell. I guess I’ve been using shapes to fulfill the same basic functions: Round=writing, Rectangles=coding, Cloud=things to think about, Quote-bubble=questions to ask.
Unfortunately, I have a boss that if I was to paint the Mona Lisa, he would be looking more for a Picasso. He’s a shoot-from-the-hip, I’m-always-right, kind of guy. Never, I mean never, does he say, “Wow, great job”. It’s always, “I thought I told you to make the buttons purple and orange”.
But anyway, I try to put all that aside, do the best I can, and get plenty of sleep. Sometimes the hardest problems are solved when I just relax and forget all about them. You need that downtime to let the bad ideas, or the ideas that won’t work, a chance to burn themselves out and float away.
i talk with myself.
From what i here this isn’t as uncommon as i first thought.
for as many different sides to the problem as their can be create a seperate mental “voice” to argue that point.
If i need to picture diagrams but nothing detailed just abstracts, i just draw them in the air infront on me.
I guess when I think about it, I can imagine how color-coding would be useful.