John Boyd wrote a laboriously researched, epistemological theory he called ” Destruction and Creation ” where he advocated ” smashing ” the conceptual borders of domains – i.e. Horizontal thinking directed synthesis – as the key to learning and the discovery of new ideas and this process was a continuous cycle, a ” dialectic engine “. (4) I believe that Boyd, without benefit of any advanced brain research data, came very close to finding the actual process of insight.

Where Boyd fell short was primarily in developing the details of his cycle. Horizontal thinking does not occur in a void but against an established body of knowledge with which every individual frames their interpretation of sensory information and symbolic communication. In other words, the data provided by Horizontal thinking must be integrated with a person’s Cognitive Map – the repository of Vertical knowledge and past experiences – to become of use.

The act of integration is really a process by which a person engages in both Vertical and Horizontal thinking, simultaneously or in sequence along with a reflective monitoring of their own thinking ( metacognition). To use a spatial metaphor, the Horizontal data gets ” rotated” mentally, measured for validity and placement ( Vertical thinking) or pattern similarity or potential relationships ( Horizontal) with known phenomena (5). When the significance of the data is understood and its logical parameters discovered the thinking process has crystallized into a moment of insight – an insight that can be empirically or logically tested or in turn may suggest other alternatives ( though seeking proof or generating alternatives can also precede and lead to the moment of insight).

Application:

If the Horizontal and Vertical feedback loop does in fact result in insight then I would hypothesize that combining horizontal and vertical thinking techniques is the road to becoming more insightful. We can attack our Vertical frames by a forced change of perspective, reversing premises, counterfactuals, brainstorming, forced association and similar techniques. Likewise, I believe that Novelty – starting anew in a different domain from the ground up instead of ” smashing” across it looking for analogous concepts – is the most powerful stimulus that Vertical thinking can offer to complement Horizontal thinking.

Renaisssance men make themselves, they are not born.

2. R MacPherson, B Jerrom and A Hughes. ” Relationship between insight, educational background and cognition in schizophrenia ” The British Journal of Psychiatry 168: 718 -722 1996.

3. Mark Jung-Beeman1*, Edward M. Bowden1, Jason Haberman1, Jennifer L. Frymiare2, Stella Arambel-Liu1, Richard Greenblatt3, Paul J. Reber1, John Kounios “Neural Activity When People Solve Verbal Problems with Insight” PLOS Biology Vol 2. issue 4 April 2004

4. John Boyd, ” Destruction and Creation”, 1976.

5. Larry Dunbar, private correspondence to Zenpundit:

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