“I see, vertical thought fills in the blank areas of the horizontal line that flows from the thinker. These blank areas contain the visions that the horizontal thinker “sees”. Once the areas are filled in, the vision or pathway is complete. Then we the vertical thinkers may walk the path of the horizontal thinkers. This would be kind of like an Autolisp program written for AutoCAD. The program would ask you the size, shape, and square distance of path, and the AutoCAD application would define and draw it for you. The application would be the vertical thinkers, and you, using the graphical interface of the computer, would be the horizontal thinker. The stepping-stones would be implicit laws that move the trail west“
ADDENDUM: The Eide Neurolearning Blog just happened to have a post on Novelty up today with four research links for further investigation.
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Stuart Berman:
April 30th, 2005 at 3:13 am
I liked Barnett’s statements about horizontal thinkers being ‘late bloomers’ – that it just takes a while to sort it all out. Great advice for kids wondering why they just don’t ‘have it together’ like their friends who are ‘on track’.
It seems that kids that have the personality or are predisposed to understand how something works (as opposed to just accepting that something works) can be encouraged in the process of horizontal thinking.
It also seems that there are ways to develop our own horizontal thinking:
Develop deep vertical thinking – understand how we enter a state of ‘flow’ as described by Csikszentmihalyi.
Leave a field that you have gained expertise in – although this seems like a forfeiture of experience it may indeed be a long term investment in breadth – to immerse yourself in a new expertise.
Introspection – value your own insights and be wary of following the group opinion (expert opinion) when in conflict.
mark:
April 30th, 2005 at 4:01 am
On Late bloomers, a friend pointed out to me yesterday there’s something to be said for the mixture of expertise (content knowledge)with experience – that the the perspective of age can actually help in terms of finding vision.
On your second point, I think that quality of intellectual curiousity is a true spark that causes the person to be a ” scanner” rather than someone stuck with ” tunnel vision” who accepts the parameters or premises as they drive toward a goal.
I don’t think you have to abandon your prmary field but you do have to put aside your pride as an expert and let yourself step back into the role of student. If you can do that you get the reward of seeing things with if not ” new eyes” at least newer ones. In terms of cognitive benefit, I bet you get your greatest novelty effect at the very beginning as you master the fundamentals – after that diminishing retuirns sets in.
Check out the addendum I’m adding on Novelty….
Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide:
May 2nd, 2005 at 4:49 pm
Hi Mark -It’s Fernette and Brock. Maybe you’d like this quote from Root-Bernstein’s Discovering: “…researchers who continued to be productive past middle age changed fields regularly. In effect, they periodically returned to the state of a novice by taking up a new subject. They broek out of the patterns of work and thought to which they had become accustomed. As Benzer remarked, ‘The best way to have fun in science is to do s omething you are not trained for…’ “
mark:
May 2nd, 2005 at 8:16 pm
The Drs. Eide,
That’s a great quote as well as a great observation ! I’ll have to include that one.
It probably holds true for the rare double Nobel winners that there is a shift in research interests…it also seems that in math in physics the great breakthroughs frequently come early -in the late grad student to early post-doc years of the twenties.
Denis Berkson, an advocate for creative thinking, told me about a decade ago that if he had his way he would require all educators to take a year off (with pay) every seven years or so, to learn the fundamentals of a new content field. Said that would do more to improve test scores than any other teacher-training reform.
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