In fact, new technologies and new ideas are the best growth points of creativity, so we must be keenly aware of the latest information and the cutting-edge trends. Ma's first reaction to new things is that this is my chance to innovate. I must think about whether I can go further on this basis or expand it for my use. Even if such an idea has no practical value, write it down as a kind of thinking training. Therefore, the more you don't understand, the more you have to contact, and you can't completely let your interest (preference is sometimes a mindset). Because new technology must be imperfect, there is too much room for expansion, and the chances of getting new ideas are higher.
Step 2 be absorbed
Most of the creativity is due to the change of thinking angle. For everything, you should try to look at it from different angles, different places, different groups and so on. If you think about it carefully, you will often find something unexpected. The special perspective often determines the level of creativity. Reverse thinking is one of the special cases. For example, when developing products, it is best to regard yourself as a service terminal, consider customers and intermediate links, and examine each link to see if it can be different from others. You can also think of yourself as a competitor, think about their situation, ask more why, and ask why not. When you think like this, you may find problems and make innovations and improvements.
3. Seek common ground while reserving differences
Compare more and compare from different angles, not only to find out their similarities, but also to find out their differences. The comparison must be meticulous and comprehensive, without letting go of any nuances (details are very important). So it's best to list them one by one and compare them repeatedly. Similarity must have the same internal mechanism, which is more likely to be the most basic problem. Most people like to seek differences, while thinkers prefer to seek common ground and find out the essence and essence from the ever-changing complex things, so as to better understand differences. Difference may be the entrance to thinking and a clue. If you follow it, you may further decompose the characteristics of things and find laws, which are easy for everyone to understand.
4. Decomposition and Synthesis
If you can break down your concerns into enough details, the finer the better, break down a big problem into countless small problems, and examine each problem carefully, you may find a breakthrough or open up new territory. For example, if you study biology, you can decompose the behavior of multi-cells to single-cell level or even single-molecule level, which will inevitably encounter many technical problems, but it may also inspire you to establish a new technical system, just like the single-molecule technology mentioned in Ma's blog earlier. In addition, you can ask yourself 100 or more questions in your research field, and there will be sparks in your thoughts among these 100 questions. Einstein once said that asking questions is often more important than solving problems, because the key questions often show that you have achieved a breakthrough in solving problems.
5. Unconventional thinking
Imagine what the ideal state will be like, what the extreme conditions will be like, what the needs of special people will be like, what the beginning and end of time will be like, or what it will be like to exaggerate and shrink infinitely, what it will be like to be a slacker, what it will be like to make a deliberate mistake, what it will be like to be minimal and maximal, and so on. These ideas may simplify or enlarge your problem. For example, if you develop a product, imagine that if a child takes it, it may be smashed, the battlefield may be damaged by bumps, and the bad guys want to destroy it. Can your product be innovative in this respect?
Step 6 be artistic
You can give ordinary and unremarkable things more artistic or social significance, such as making them interesting and meaningful. This is a kind of creativity. It is an aesthetic idea to simplify complex formulas and make ordinary things more beautiful, optimized, energy-saving and light. It is also a magical art to make simple things into complex structures and diverse functions. Therefore, everything should be as meticulous, exquisite, interesting or meaningful as possible.
7. Add new features
Combination is also a kind of creation, so always think about whether you can give your product more functions and whether you can blend different things together.
8, learn to divergent thinking
Put a lot of unrelated things together, let them combine and contact at will, and then filter and analyze them to stimulate thinking and find inspiration. Therefore, sometimes a casual walk, or browsing through irrelevant books and periodicals, and chatting with irrelevant people may inspire thinking, and you don't have to stay somewhere all the time to think hard before you can count as a job. My tutor often teaches us that eating is also a job, which means that we want to know more outside researchers while eating, so that we can exchange some information consciously or unconsciously.
9. transplant ideas
It is a divergent thinking method, that is, applying the thinking methods from other fields to the fields you focus on, or extending your thinking methods to other fields, that is, interdisciplinary, or even crossing or rising to the philosophical level. Ma Xianghai has a habit, that is, whenever he has an idea, he writes it down quickly and then constantly improves it. Then he will think about whether it can be extended to related fields or broader fields, followed by practical considerations, such as whether it can be used in daily life or medical research, whether it can apply for patents, develop products or industrialized mass production. When you think like this, you will have more supporting questions and your thinking will be active.
10, predicting the future
You can imagine how people will live and work in 20 years, and then focus on specific fields and refine them. These predictions can be used as your research goals. For example, in the computer industry, the future will definitely be a great integration of functions. A PDA can satisfy almost all your information processing tasks, such as making phone calls, watching TV, surfing the Internet, education, consulting, service, instrument control and so on. So an innovation in this industry is continuous integration. There are iPhone and iPOD today, i 100 tomorrow, and iALL the day after tomorrow. Cooking and looking after children can be controlled by several buttons. Then the task now is to develop and improve around these, and it should be inevitable to make products with more and better functions than iPOD. For other fields, the thinking can also be advanced. For example, there are so many mysteries about the human body that few people care. Although it is technically difficult, it is not impossible to design experiments for research. At least, we can set goals and explore step by step. Only in this way can your thinking surpass others and make a big breakthrough.
1 1, rational use of thinking in images
We must try to use graphics to express various meanings, because thinking in images can reproduce the prototype of things, and we can easily find the spatial details and spatio-temporal logical contradictions that are easy to miss in words. Therefore, when thinking about problems, we might as well draw more pictures, build more models and use imagination to make up for the blank of thinking. You can also use the image as an analogy, imagine what it looks like, what the internal structure may be like, and imagine from another angle, what will the result be? Or, by establishing certain symbols and performing logical operations, we can also intuitively understand problems and find contradictions.
12, pay attention to contradictions
The problem is an opportunity, which should not be avoided, but should be regarded as a breakthrough opportunity. Every time you encounter difficulties, you'd better ask yourself if there is any hidden mechanism. Don't give up easily, write it down first, and then put forward various ideas as much as possible, analyze and eliminate them one by one.
13, often thinking about social needs
As long as it is a demand, it deserves serious consideration. In fact, an important indicator of creativity evaluation is its social significance, including theoretical, technical and practical needs. Therefore, we must expand our thinking, examine all aspects of social needs and establish contacts. For example, people who do basic biological research may not only do laboratory work, but also expand whether they can contact the national economy and people's livelihood, such as garbage disposal, oral hygiene, food monitoring, bioenergy and so on. You can also look at the social needs first, and then see which ones can be used as the direction of your own research breakthrough.
14, logical deduction
When I was studying, one of my tutors once let me think freely about all kinds of problems, and encouraged me to imagine boldly. No matter whether it is technically feasible or absurd, I should first establish a hypothesis based on the existing materials, and then boldly deduce it, look for evidence and constantly improve it. If there is no evidence, fill it with imagination and leave a vacancy. For example, if your model is correct, it must have many derived features, which can be decomposed to design experiments for verification. If the assumption is incorrect, you will naturally learn a lot of information to correct it during the verification process. Therefore, it is better to have a model or hypothesis, whether right or not, than nothing. After you have it, you must constantly deduce and decompose it. So I grew up the fastest at that time, learned a lot and put forward many ideas that surprised me.
15, practice is better than theory.
Many times, only by personally experiencing something can we form a unique opinion in a certain aspect. Writers are like this, and so are those who do scientific research. For example, the scientist who founded tumor vascular inhibition therapy found that tumor vascular proliferation is related to prognosis in clinic, but it is difficult for so many oncologists who only stay in the laboratory to understand this and it is impossible to find new laws. So sometimes you don't have to have mature ideas to do it, but you have to discover and explore progress in the process of doing it. Many successful scholars have done this.
16, learn to be a conscientious person.
Learning to collect data and thinking methods, accumulating basic knowledge and resources, becoming an expert in a certain field and gaining insight into the frontier of research are all the foundations of creative thinking.
17, establish a mathematical model.
Try to establish a mathematical model to quantify and standardize everything. After all, many things in the world cannot be quantified, which is actually both a challenge and an opportunity to exert creativity. Biomedicine, for example, is difficult to quantify at present, but it has a quantitative relationship in some aspects. Many people do not consider this relationship, and the research they do may be far from the actual situation. In biology class in senior high school, Ma likes to ask how many specific protein molecules are in a cell, what is the geometric probability of the directional binding of this protein with other molecules, and how much influence the change of a protein quality will have on the final effect, and puts forward several quantitative models, which can be verified by designing experiments. However, few people in the biomedical field have considered these problems, and now they are gradually realized, which shows that my ideas are still ahead of schedule.
18, jump out of the set
Subconsciously ask yourself, if your thinking mode is the same, can you jump out? When you think like this, maybe you can feel your limitations, take your thinking to another angle or direction, and even run freely and break through the routine.
19, dare to think boldly
For example, people who do biomedical research should not always turn around in their own circles and read a lot of literature, but should regard themselves as God and think about what they would do if they designed the human body and the world. There are many problems that can't be explained by current theories, but many people dare not touch them, but they are the nodes of human cognitive breakthrough. Only by understanding the possible laws of the world can you fill the huge gap between facts and knowledge with imagination and overlook your research field from a height. Of course, those who can reach this state of mind are beyond the ability of ordinary people and need hard training and superb understanding.
20, philosophical thinking
It is always good to learn some philosophy, because philosophy is the result of induction and has universality. Subconsciously analyzing specific problems with philosophical thoughts can often help us understand the essence of things more deeply and inspire us. For example, we should learn to analyze problems dialectically, systematically and dynamically, analyze system elements from different levels, and study its structural characteristics and information regulation mechanism. It can also be popularized and applied from specific research objects here and there, and even rise to a higher level or philosophical level. Some people hate philosophy and think it doesn't matter whether they learn or not. In fact, this is also an emotional formula, because the key is whether you can use it or not, or if you use it, you feel useless. For example, if a biologist learns some philosophical thoughts such as dissipative structure, he may think about the self-organization mechanism in life phenomena, study the self-organization center, and guess the system operation mechanism, then he may think of possibilities that others can't think of.