Highly creative thinkers are good at seeing connections. By enhancing your ability to see connections, you can enhance your creativity. Based on this observation, a solid theory and the latest neuroscience, this exercise book is for people who want to become better creative thinkers. This book gives you: 52 exercises to enhance your creativity Opportunity to think, rethink and think again Fun training for your brain Hands-on training in generating ideas Fun for everybody age 6-99 Creative Thinker's Rethink Book trains your ability see and make connections - the underlying mechanism that helps you to think creatively. The exercises in this book forces you to go beyond the obvious - to think and rethink - again and again. It is not a theory book. It's a hands-on exercise book to boost your creativity and innovative thinking. Working with these exercises will help you to come up with fresh thinking, original ideas and unexpected innovative solutions. You can use this book as a creative morning booster, a warm up before working creatively, for everyday creativity training or just as a fun activity. The exercises can be used at home, at school, in the design studio, in the office or in the agency. Creativity is for everybody!

Discover the cognitive tools that lead to creative thinking and problem-solving with this “well-written and easy-to-follow” guide (Library Journal). Explore the “thinking tools” of extraordinary people, from Albert Einstein and Jane Goodall to Mozart and Virginia Woolf, and learn how you can practice the same imaginative skills to become your creative best. With engaging narratives and examples, Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein investigate cognitive tools such as observing, recognizing patterns, modeling, playing, and more. Sparks of Genius is “a clever, detailed and demanding fitness program for the creative mind” and a groundbreaking guidebook for anyone interested in imaginative thinking, lifelong learning, and transdisciplinary education (Kirkus Reviews). “How different the painter at the easel and the physicist in the laboratory! Yet the Root-Bernsteins recognize the deep-down similarity of all creative thinking, whether in art or science. They demonstrate this similarity by comparing the accounts that various pioneers and inventors have left of their own creative processes: for Picasso just as for Einstein, for Klee just as for Feynman, the creative impulse always begins in vision, in emotion, in intuition. . . . With a lavishly illustrated chapter devoted to each tool, readers quickly realize just how far the imagination can stretch.” —Booklist “A powerful book . . . Sparks of Genius presents radically different ways of approaching problems.” —American Scientist

Rethink Creativity teaches you and your team how to start constructing a creative mindset by allocating time to change up your daily routine. It will help you rediscover the passion you felt your first day on the job! Not only will leaders and managers be able to benefit from proven strategies, thought-provoking questions, and effective training techniques, but as you move through the book, you'll start enjoying your work more, be a better leader, and find new ways to be creative, curious, and innovative every day.

A hands-on workbook with exercises that strengthen your creativity. How to train your ability to make connections others don't.

Discover how creativity depends on inside-the-box thinking-that's right, not outside the box-and a new perspective on creative thinking.

What does it take to re-think anything in your life? Sometimes nothing short of turning your whole world upside down. Slow down your thinking for a moment. What is your brain doing? Almost certainly trying to come up with a single right answer because then you can stop thinking about the problem. All too often we are not really thinking, but sleepwalking through life. Fresh angles on familiar problems elude us. Re-thinking is the opposite: it means seeing better or different solutions. In other words, thinking as unusual. Rethink shows you why and how. What if today you were to . . . Buy a new newspaper? Take a different route home? Say ‘yes’ to everything your partner asks? Invent new rituals for your family? Surround yourself with beauty? Try a first take at the creative fantasy sleeping in the attic of your mind? Find a new hero? Discover more about your upbringing? Act as if anything were possible rather than yes-butting the new? You’d be a re-thinker. Why not? There’s always a better or different solution to the way you lead your personal or professional life. Rethink will help you to stop living on autopilot and reawaken your sense of wonder, curiosity, and creativity.

Rethinking Thought takes readers into the minds of 30 creative thinkers to show how greatly the experience of thought can vary. It is dedicated to anyone who has ever been told, "You're not thinking!", because his or her way of thinking differs so much from a spouse's, employer's, or teacher's. The book focuses on individual experiences with visual mental images and verbal language that are used in planning, problem-solving, reflecting, remembering, and forging new ideas. It approaches the question of what thinking is by analyzing variations in the way thinking feels.Written by neuroscientist-turned-literary scholar Laura Otis, Rethinking Thought juxtaposes creative thinkers' insights with recent neuroscientific discoveries about visual mental imagery, verbal language, and thought. Presenting the results of new, interview-based research, it offers verbal portraits of novelist Salman Rushdie, engineer Temple Grandin, American Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, and Nobel prize-winning biologist Elizabeth Blackburn. It also depicts the unique mental worlds of two award-winning painters, a flamenco dancer, a game designer, a cartoonist, a lawyer-novelist, a theoretical physicist, and a creator of multi-agent software. Treating scientists and artists with equal respect, it creates a dialogue in which neuroscientific findings and the introspections of creative thinkers engage each other as equal partners.The interviews presented in this book indicate that many creative people enter fields requiring skills that don't come naturally. Instead, they choose professions that demand the hardest work and the greatest mental growth. Instead of classifying people as "visual" or "verbal," educators and managers need to consider how thinkers combine visual and verbal skills and how those abilities can be further developed. By showing how greatly individual experiences of thought can vary, this book aims to help readers in all professions better understand and respect the diverse people with whom they work.

"A brilliant and groundbreaking argument that innovation and progress are often achieved by revisiting and retooling ideas from the past rather than starting from scratch--from The Guardian columnist and contributor to The Atlantic, "--Baker & Taylor.

“Jeff and Staney emphasize that small acts of creativity can have huge consequences and that ordinary people can do extraordinary things if they can see the opportunities in front of them.” —Mitch Jacobson, Executive Director, Austin Technology Incubator, UT Blackstone LaunchPad, University of Texas at Austin Nearly all of today's major innovation workshops and programs call on organizations to drive innovation. What they miss is that innovation comes from the personal creativity of individuals. And creativity doesn't require an advanced education or technical skills—all employees can be creative. Often, all they lack is a fitting mindset and the right skills. The Creative Mindset brings how-to advice, tools, and techniques from two master innovators who have taught and worked with over half of all Fortune 500 companies. Jeff and Staney DeGraff introduce six essential creative-thinking skills that can be easily mastered with limited practice and remembered as the acronym CREATE: Concentrate, Replicate, Elaborate, Associate, Translate, and Evaluate. These six skills, sequenced as steps, simplify and summarize the most important research on creative thinking and draw on over thirty years of real-world application in some of the most innovative organizations in the world. It's time to rethink the way we make innovation happen. Individual creativity is an immense untapped resource, and you don't have to be Beethoven to make a big difference. As the spirit of chef Gusteau proclaims in the Pixar classic Ratatouille, “Anyone can cook.”

Flying in the face of current thinking, this book suggests that we do not need to ‘think outside the box’ in our quest for creativity, rather we should rethink the way we look ‘inside the box’. This idea will resonate only too well with those who have endeavoured to be creative by thinking outside that box, only to have their attempts scuppered by the constraints of bureaucracy and organizational politics. Instead of fighting a losing battle, the author suggests that creativity should be worked at within the constraints of the organizational box, but that space needs to be grown and allowed to be shaken up. Only by experimenting, mutating and finding new directions can you uncover business paths that lead to success. The reader is encouraged not to free themselves from all their knowledge and experiences (the thinking outside the box method) but to use their knowledge and experience in new ways. The book is structured around three key steps: Expanding the box: so that the pieces of the puzzle in it can move around more freely Filling the box: with even more knowledge, and how to get these new pieces of the puzzle to connect with the existing ones Shaking the box: so that the pieces fall into new places and form new patterns. The book shows that anybody can be creative. The creative methods suggested in the book will be linked to real business examples from which techniques have been developed to help their implementation. Numerous exercises and ‘eye-openers’ form part of the practical implementation of Micael Dahlén’s ideas. The book is framed by models and concepts of how creativity works (the creative process, the creative person and the creative result) and what its effects are.