Inventor Book Reviews

Think Like A Genius

By Todd Siler, 1996, 294 pages, $23.95, ISBN 0-553-10732-1, Bantam Books

If you stumbled across this book at your local bookstore, you might make the mistake of thinking it is just another book that promises to make you a creative genius overnight.  The fact that it is written by a man with a Ph.D. degree might also turn you off since there is a popular belief that Ph.D. really means "pile it higher and deeper".

If you are a real world, hands-on type person, you are leery of any professorial type how-to-do-it book.  However, if you passed it by based on this first impression, you would be missing one of the best current books on the subject of creative thinking.  The author is not only an inventor (computer imaging, textile printing) but is also an internationally recognized artist.

The book he has produced conveys, in down to earth language, tremendous insights as to how you can become more creative.  He also provides almost two hundred sketches and drawings illustrating his approach to firing up your creative side.  He starts out with the deceptively simple observation that creative problem solving is based on finding information and applying it productively.  This often involves what Leonardo da Vinci called "creative seeing".

His basic mental tool is what the author calls "metaphorming".  He derives this word from the word metaphor, which, you may recall from your high school English classes, is a figure of speech that compares two unlike entities and fuses them into a new entity.  For example, "iron horse" (for a train).  However, he greatly increases that definition to cover the entire process of inquiry leading to discovery and invention.

He believes "We are all born with the ability to create, explore, learn, discover, and invent -- that is, to metaphorm".  The book is devoted to overcoming the mental barriers we have acquired in life that impede creativity.

He explains the metaphorming process by applying the acronym C.R.E.A.T.E.  (Connect, Relate, Explore, Analyze, Transform, Experience) to the four levels of metaphorming: Connection-Discovery-Invention-Application.  This description may seem abstract.  But his sketches, such as how Leonardo da Vinci connected and related his observations about tree branches to the engineering of the waterways of Florence to the sea (by canals and sluice gates), show that metaphorming is simple and that it is practical.

The author devotes an entire chapter to fear and another to cynicism.  These very human negatives can also be positives when they are recognized and dealt with.  Another chapter suggests how to replace habit by choice.  Yet another chapter describes the means by which you can "make the obvious more obvious".  He gives as an example the two mothers who observed how two-year-olds delight in watching other babies smiling.  They produced a short videotape of just close-ups of such smiling babies ("Baby Mugs").  Children are entranced watching it.  The tape sold at the rate of thousands per month!

Do you allow your emotional mind to color your rational mind? He observes that "the flip side of boredom is creativity" and that those noted for creativity usually find life fascinating during their entire life.

He cites the energy you create when you connect things in a novel way.  The excitement of seeing a new relationship is like fuel to a vehicle.  He points out Einstein's famous observation that "energy equals mass times the speed of light squared" as being comparable to recognizing "intellectual energy is as frozen and inaccessible as the energy locked in matter".  n other words, a tiny bit of information can release enormous amounts of creativity and invention when we relate or connect it in another context and that nothing surpasses the human brain when it comes to making new connections.

The writer suggests the essence of genius "is the ability to see through things -- and see things through."  The book is sprinkled with thought provoking quotations such as Pablo Picasso's "A painter takes the sun and makes it into a yellow spot.  An artist takes a yellow spot and makes it into a sun."

Probably the most important message in this book is that just about everyone has the ability to think like a genius.  The reason we fail to is that to live efficiently under normal social conditions we have acquired certain habits and patterns of thinking that get us through the daily routines quite well, but that also lull us into not questioning, not stopping to ask why, and not exploring the possibilities and benefits of doing things differently.

This is a delightful book to read and the unique sketches and drawings may well reach that visual and nonverbal half of your brain that modem research indicates is so important to both the artist and the inventor.