L13. A Cognitive Trick for Solving Problems Creatively

CREATIVITY
A Cognitive Trick for
Solving Problems
Creatively
by Theodore Scaltsas
MAY 04, 2016
Many experts argue that creative thinking requires people to challenge their preconceptions and
assumptions about the way the world works. One common claim, for example, is that the mental
shortcuts we all rely on to solve problems get in the way of creative thinking. How can you innovate
if your thinking is anchored in past experience?
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But I’m not sure that questioning biases from your past experience and assumptions is the best path
to creative problem solving — it simply does not seem to fit well with how the mind actually works.
The role of thinking processes in decision making was made prominent by Daniel Kahneman and the
late Amos Tversky, whose Nobel Prize–winning research argues that economic decision makers
are subject to deeply held cognitive biases. Anchoring, in which people address new problems by
applying decisions they have made on similar problems in the past, explains the irrationality of much
economic decision making.
It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that the way to better, more creative decisions is to
introduce more rationality by compensating for or correcting biases. Kahneman himself complained
that when people think intuitively rather than rationally, cognitive biases lead them to poor
decisions.
But Kahneman and Tversky also believed that cognitive biases exist because they are effective
survival tools. The anchoring bias, for example, helps people respond to change more quickly. From
time to time the old solutions may not work, but mostly they do, evolutionarily speaking, and
everyone knows how to put the old solutions into practice.
Moreover, scholars such as Jakob Hohwy, author of The Predictive Mind, are finding that the brain
constructs models of the world on the basis of past experience, and predicts new experiences, which
are subsequently confirmed or corrected, on the basis of further cognitive or experiential input. If we
apply this predictive mechanism of the brain to the cognitive task of problem solving, we see that our
brain produces candidate solutions for a given problem by predicting (firing at us) solution models
based on past experience. We modify the models with cognitive or experiential input from the
present problem to get prospective solutions based on what we’ve applied before when facing similar
problems. We finally settle on a particular solution for the current problem by referring to the
detailed circumstances of the problem.
But if all solutions are old ones in some way, then why are we so good at producing new ones? There
would seem to be a fundamental disconnect between the workings of the mind and a world that is in
a state of almost constant change. It also seems unlikely that creative thinkers are going through a
process of rational deliberation to deliver all those fresh ideas — most people report that creative
ideas come unexpectedly, in a flash, rather than as conclusions to deliberation. So how do new
solutions emerge?
The answer to that question is rooted in how one approaches the problem. Although the brain’s
solution-generating mechanism is inherently predictive (bringing familiar solutions to a given
problem) you can also address an intractable problem by reinventing the problem itself. Doing so
coaxes the brain into proposing old solutions for types of problem these old solutions have not solved
before.
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One way of triggering these solutions is to imagine ways out of the fix you’re in by imagining that the
circumstances blocking your progress are being lifted one by one. This produces different versions of
the challenge. One of these new hypothetical versions may well resemble a type of problem that you
have solved in the past. Your mind will then fire out a whole new set of solutions, one or more of
which may work. If the solution you select for the new version of the challenge is untypical for the
original version, it can certainly qualify as a creative solution to the new one.
For example, suppose that you’re in a room and your original challenge is to get out of it. There are a
bunch of conventional solutions: You open the door or jump out of the window. But what do you do
if the room is on the 10th floor and a fire is raging outside the door? The conventional solutions
will be fatal. To survive in these circumstances, you assume (before knowing if it can be done) that
you can jump safely from the window; you then consider how to do that. This triggers the thought of
a parachute, which makes you look at the window curtains in a new light. You solve the “safe exit”
challenge creatively by transforming it into a problem of how to make a parachute out of the window
curtains.
To illustrate more precisely, let me turn to a famous example of this kind of lateral creative thinking:
the stratagem of the Trojan Horse. For 10 years the Greeks failed to take the city of Troy, frustrated by
its great walls and the valor of the Trojan army. They were on the point of giving up.
Enter Odysseus and his plan for building a wooden horse. We know from Homer that the Greeks tried
all possible means of taking the city, including some fairly unlikely methods, but the challenge
proved intractable. They tried fighting the Trojan warriors but found no way of getting through the
walls by tunneling under them or battering them down.
One of the factors Odysseus considers is that the Trojan leaders have consistently made pretty smart
decisions. But what, Odysseus asks, if one attempted to trick the Trojans into making a bad decision?
Conceived as a problem of deceit, the challenge fits Odysseus’s expertise nicely. His trickster’s brain
fires out all the solutions to deception problems he has faced before, and he conceives of the idea of
the Trojan Horse, an innovative — and quick — conclusion to a long, bloody military campaign.
The lesson is not that the Trojan Horse was a new solution per se. Misdirection of that kind is the
staple of any con artist. The creativity lies in the fact that Odysseus was able to transform the 10-yearold problem of overpowering the Trojans into a problem of deceiving them, which opened up a whole
new set of ready-made solutions that he was already master of. And given the 10 years the Greeks
had spent failing to win the war, Odysseus was able to make a convincing case that his treating the
core problem not as one of combat but as one of deceit offered an unexplored path to success.
I think of the process I’ve described as brain mining: We search our mind for old solutions that we
can apply to new kinds of problems. Defined this way, creative thinking is clearly a natural process
because the mind naturally solves new problems through old solutions, thanks to our biased and
predictive brain’s mechanisms. All we have to do to think creatively, therefore, is to systematically
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redefine an intractable problem until it transforms into a problem that some old solution we already
have can solve. If the new version of the problem is a feasible redefinition of it and the solution
triggered by the redefinition is very different from conventional solutions of the original (preredefinition) problem, then we have an innovation.
And this brings me to a redefinition of the creative thinking problem: It’s not a problem of how we
think; it’s more a problem of who’s doing the thinking, and in particular of what they distinctively
bring to this case from their past. We can all transform an intractable problem we are facing, but the
more experiences we can draw on to “bias” our search toward alternative solutions to problematic
features, the more likely we are to find a way to transform the original problem into one we can solve
in an old way.
Theodore Scaltsas is a Chaired Professor in Classical Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
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