Holographic Mind: Thinking The Future: Unleash Your Original Ideas

Credits

HOLOGRAPHIC MIND: Thinking the Future

Introduction

If you have picked up this book, you are an idea person. Ideas run the world, impacting it for better or worse - for worse when hackneyed, for better when pushing the envelope finding original solutions.

For my PhD, I looked into the brains of the most gifted inventors in America. I asked them how they created 3D ideas. I was surprised as a teacher to find that original thinking had nothing to do with school. Words and numbers? Not at all! One inventor, the Wizard of Westport, told me, School was irrelevant. Digging back through the research, I found the basis of visionary thinking to be non-verbal and highly intuitive. As I analyzed my own data, it unfolded as a sci-fi combination of imagery skills linked to something called orthocognition that was used to mentally manipulate spacetime. I realized that this type of thinking, although responsible for solving major problems throughout history, was not rigorously taught in school.

Educator Neil Postman said, Children start school as question marks and leave as periods. School teaches us to think in a step-by-step, linear way, using cause-and-effect logic that points backward to established ideas. We are taught rules of learning - grammar, arithmetic tables, facts - and apply them to solve problems with mathematical models and debate. Inventors and highly creative people think differently. Original thinkers think like a hologram - that space-age gadget that produces 3D images with laser light capable of capturing hints of future realities. Creative people use the whole of their mindBodies to find inventive meaning hiding in the future. Seemingly unscientific, they use imagery on inner TVs and dialog with deep sources of inspiration within and without themselves. By using these cognitive skills, they produce groundbreaking solutions that change the world.

My dissertation had taken me seven demanding years to research and produce. Reading its academic jargon feels like sand-bagging your head and swimming a race through cement. Yet, I love a challenging swim, and I was driven to share these unconventional, and at times unbelievable, facts. Writing Holographic Mind: Thinking the Future is my opportunity as a teacher to dive into the depths of human consciousness and teach how to use the most powerful intuitive forces of your mind. I want to teach you how to create ideas so pioneering they are laughed at until eventually they are proven invaluable. I wrote this book because the planet needs thinkers who dare to swim against the tide.

Still, I had doubts that I could make my model of original thinking watertight and understandable. How was I going to make my findings credible? Who would believe that the inventors used time-transcending imagery to think the future into existence? Who would accept that they dialoged with atoms for scientific problem solving? For years, my experience as an educator of intellectually gifted students led me to examine critically how the mind uses creativity. It has impressed upon me the importance of making the tools of creative thinking available to students, educators and people in all walks of life.

My fascination with spatial thinking started in childhood when I saw my father take apart the engine of our 1948 Plymouth, laying it out piece by piece in a long mechanical snake - spark plugs, carburetor, air filter, and wires crawled down the driveway toward the neighbors. Then slowly, each part crawled back up off the pavement into the engine, running perfectly when re-assembled. I did not realize until later that the human mind is capable of such photographic thinking, and despite my father’s being dyslexic, he had such a mind. I also learned that this mental gift again had nothing to do with reading or math but was called spatial intelligence, a function of the brain that could think by visualizing in spacetime. Having a certain amount of this ability myself, this became the focus of my research, and eventually I renamed it spatialtemporal intelligence to include the mind’s ability to manipulate TIME (See article: Spatial-temporal Intelligence http://journals.prufrock.com Journal for the Education of the Gifted Volume 24 Issue 2 Winter 2000. Pages 170-193).

The Need

Over the past century, researchers worldwide have broken down creative thinking into a set of skills that can be taught. Yet, this past knowledge has only carried us so far. Our present emphasis in public education across the globe is on verbal-mathematical pedagogy that provides critical, essential basics - reading, writing, and arithmetic. Still, these skills have not been enough to provide lasting solutions to our most pressing problems.

Our modern world is rife with disaster. On 9/11, terrorists violently brought down the World Trade Center. In 2008, the debacle on Wall Street painfully cost retirees a secure future. In 1999, scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Agency Jet Propulsion Laboratory failed to translate inches into metrics and blew $125 million on a climate orbiter that burned up while entering Mars’ atmosphere. During the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, engineers took five months to figure out how to plug millions of gallons of oil that was leaking into Louisiana’s fragile ecosystem. Every year a tiny mosquito outsmarts us, resulting in over one million deaths from malaria. Our planet is sick, unbalanced, and angry.

Even so, our approach to current problems is using customary reasoning methods to solve our problems. Traditional logic, scientific methodology, mathematical modeling using words and numbers opens us up to new truths. Alone without intuitive insight, they are narrow vehicles that constrain our ability to face the complex challenges of the 21st Century. It is clear that we are in an age of dramatic transformation that begs the question of how to fully educate the creative mind.

To some, the answer is clear. After the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, a commission was appointed to find out why we had failed to protect our country. They correctly identified America’s disaster as a failure of imagination. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, focusing on world health problems, states that creative, unorthodox thinking is essential to overcoming the most persistent challenges we face globally. Holographic Mind teaches skills that provide a new perspective on how to think out of the box. It closes a critical educational gap between nonverbal and verbal-linear thinking. It asks that intuitive intelligence be galvanized with linguistic-mathematical approaches and taught rigorously. Although insights revealed in this book might not be replicable as required by empirical science; paradoxically, we must recognize that original solutions occur only from intuitive thrusts. This book teaches us to use unorthodox, whole-brain cognition to work toward a more beneficial future.

Everyone Has a Holographic Mind

You may ask, "Can I do this? The answer is yes. Many people apply holographic skills on a daily basis. Engineers, mechanics, electricians, plumbers, medical intuitive healers, teachers, athletes, poets, writers, designers, artists, etc. all use this approach to solve problems. They are inputting visual data constantly along with everything they have read, learned in school, seen on TV, surfed on the Internet and experienced in their daily lives to better them-selves and to improve the human condition. I believe that each of us has a potential holographic mind that once trained can imagine the future. Everyone who is willing to push the imaginary envelope of spacetime has the ability to produce highly creative ideas by using the techniques found in this book.

Organization

Holographic Mind takes you into the minds of original thinkers. Reading this book in a linear manner, starting with chapter one onward to the last word, is almost illogical, because it’s about global, circular thinking. To start the flow of ideas, a certain amount of understanding about logic, holograms, and nonverbal intelligence is needed. Each chapter stands both alone and in relation to the others, and you can gain insight into these ideas by starting at almost any point.

If this book were a novel, the first chapter would be the climax. It introduces you to a special kind of atypical logic used by all innovative thinkers. Along with my findings and quotes from historical figures, you’ll find a simplified version of David Bohm and Karl Pribram’s theories spelling out how the brain thinks like a hologram. Chapters two through five lay out the mindBody connection, the historical foundation, and include Piaget and Inhelder’s groundbreaking work on how children think in space. Chapter six takes you out of the universe, unveiling transpersonal skills used to envision new realities while chapters seven through eight intrigue with a sizzling romance dramatically played out between the lovers - space and time. The last chapters discuss unusual incubation processes and the uncompromising spirit needed to actualize unrivaled ideas. Start where your experience calls you.

While keeping the anonymity of the inventors who participated directly in my research, as called for by research, they have been given pseudonyms. The secrets of their thinking are made practical through a set of strategies for each concept. Learn to think with your mindBody, visualize your inner TV, dialog with sources within and beyond yourself, develop holographic logic, and discover how to use unusual incubation methods and mantras to build your resolve to move forward in the face of resistance to change.

Aim

Holographic Mind: Thinking the Future unveils the mind that doesn’t fit the mold. In fact, it ruptures the mold of habitual thinking. The inventors, architect, nurse, designer, scientists, and others described in this book tell their singular, private stories finding meaning in their lives.

Stories contain our most personal intentions, cognition and sense-making. Stories belong to us. They hold our lives, and we use them to find the significance of our inner worlds. By investigating your deepest, lived experience(s) as in this book, you learn how to apply the highest levels of your consciousness to live productively. This book is about meaning-making, and its findings can be generalized to all thinkers.

Throughout my life, I have been obliged to teach lessons that challenge and create meaning in the lives of our most gifted students. As I see our planet race against time to solve its most serious problems, my journey as a teacher is never-ending. All activities have simultaneous social, economic and environmental impacts on our lives, and each problem requires a fresh and revolutionary approach. What affects one part of the world affects the whole. We endure as one organism. We are in an age of dramatic change requiring fast, non-conformist thinking. Holographic Mind is written for people with a passion to solve problems. It’s written for those whose job it is to bring about decisive change with no failure of imagination.

- Eileen E. Cooper, PhD

Chapter 1 How Original Ideas Are Created

Ideas are our most precious natural resource. Good ideas make money. Original ideas change the course of history. Through the ages, the human mind has shaped the world with innovations running the gamut from the nail, to the steam engine, to the Mars Rover, to the Internet. These advancements were not created in the same way as run-of-the-mill ideas. Highly original, they sprang from thinking skills that use a logic of their own.

If you’ve ever wondered, like the slogan from Price Waterhouse’s Mind & Muscle, Why can’t ideas come with batteries included and no assembly required?, you realize the challenge of solving complex problems. Even so, each of us can learn to use our minds to reach personal or professional Eurekas! Inventors produce novel solutions all the time, and a look into one inventor’s mind explains how.

Snapshot of the Holographic Mind

An inventor, who we’ll call Telly, used an inner TV to find and assemble original ideas. Telly holds numerous patents in the fields of industrial mechanics, leisure vehicles, and assisted living devices. He is prolific in his field.

One day, Telly found himself in a meeting with a group of engineers discussing an unfamiliar, recalcitrant problem they had been struggling to solve. While listening to the problem, Telly pulled up his mental TV and watched the problem unfold image by image before him like a video. I was sitting in that meeting, I was watching their process which I had never seen...on my own little TV... He continued:

I just imagined (the problem of hollow, twisted piping) in my mind and as soon as I saw (the solution), as soon as I plugged in a few alternative specialties on it that it needed, I just knew it would work. I mean, it was clear as could be it would work. And it did work the very first try. I mean, it worked flawlessly first try.

Telly’s inner TV solved the engineer’s problem within minutes, rolling out a patentable invention. His mind was prepared to grapple with this previously unknown problem because he has an "encyclopedia of three-dimensional imagery" in his mind. As a youth from age seven, he’d take things apart, put them back together, and poured over technical magazines and books. Visually, he absorbed and stored data - eyes and hands working together. He soon realized that he was solving problems by thinking in pictures, and all that imagery was running on an inner TV like a movie.

On that day with the engineers, Telly didn’t have to study the problem at length. His imagery cut through all time constraints. His inner TV dissected the scramble of parts looking for the gap. His