Book Review-Sparks of Genius By Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein

This book Sparks of Genius was not a book that I had intended to read. I started reading this on the recommendation of Prof. Steven Strogatz, the renowned mathematician. He had mentioned this book as an instructive examination of the creative process, as a book on some of the tools to be used to spur our creative juices. I didn't believe him, so  I tweeted back to him that I didn't believe him. He kindly responded that he was skeptical at first as well but felt that it was a worthy read. I took a chance and bought a copy. As it turned out, he was correct, I truly enjoyed reading this book. I gained a considerable amount of knowledge regarding the creative process; more importantly the book opened up my mind to the possibilities of applying the 13 tools that the authors culled from their examination and study of some of the world’s most creative minds.  The 13 tools are natural things that we humans all do in flashes of inspiration. The difference is that they put the 13 tools next to one another and created connections between them and painted a mosaic which makes up the creative thought process.

The authors began the book with a chapter titled: Rethinking Thinking. The chapter observed our traditional way of thinking. How procedural our thinking has become as we have become acclimated to a specific way of using our senses and made the process of creating bypass our creativity, because we wanted to be efficient and expedient.  That first chapter drew me in, it fired my imagination and it made me consider the narrative that they described.  The first chapter also defined the difference that the authors thought between knowing and understanding, a key concept that I kept running into in my other readings. The authors also expounded on the importance of feeling as a major part of the creative process, something that is often neglected in the western traditions when it comes to thinking creatively. We have taken the mechanistic method of creativity to its extreme.

The second chapter is titled:  Schooling the Imagination. That chapter also goes hand in hand with the first chapter and it sets up the book nicely as to what the authors were trying to do with the 13 tools. In the second chapter, they make a case for changing the way we think about creating and inventing. This is where they lay out the 13 tools and gives us a bit of an advanced taste of what is to come in the later chapters. They go down the list of the 13 tools: observing, imaging, abstracting, recognizing patterns, forming patterns, analogizing, body thinking, empathizing, dimensional thinking, modeling, play, transforming, and synthesizing.

The last chapter is their summary and a call to arms to introduce these 13 tools into our educational paradigm formally so that we can educate the future generation on how to be creative and innovative through the application of these 13 tools.

The book starts with the most basic tool: Observing. And observation is illustrated by citing numerous examples of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things as they apply their keen sense of observations as a major part of their creative process. Observation is also explained and defined; they explain that observation  is not just looking for something but also knowing what to look for.  Which was a voilà moment for me.

The next chapter on Imaging, which  naturally flows from Observing. Imaging takes the results from observations to create images. Again, many examples of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things are described to demonstrate the  imaging process.

Abstracting follows and one gets the idea of the way the authors are using the sequencing of the chapters to create a sense of the natural sequential flow of the tools. They take the relatively concrete skill of  observing and move the thought process to something a little less tangible.  They then arrive at the actual act of abstracting itself.

Next on the tools list is Recognizing Patterns which was almost predictable because once you've abstracted the image our mind naturally begins to identify or recognize patterns for our own edification. Humans are very good at recognizing patterns; in fact, humans are too good at recognizing patterns. Sometimes we ascribe patterns for things just aren't there, but that is our creative advantage when we wish to create and innovate, we recognize patterns that are not logical.

Forming  patterns follows, because the natural instinct is to  create our own patterns after having recognized patterns from nature or from other people’s work.

As humans, we start drawing connections between the unfamiliar, we start Analogizing. This now takes us away from the most primal tools, those involve sensory perceptions and moving onto something that's mental: drawing analogy between the observed, imaged, abstracted, identified and formed patterns of; and connect with the familiar and recognized ideas from our experience through analogies.

Body thinking is next. The idea now is to imagine placing our bodies  into the analogy that we have drawn while centering that experience around our body.  

I have always taken empathizing as something emotional, but this chapter on empathizing made me think of empathizing in terms of slipping into someone else’s center, of changing my usual view from my center of existence and shifting it into observing all that is around me through the eyes of someone or something different.  

Dimensional thinking is next; this chapter is about  distorting, scaling, twisting, and rotating our  perceptions from the  body thinking and empathizing into a perception that is completely new and unknown.

Next two are modeling and playing. Modelling takes all the physical abstractions from body thinking, empathizing, and dimensional thinking  and creates a model. Which makes good sense. Playing is something very powerful that we humans do,  but we don't do enough of it because we are usually discouraged from playing in order to be serious, that is a bad mistake.  It takes the act of playing with the ideas before the concepts are made real.

The last two tools: transforming and synthesizing takes all that the previous 11 tools and use all of them together in a cohesive way. The transforming chapter talks about distorting and creating innovative concepts through the exercise of transforming the usual and daring to make it different, transformed.

Synthesizing is the critical final tool where we take the various disparate ideas that results from using the other tools and  put it all together into a consistent and cohesive whole.

The last chapter is again the authors’ opportunity to plea for the educational system to promote creative thinking, and they lay out their vision for a better process using the 13 tools in this chapter.

I truly enjoyed this book more than I thought I would, much more than I thought I would. I want to thank professor Strogatz for recommending it even though I gave him a little bit of guff for recognizing this book. It has modified and fortified my instincts on creativity and broadened my vision. I look at the world in a different, more nuanced way because I am aware of the 13 tools. Perhaps I knew some of the 13 tools as separate acts of brainstorming, now I can see them all as 13 ideas that must be coordinated and fleshed out in my thinking if I wanted to be optimally creative.

Obviously, I recommend this book very much.