John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Smart Decision Making

Idea 83: Make fuller use of your depth mind

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination.

Albert Einstein, German physicist

Synthesis of apparently unrelated things or ideas carried out at the conscious level is not the same as free-range, natural creative thinking. In the latter the process of synthesis takes place at a less than conscious level.

The poet C. Day Lewis once described the process in a lecture thus:

What seems to happen for a poet is that experience sinks down on to the seabed of the unconscious. And lying there for a length of time, it is changed: ‘those are pearls that were his eyes’.

And one day a fragment of this buried treasure floats to the surface. It comes ...