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Dmitry Chernyshev

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Creating new ideas is an operation accessible to everyone and quite simple: it is enough to know in what concentrations to mix the obvious and the impossible.

Clear thinking takes courage

not intelligence.

Thomas Szasz

This book is an attempt to understand how people think.

It must be admitted that people think extremely rarely. The vast majority of everything the average person does throughout his life, he does almost without thinking, based on very simple algorithms. For example, a man gets up (the alarm clock rang - I need to get up, I’ll lie down for a few more minutes and get up), goes to the toilet (turn on the light, open the door, raise the toilet seat, pee, flush, lower the toilet seat, close the door, turn off the light), gets dressed (where is the second sock? Are these socks already dirty or can you wear them for another day?), washes your face, makes your bed, turns on the TV, prepares breakfast, goes to work... and all this without thinking at all. Having arrived at work, a person often cannot even remember how he got there. It’s quite difficult to call this thinking. It is simply a sequence of constantly repeated actions. As Niels Bohr said: “You don’t think, you’re just logical.” This is all very correct - these are wonderfully working algorithms that have been tested thousands of times. But not very interesting. By creative thinking we will understand the creation of something new, something that did not exist before, or the solution of a specific problem.

Imagine walking up to your door, taking a key out of your pocket and trying to insert it into the keyhole. The key is not inserted. You turn the key over to the other side and try again. The key doesn't fit again. You look at the key - this is your key to your apartment. Look at the door - this is your apartment. And only at this moment do you come out of the state of automatism in which you were, and begin to think - try to understand what happened. And your imagination begins to work. The book will be about exactly this – about creative thinking. Because there is no other way of thinking other than creative thinking.

There are two main approaches to creativity. Some people believe that this is something given to a person from above. Connection to the noosphere. Revelation. Insight. Miracle. And any attempt to understand this miracle, hidden under the veil of secrecy, is doomed to failure. I believe that creative thinking is a technological process that can and should be learned. And this is available to anyone.

Unfortunately, few people know about the American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915). Meanwhile, this is a genius who laid the foundations for the scientific organization of labor. He showed that the basis of any skill lies in a set of fairly simple repetitive operations. Previously, many masters jealously guarded the secrets of their profession and did not try to systematize them, and often simply write them down. In crafts guilds, new members took an oath of secrecy about the subtleties of their craft. And many of the discoveries already made were inaccessible to the uninitiated.

For example, forceps, a surgical instrument to facilitate childbirth. They were invented by the English physician Peter Chamberlain at the beginning of the 17th century. They helped women in labor with difficult labor and in a critical situation could save both the woman and the child. The Chamberlains kept the invention a closely guarded secret for decades. When the doctor came to the woman in labor, he demanded that everyone leave the room and the woman be blindfolded. It is difficult to even imagine how many lives would have been saved if not for this secrecy.

In 1911, Taylor wrote a monograph, Principles of Scientific Management. He followed the workers with a stopwatch, plotted graphs of their degree of fatigue and, based on the collected data, showed how labor productivity could be increased several times (in the Soviet Union, the Stakhanov movement would grow from the principles developed by Taylor). Taylor proved that the fairest payment system is piecework. Workers have always fought against piecework. There was even a saying: “Piecework is deadly work.” Those who began to work harder and better had their machines damaged, claiming that they were leaving their comrades without work. Taylor proved that this is not so: “The overwhelming majority of workers to this day believe that if they began to work at the highest speed available to them, they would thereby cause enormous harm to all their fellow workers by depriving them of their jobs. In contrast, the history of the development of any branch of industry indicates that every improvement and improvement, be it the invention of a new machine or the introduction of improved methods of production, resulting in an increase in labor productivity in a given industrial branch and in a reduction in the cost of production, always ultimately "Instead of putting people out of work, it gave jobs to more workers."

Due to the active promotion of piecework wages, trade unions began to fight Taylor. A campaign of “universal contempt” was launched in the United States - one of the most vicious in the history of the country. Meanwhile, it was the application of Taylor's methods that helped the United States bring victory closer in World War II. Hitler was counting on the fact that America did not have enough transport ships and destroyers to cover them in order to transfer large military forces to Europe. The Germans relied on submarines - more than a thousand of them were built - and sank almost 800 Allied transport ships. Taylor's methods made it possible to train first-class welders and shipbuilders from unskilled workers in just two to three months. Previously, this took several years. And the production of ships was put on the assembly line.

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Dmitry Chernyshev
How people see

Words of gratitude to people without whose patience and help this book would not exist

Smelsky Alexander Sergeevich and Maxim

Ageev Dmitry Viktorovich, Alu udalovalex U, Alontsev Mikhail, Anchipolevsky Sergey Yurievich, Arzhannikova Marina Nikolaevna, Arslanov Konstantin, Artemyev Oleg, Arkhipova Larisa Vyacheslavovna, Baishikhin Alexander, Balev Roman, Begichev Pavel, Belkin Roman Belov Alexander, Belyakova T Atyana Lvovna, Andrey Blokhin, Blyakhin Igor, both Bogdanov Vadim, Bogun Nikolai Alexandrovich, Boldareva Mila, Bolshakov Dmitry, Bondarenko Sergei Sergeevich, Borisov Mikhail, Borisova Vera Fedorovna, Bredikhina Nina Vasilievna, Buldakova Alexandra, Buslay Stepanych, Bykadorov Dmitry, Varlamov Ilya, Venitsianova Dmi Triy, Veretennikov Dmitry Stanislavovich , Volik Margarita Aleksandrovna, Volkov Dmitry, Volodin Egor Sergeevich, Volodina Olga Borisovna, Voronov Alexander, Vyatkin Mikhail, Gavryushov Andrey Vladimirovich, Galaktionov Alexey, Galiev Azat Faatovich, Galkin Kirill, Glybov Sergey, Gorovaya Vasilina, Guzel Sergey Antonovich , Denis Davydkov, Dedikov Fedor Sergeevich, Demchuk Max, Dmitrieva Yulia, Dobriden Irina, Dovydenko Vladimir Mikhailovich, Drozdova Yulia, Druzhinin Egor, Evdokimov Andrey, Egorov Anton, Elshin Fedor Anatolyevich, Zheludkov Rodion, Zhuravleva Victoria, Zaitsev Alexey, Zakharova Polina, Zakharchenko Victor y, Zuev Mikhail Yurievich , Ilyushenko Dmitry Vladimirovich, Kazakov Denis, Kalkeev Vladimir Andreevich, Kiselgof Mirau, Klimova Lidiya, Klinov Gleb Borisovich, Kozlenko Alexander, Kozlov Anton, Kolosova Marina, Komarova Olga, Konyukhov Pavel, Queen Maria Nikolaevna, Kraskov Max, Krivopalov Dmitry Valerievich, Alexander Kuznetsov , Kuzmin Alexey, Kulikov Anton, Kulishova Olesya, Kurlykin Alexander, Kushlevich Sergei, Lariel, Lebedev Yuri, Lirnik Anton, Lobzeva Alina, Lyapina Yaroslav, Makarova Elena, Malinin Artem, Maslov Alexander Vitalievich, Medvedev Vladimir, Melnikova Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, Mesh Kovu Alexandru, Miroshnik Vadim, Mitsura Dmitry, Musatkina Elena, Nazarova Valentina Yuryevna, Nazarchuk Katerina Aleksandrovna, Nastasya, Negrey Alina, Nesterov Alexander, Nikitin Daniil, Nikitina Tatyana Vyacheslavovna, Ozhgibesov Alexey Vladimirovich, Oleynik Sergey, Osminin Sergey Anatolyevich, O Khrimenko Nikolai, Oshchepkova Elizaveta Aleksandrovna, Pavlik Anton, Panina Nesmeyana, Perevalov Kirill Vladimirovich, Perova Tatiana Alekseevna, Peters Oleg, Petrov Maxim, Platonov Maxim, Polyanskaya Ekaterina, Ponamorev Alexander, Popov Sergei Pavlovich, Prokhorova Galina Nikolaevna, Rabinovich Ilya, Rebik Alexey, Remez Alexey, Rekhtina E Lena, Rogozhin Alexander, Rodin Pavel Viktorovich, Oleg Rudchenko, Mikhail Ryzhov, Maxim Ryazanov, Alexander Savvov, Evgeniy Samoilov, Arthur Sarkisov, Elena Sakhnenko, Sergei, Andrey Silinichenko, Andrey Slepov, Sergey Vladimirovich Slepokurov, Alexander Smelsky, Oleg Smolin, Alex Stepanov Yu, Stepanova Maria , Stretovich Evgeniy, Tagiltseva Nastya, Timofeev Denius Lvovich, Timokhin Egor Vladimirovich, Tipyaev Alexander, Tkachuk Vladimir, Trubitskaya Marina, Uvarkin Ivan, Ulmaskulov Raul, Fedorov Denis, Filonov Anton, Firstov Andrey Vladimirovich, Folomeev Anton Vladimirovich , Alexey Khazov, Anna Chuikina, Shapovalov Yaroslav, Swede Dmitry, Shevchenko Alexey, Shelyakhovskaya Elena, Shestakov Maxim, Shigaeva Dasha, Shokhanova Svetlana, Shtepenko Anastasia Igorevna, Shcherbakov Sergey, Yuri Semenkov, Yurinov Vadim Alexandrovich, Yakovlev Oleg

And also to people whom, unfortunately, I know only by nicknames:

4567, 4128327, 8800088, 2smile, 2uran, 4dinaa, a.v.lysenkov, abc373, abdubaeva, addict2blood, aivbvd, al2smirn, Alex Chorry, alex_lobov, alex-bel2003, alex.dudnikov, alex2k, alexander.stashchuk, alexandra, Alexey altrainings L, alexjimmor, alkli, alyukova, anatoly.borhovich, andr.starkov, andry, andyjam, aniretake, Anita, anna_maksi, anna. yaselman, anon418, ao55, apopov, arcady08, arn, arzamaskov, askort, av, avtobass, balance, bazhin61, belokurova, berezel, birdy_2003, bistrener, blagosklonov, booinbox, boris.br, botym, brichikovng, buckwheatkris, budavv, captainvoronin, cas_siopeia, Chysiuk Igor, crevice, cyrill.verbych, d, Dan Yves, dania.chuvashaeva, danielmcevi, darkarchitect, denni435, dent, derendyaev, dikmax, dima, dimka, dirkbikk96, dishdishyan, dishshushu, dmitry.korban, doddy1, dontchaknowme, droop, e78902, eelleenna, ekstrasens87, elfcheg, elkochergina, elya.vm, epavlenko.com, erniest29, etagizn, eugene_jj, eva.yannn, FAUst, fazlullin, frame, fresh-fower, fvv_vika, gapel, genord, georgicio, gigorilio, glena.elena, gm-w, gnezdin, go, goldiki, gperevozova, grachol, greenguard, grytsenkopavlo, gsdstr, Guilfanov Ilfak, gulnazz, gymirbis, i-cl-i, i-crop, iam, ideynik, ig.grigoriev, igaros , illotum, ilya, ilyashargaev, info, is, isaamad, iskanderus, iskra.s.a.s, it.bruk, itorgovnikov, iva2000, ivan_shatalov, ivan-d1, ivan. charnetski, ivan.maryshev, ivanievlev, jahdie, joefns, julia4s, justddd1, kachanea, kae, kalushnya, kanzaki, kblkjil zuhuhuio uhioio, kemskemss, kender5e, kero.one, kinar82, koguanany, koka-mcse, kokoro.no.aseri, konst_dm, konstantin.lashuk, konstmail, koulkv, kriga, kriokamera, ksenia.chuykova, ktata, kubasse, kuharenok, kulabuhova. swetlana555, kumanika, LarCS-L, laune78, lawnmower-man, leogin, Leonov Oleksii, lex.pisarev, lily.alieva, liza-fly, loa, lomur00, m.karch, m.molodtsova, m897, mail, mailto. alehandro, mamontorama, maodzedunis, marinarus1, marlushka23, masavel, maxim7801, maxlethal, meadkar, meehey, metkere.com, michailovaster, milovanovav, Mist. Er, mitka, miwanya069, mmbx, moyapochta84, mpassov, mskmichel, mtvaradze, murky.cat, museyka, muto.boyz, nagaylik, nata1iya, naugadina, navyes, nechaevu, nelleh, nht.bender, nikonovakate, niksm, Nnear, novikov, o.gonchar, odissey80, oleg_s, oleg.yov, oleh, oleinik, olga_dp, olga784, ollyak, osipov_dv, owlripper, p-9, paragozin, pasha, passison, patarakina, pavelkudelin, pbdmn, pechnik, phis, pidvarko, pix- pix, pk, presariocq60, propavel, Pugatsov Andrei, puzz3d, pvproshko, quinikerr, qyarri, r.onin, ramagast, regedy, reukov, rikka_-_, rutven, safn_r, sanphir, sapandrey, sashabasos, sav.iamsav, sekhsveta, semavl , serega30d, serge.prokurov, serpletnev, severgr, sgned, shishkidesign, shlyapkina, shurik239, silins, sirponch, slayersp, smollett, sokolovpe, sokolx, sshayena, stimur, sunniest, swaydream, switnp, tak78, tam-barkhiyan, tenzz or, tequila00 , testarossa1, thakina, tikonoff, timo, treus85, tsitsurskaya, tzozulina, u.usmanov, uho1564, umalex99, unique.evy, uraken1, vadim, vafya, varvara.ld, vekodont, verakuz69, vespero, vesselovavv, Vimba, vinataly, vinsanti , vodaja, votosa, vpodobed, vskalinin, vspetrovskaya, vvk. 73, vvvps, wellyouknow, whatersoer, work4eat, xabeeroff.k, y.fetisova, yepard, ymprivate, you_too, Yu S, yugene, yukotka, yuri kan, yury.ilinsky, yury.khrol, z-positive, zay100, zayafedotova, Zhdanovich Matsvei, zorikto. dabaev

Introduction
(the word “introduction” does not mean that this text should not be read)

I wrote my first story because I myself would like to read such a story.

Toni Morrison

A few words about why I decided to write a book on photography, being neither a professional photographer nor a professional writer. Realizing how many books have already been written on everything that is somehow related to photography. The fact is that among the many books I read, I did not find a single one that taught me how to see the unusual in the ordinary, how to distinguish a good shot from a mediocre one. And I would answer the question, why out of the many pictures you look at do you remember only one, but it is remembered in such a way that you will never forget it?

It seems to me that two people came closest to answering these questions: Susan Sontag in her works on photography and Roland Barthes in Camera lucida. I want to deal with that same Barthesian “punctum” - that random prick in a photograph that makes an impression on the viewer. To slightly paraphrase D. Barnes, grab the viewer’s heart with two fingers and, pinching, leave a bruise from which a love hematoma will develop. I would like to talk about this topic in simple words, without using Barthes’ vocabulary - ontological, Tyche, sovereignty of the “I”, heuristic principles and other Mathesis singularis.

I once read about the artist August Natterer, who once, in a fit of hallucination, saw 10,000 paintings in half an hour and went crazy. And after that he began to paint pictures. I worked as a creative director for fifteen years and sometimes had to look through 40-50,000 photos a week at work. I began to select the photographs that caught my attention and tried to figure out why I liked them so much.

The book will not tell you how the camera works: what shutter speed, aperture and ISO are (a huge number of books have been written about this). There will be no recommendations for processing images in Photoshop (I don’t think this topic deserves serious attention at all) and there will be no “water” - all these long stories about how the author came to his wonderful idea and what a great guy he is.

I thought for a long time about how to illustrate the book. At first I wanted to use only my own photographs and photographs of my photographer friends, but then I realized that this was completely not enough for me. I ask you to consider the photographs in the book not as a desire to profit from the creativity of talented people and not as an attempt to hide behind their authority. No - only as illustrative material.

In addition, the book can be used as a photography tutorial. Anyone who completes all the tasks in the book and replaces other people's photographs with their own will receive a special diploma from me.

After publishing my first book, How People Think, I received several hundred reviews. Especially often the same thought was found in them - thank you for writing about something that I had vaguely felt for a long time, but could not formulate. And one of the purposes of this book is to help the reader verbalize his own thoughts.

Start

You can't take a photo with just a camera. You bring into it all the photographs you've seen, the books you've read, the music you've heard, the people you've loved.

Ansel Adams

Alfred Stieglitz

Photography began as magic and consisted of magical objects - a mirror, a crystal ball (lens), silver. And like any magic, it needed contrasts - bright light and complete darkness. Adepts of photography could create a miracle - stop time. They stole the image of reality, preserving it forever. And getting acquainted with photography must begin with theft. You need to look at the work of the best photographers in the world and take away the best from them - ideas, techniques, angles, composition, working with models, processing images... - everything. You need to absorb them and start looking at the world through their eyes. Don't be afraid to steal ideas - they're not things. There are no fewer ideas from this. You won’t be able to do the same anyway, and you don’t need to. This is necessary for inspiration and for raising the internal bar as high as possible. You must fill yourself with the best. For example, in Japan, an antique dealer surrounded his students with the most expensive originals and, growing up in such an atmosphere, they could recognize a fake at first sight.

Nietzsche believed that a person in his development can go through three stages - camel, lion and child. At first, every person is a camel. Like a camel that accumulates water for a long journey through the desert, a person accumulates knowledge that is given to him by his parents, society, school... The camel is guided by this knowledge, the camel agrees with everything and does not question anything. He only knows how to say “yes.” So Quentin Tarantino watched four or five films every day for several years before he began making his own films.

Viewing the best photos is the camel stage. You can't miss it. Artists learn to paint by copying great paintings. Aspiring filmmakers are re-shooting shots from classic films. A good exercise for a photographer is to retake other people's photographs that he likes.

The usual division of photographers into professionals and amateurs is fundamentally incorrect. A true amateur is a person who takes up photography for the love of it. And although, as a rule, an amateur loses to a professional in everything - in technology, in time, in money, in the quality and quantity of photographs taken and in the number of exotic places visited - without the love of photography, even a strong professional will remain, at best, only an artisan.

The list of good photographers is huge. I will only tell you about a few that I like.

Alfred Stieglitz

His pictorealistic photographs are a cross between painting and photography. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Stieglitz “almost single-handedly pushed America into the world of 20th-century art” - in his “Gallery 291” photographs were exhibited along with paintings by contemporary artists: Matisse, Renoir, Cezanne, Manet, Picasso. Another story is connected with Picasso - in 1911, the exhibition and sale of the artist’s works ended in complete failure. Stieglitz wrote: “I sold one drawing that he made as a twelve-year-old boy, the second I bought myself... I was ashamed of America when I returned all the works to Picasso. I sold them for $20-$30 a piece. The entire collection could be purchased for $2,000. I suggested it to the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He saw nothing in Picasso's work and said that such crazy things would never be accepted by America."

August Sander

Zander worked as a miner in Germany, then became interested in photography and served in the army as a photographer's assistant. In 1901, he entered service in a photographic studio in Linz and three years later he bought it and named it “August Sander’s Studio of Art Photography and Painting.” In 1904 he received a gold medal at the Paris Photo Exhibition. He decided on a titanic project - to create a portrait of the nation. Zander traveled around the country and filmed, filmed, filmed. When the Nazis came to power, Sander's book was banned, some of the negatives were destroyed, and his son was imprisoned as a socialist for 10 years (he died in 1944 without ever being released). Part of the archive will perish during the war, the other part will be destroyed by robbers in 1946. Only 40,000 photos left.

Arnold Newman

American photographer who created his own genre of portraiture – “portrait in a natural setting.” He dreamed of becoming an artist, was brought up on classical painting and tried to reveal the inner world of a person through a portrait. For three years he worked in the cheapest photo studios, sometimes making a hundred portraits a day.

Andre Kertesz

Hungarian, French and American photographer. A proponent of maximum photographic simplicity – “simplify, simplify, simplify.” Created a large series of people who read – On Reading. He bequeathed all his negatives to France.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

The father of photo reporting and photojournalism. I also wanted to become an artist. One of the founders of the legendary Magnum Photo agency. He was the first foreign photographer to visit the USSR after Stalin's death. It was said about him that he knew how to become invisible to the people he photographed.

Antanas Sutkus

As a child, I saved money for a bicycle, but for some reason I bought a camera. He became known in the West earlier than in the USSR. He gave up filming groups and filmed ordinary people, their lives and concerns. He turned reportage photography into artistic photography.

This is only a tiny part of the wonderful photographers starting with the letter “A”. My goal is not to tell you about the history of photography, but rather to interest you. As Sergei Averintsev advised: “How to write? Thought does not pretend to be moving; it gives not an indication of the path, but a pattern of walking. It’s good when the reader finishes reading a book with the unmistakable feeling that now he doesn’t know more than he didn’t know before.”

Still, I’ll name a few more favorite photographers.

Alexander Rodchenko, Leni Riffenstahl, Josef Koudelka, David Bailey, Vladimir Vyatkin, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Alexander Petrosyan, Vladimir Lagrange, Vikenty Nilin, Annie Leibovitz, Evgeniy Umnov, Elliott Erwitt. Alexander Slyusarev, Chema Madoz, Ansel Adams, Romualdas Rakauskas, Sam Haskins, Bruce Davidson, Robert Doisneau, Ralph Gibson, Dorothea Lange, Sally Mann, Brassaï, Sergey Maximishin, Sebastian Salgado, Horst P. Horst, Eugene Smith, Irving Penn, Helmuth Newton, Gregory Colbert, Robert Capa, Richard Avedon, Andreas Feininger, Michael Kenna, Norman Parkinson, Igor Mukhin, Diane Arbus, Arkady Shaikhet, TRIVA Group, Vivian Maier, Jan Saudek...

There's plenty of free space left here for you to add your favorite photographers. Or crossed off those you didn’t like from the list.

Development of imagination

Surprisingly, a serious obstacle to a person’s progress in photography is the progress of photographic technology - a novice photographer immediately begins to do everything well (more precisely, it seems to a novice photographer that everything turns out well - the colors are so bright, and the pictures are so sharp).

And the entire lengthy but vital process of apprenticeship is lost. It’s as if in painting there would be no need for a very long time to first draw the simplest geometric figures, then plaster busts and stuffed animals, then move on to working with sitters, there would be no need to study anatomy and the laws of perspective, there would be no need to go to sketches and understand color mixing, work with light, shades and halftones.

Meanwhile, in order to learn to see an interesting plot, you must first learn to build an interesting plot. From any available materials - the simpler they are, the better. Try, for example, using a box of matches to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet. Take a star atlas and draw your own constellations - imagine yourself being the first person on Earth to name constellations. Figure out how to capture the wind without an upturned umbrella and a flying hat. Or try taking time off. Or choose any poem you like and take a photo based on it.

For example, Lorca "Prelude"

And the poplars leave -
but their trace of the lake is bright.
And the poplars leave -
but they leave us the wind.
And the wind will fall silent at night, dressed in black crepe.
But the wind will leave an echo floating down the rivers.
And the world of fireflies will overflow - and the past will drown in it.
And a tiny heart will open in the palm of your hand.
/translation by A. Geleskul/

or Vladimir Burich:

I'm going for water
and about the bottom of my bucket
Daisies are banging their heads.
I lie on my back and look at the ceiling with my ears full of tears.
Blowing into your child's hair
Reading the names of river steamers
Helping a bee free itself from jam
By what betrayal did you buy all this?

Start with simple things. You don’t need to go to the other side of the globe for inspiration - “What’s more interesting in the world than a wall and a chair?” Kafka writes about this: “You don’t have to leave the house. Stay at your desk and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't even wait, just be silent and be alone. The universe itself will begin to ask for exposure, it cannot do otherwise, it will ecstatically writhe in front of you.”

Don't be afraid to look like an idiot. Mark Bell, an actor and plastic teacher at the London Academy of Musical and Dramatic Art, said: “My responsibilities include training young actors to work in comedy roles. Such roles are based on what we call the image of the Clown. This Clown is in each of us, and everyone can discover the comic side of themselves. Imagine that inside most of us there is a creature that we call “a complete idiot”, and we are always trying to hide it. In the first lessons, we search for this creature, and then we look at what image can be formed on this basis, what type of idiot it will be.” The Japanese have a wonderful saying: “Whether we dance or not, we still look like idiots. Then it’s better to dance.”

Start with something simple: write numbers from zero to nine on a piece of paper, and then add a couple of strokes or dots to them so that they turn into something else, recognizable:

For example: barrel, match, face, chest, cactus... The less you add, the better.

Or imagine that you only have two characters - a bracket and a period. Try to draw something with their help.

I once gave this assignment in my journal. Here's what happened:

Why do I suggest starting with primitives? Limits include human imagination. Hemingway once came up with a six-word story. For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn (Russian version is half as long: “Booties for sale. Never worn”). And he created a whole genre of six-word stories:

Sorry soldier, we sell boots in pairs.

On the broken windshield was written “just married”...

There were also very short scary stories:

The last man on Earth was sitting in a room. There was a knock on the door.

/Frederick Brown. "The Shortest Scary Story Ever Written"

I start to put the child to bed, and he says to me: “Dad, check for the monsters under the bed.” I look under the bed to calm him down, and I see my child there, who looks at me with horror and says in a trembling voice: “Dad, there is someone else in my bed.”

This morning I found a fresh photo of myself sleeping on my phone. I live alone…

And Tonino Guerra once won a bet. He claimed that he could make a full-fledged film with a plot in ten seconds. And this is what happened: “A woman is watching TV. The spacecraft launch is being broadcast. As the time to the start counts down: 10, 9, 8... - the woman picks up the phone and turns the dial. At the very moment when the rocket launch is shown on the screen, she says into the phone: “Come, he has flown away...”.

Here's a great exercise from the Brazilian School of Art and Design.

Imagine how much children's drawings would change if school notebooks were printed not with squares, but, for example, with triangles. Or with concentric circles.

Several works with the primitives of the classics. Film by Michael Ansara: Man Blows Chewing Gum. Film by Takeshi Kitano "Samurai in the Toilet".

Yoko Ono's work "A Hole Through Which You Can Look at the Sky":

More about working with primitives. One day I saw a drawing on the Internet with red dots - a lover, a fighter, a loser. And first he himself proposed his own option - a sniper, and then asked readers to do the same. Try to continue this series:

Try, like Christoph Niemann, to take any object from your table and “complete” it so that it turns into something else. The quality of the drawing is completely unimportant - as long as your idea is readable.

Or, like Kate Sharp, find an associative photographic rhyme for any object around you. To do this, it is enough to simply formulate some feature of this object - corrugation, scales - and find an analogue for them.

A very good exercise for developing imagination is to look for familiar images in the crown of trees, in patterns on wallpaper or in cracks on the asphalt. Don't be confused by the fact that this is considered one of the symptoms of schizophrenia.

The Strugatskys once had an idea to include schizids in the crews of spaceships: “schizoid types have a pronounced ability of unbiased association. Where a normal person, in the chaos of the unprecedented, willy-nilly strives to discern the familiar, the previously known, the stereotypical, the schizoid, on the contrary, not only sees everything as it is, but is capable of creating new stereotypes that directly follow from the hidden nature of the chaos in question.” Inspiration can be found everywhere. Once in the ordinary inscription “Metro Tekstilshchiki” I saw both meter, text, and style. And the Englishman Paul Middlewick is looking for animals in the London Underground map.

Mikhail Gasparov in his book “Records and Extracts” has another interesting recipe for finding inspiration: “K. he cut out words from newspaper advertisements, glued them into incomprehensible phrases, glued them to the walls of the room, an arrow hung from the ceiling on a thread, every morning he untwisted it and thought about the phrase.”

At school, careless students often completed drawings on pictures, diagrams and maps in textbooks. This is a vicious practice, however, it perfectly develops the imagination. Take a look at Tineke Meirink's work:

In drawing theory there is the concept of “negative space”. This is space not occupied by objects. It can also obey the laws of composition. More precisely, this is the reverse side of the composition. This is practically the same as pauses in music.

In photography, negative space can be used to emphasize shapes and sizes and place semantic accents. Look what Thomas Lamadieu makes of empty space (the sky):

Very often, when a photographer comes to another country, he gets a second wind and a third eye - everything seems interesting and fascinating to him, at every step he finds hundreds of subjects. And then, after returning home, the photographer seems to go blind. Everything seems insipid, dull and hackneyed to him. Meanwhile, it’s all about personal settings, which can and should be controlled. Imagine, for example, that you are an alien who has never been to Earth and who has only a few hours to form an idea about it - everything is new and unusual for you - both the telegraph pole and St. Basil's Cathedral. Try to take such a series of photographs - with alien logic and taste. Let me complicate the task - your height is 40 centimeters.

Chesterton once coined the word “mooreeffoc” (inverted coffe-room). He used it “to denote that sudden defamiliarization of things that have long been familiar to us, when they suddenly appear from an unexpected perspective.” Tolkien's explanation: “Murefok is a fantastic word, but you can find it in every city in our country. To clarify, let's take, say, this example: sitting in a coffee shop, you suddenly see this word through the glass door... The word “murefok” can help you suddenly realize that England is a completely foreign country to you, flashed once in history and lost in ancient centuries, or, conversely, a country shrouded in the mists of such a distant future, in which you can only find yourself with the help of a time machine; you may discover that its inhabitants are surprisingly strange and interesting people, distinguished by unusual habits. However, all this is nothing more than the action of a telescope of time, focused on one point or another.”

It is a very useful exercise to look at everything with new eyes. You begin to see what no one else sees.

In St. Paul's Cathedral in London, under the dome of the Whispering Gallery, I saw the fading smile of the Cheshire Cat.

Reading Nabokov's biography, I understood why the pharaohs were mummified. The connection with the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly is obvious. The same belief in life after death. The same hope for the ability to fly. The same gentle swaddling.

The fence at a station near Moscow has been painted dozens of times. With the paint that was on hand. And it turned out to be a kind of “cultural layer”.

I committed the worst sin of all possible sins. I wasn't happy.

Don't be afraid to look like a weirdo in the eyes of others. One of my acquaintances, who holds a high position in a large company, left it and became a photographer when he suddenly realized that he could not remember a single event during the entire past year.

Try mixing different realities. Print out some illustrations from your favorite book and find a place for them around town. For example, like this:

And then, as if by magic, chewing gum marks on the asphalt will turn into stars, and the sewer hatch will become a small planet with a volcano.

It is believed that it is very simple to distinguish a predator animal from a vegetarian animal: predators have eyes located on the front of the muzzle to see the prey. Vegetarians have them on both sides of their heads to see the enemy.

This also applies to lenses. They give you a rare opportunity to see the world through different eyes:

With a long lens you become a hunter. Carefully, stepping gently, approach so as not to frighten the victim. And you freeze for a second before the attack. Someone from the cat family? Predatory bird?

With a wide angle, you are a herbivore. You look at the world with a panoramic view. It will never occur to you that you can sneak up on the sunset.

Perhaps with a wide angle you see the world before the Fall.

And with the TV - after.

A macro lens turns you into an insect. You notice a drop of dew and pollen.

And it's pretty obvious what you'll turn into with a fisheye lens.

And only with “fifty dollars” you look at the world through the eyes of a person.

Taking up photography can heal a person.

In many shamanic societies, when a person came to a healer complaining of sadness, despondency or depression, he was asked several questions:

When did you stop dancing?

When did you stop singing?

How long has it been since you were fascinated by wonderful stories?

How long has it been since you tried to find solace in silence?

By the way, when did you stop singing?

In Russian, the concept of “fantasy” has negative connotations - stop fantasizing. Meanwhile, it is people with a well-developed imagination who can make the world a better place. For example, many house facades are damaged by air conditioners and satellite dishes.

Come up with a design for the panel that covers the air conditioner.

It could be a birdhouse, a small Swedish house with red walls, a band-aid, an art object...

A satellite dish can be disguised as a sunflower, a mushroom, a flying saucer...

On October 5, 1793, a new Republican (revolutionary) calendar was introduced in France. It marked a break with tradition, de-Christianization and a “natural religion” associated with nature. The new months had very beautiful names: Germinal - the month of germination, Floral - the month of flowering, Prairial - the month of meadows. Each day was associated with an animal (days ending with 5), a tool (with 0), and a plant or mineral (the remaining days).

How do people think

Dmitry Chernyshev

In the phrase “creative thinking,” the main word is thinking. It is in itself a creative act. Everything new, interesting, complex is food for the mind, and the world around us supplies this food in abundance. And you can process the material into new ideas using the techniques from this book, written by the famous Russian blogger (40,000 readers!) Dmitry Chernyshev, whose work as a creative director in an advertising agency has been associated with the daily generation of ideas for almost a decade and a half.

5th edition.

Dmitry Chernyshev

How do people think

Information from the publisher

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright holders.

Creating new ideas is an operation accessible to everyone and quite simple: it is enough to know in what concentrations to mix the obvious and the impossible.

Clear thinking requires courage, not intelligence.

Thomas Szasz

This book is an attempt to understand how people think.

I want to desacralize the process of creative thinking. Show that it consists of a set of simple and understandable algorithms that anyone can learn. When you were little and got an answer wrong, perhaps your parents said to you, “What if you think about it?” They uttered the word “think”, but did not explain what it actually meant. I want, following Einstein’s advice “Everything should be simplified as far as possible, but no more,” try to explain what it means to “think.”

I spent

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many seminars in which students came up with two to three hundred ideas related to any subject chosen for brainstorming. It seems to me that just reading a book is not enough. It's like a lecture - just listening is not very effective. You can't learn to do something without trying. Therefore, the book will contain many tasks typed in a different font, like this:

Imagine, for example, that the Earth is at war with alien intelligence not with weapons, but with ideas, and you urgently need to teach thousands of people to generate ideas in industrial quantities. Where do you start?

This is the first task.

I have a personal dislike for a lot of books that consist of one idea and two or three facts. And the rest is the story of how the author came to this wonderful idea. I don't really like it when an idea that can be expressed in one paragraph is stretched out to a whole book. That is why there will be a lot of ideas and facts in the book. This may make it difficult to read. I would hope that the book will work like a flint - and carve a few ideas. I think it's worth reading it with a pencil.

I tried to come up with an alphabet of thinking. It seems to me that this can make it easier both to come up with something new and to explain how a person came to an idea. In addition, an idea expressed graphically is remembered much better. And perhaps the creation of an alphabet of thinking will allow us to refute Ludwig Wittgenstein, who believed that the boundaries of our language mean the boundaries of our world. Maybe the alphabet will allow you to first perform mental operations, and only then find a verbal analogue for the result obtained.

Some of the main ideas in the book will be repeated several times. Don't let this bother you. It’s just that their importance to me is so great that if you remember only them from the entire book, I will consider my task completed.

Alphabet of thinking

Philosophy is the struggle against the witchcraft of our intellect through language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

All kinds of thinking traps. From admiration for authorities and public opinion to persistence in one’s own opinion and wishful thinking.

A cloud of meanings and associations surrounding any word.

The intersection of two clouds of meaning. The vast majority of new ideas are located in the area of this intersection.

Constant change in both the world around us and our ideas about it.

Classification of the reality around us. Man's desire to sort everything into pieces.

Deconstruction. Analysis of any object or concept into its constituent parts.

Searching for something new and interesting in something that has been taken apart.

Combinatorics. Enumeration of options.

Contrast/war. Potential difference.

Aikido principle. Using existing energy flows for your own purposes.

Changing the size and number of objects. Changing their functions.

Inversion. Changing the meaning to the opposite.

Constructor. Object structure.

Chaos. Chaotic selection of options.

Third Eye. Change of point of view.

Black hole. Absence of an object or part of it.

Formulation of the problem conditions.

Continuous effort. Transition to a qualitatively new level.

Guided dreams.

Why do you need to think?

The missing link in the chain between an animal and a real person is most likely you and me.

Konrad Lorenz

Thinking is a very expensive process. Our brain makes up only 2% of our body weight, and at rest it consumes about 10% of the body's total energy. When a person begins to think intensively, energy consumption increases to 20–25%.

As soon as a person has learned something new, he stops thinking about it. It’s like riding a bicycle – everything is done “automatically”. And you shouldn’t even think about how to maintain balance - you can immediately fall. In case of real danger, when a person has only three options - freeze, run or attack, a slight mental delay can cost his life.

But thinking makes a person much stronger. Education teaches him to look for non-standard options. Even slave owners understood this perfectly well. Alberto Manguel, in “The History of Reading,” writes that in the 18th century a law was passed in South Carolina strictly prohibiting all blacks, whether slave or free, from learning to read. It was not abolished until the middle of the 19th century. “The first time you were caught reading and writing, you were flogged with a cowhide whip, the second time you were given a whip of nine tails, and the third time the phalanx of your index finger was cut off.” Throughout the South, it was common to hang a slave who taught his fellows to read.

Back at the end of the 19th century, there was a theory that studying a lot is harmful. A report entitled “The Relationship between Education and Insanity” was published in the United States. After studying 1,741 cases of insanity, the author concluded that in 205 cases it was caused by work overload - “education lays the foundation for many cases of mental illness.” The teachers were concerned that the children should not study too much. They sought to reduce the hours devoted to study, since long breaks prevented damage to the mind. Echoes of these prejudices have survived to this day.

At school, the simplest topics were covered for months. Bright and talented children became bored, and they slowly faded away. No, there were, of course, exceptions - a talented teacher could perform a real miracle. But how many of these have you met? Two? Three? If more, consider yourself very lucky. As a rule, such people were not very liked in the team. Against their background, the wretchedness of the other teachers became clearly visible.

Remember the boredom and monotony of lessons. The teachers worked according to manuals, thought and said in cliches: “Have you forgotten your head at home?”, “I can hear everything,” “The bell is not for you, but for the teacher,” “Everyone will jump from the roof, and you will jump too?” , “Tell everyone, we’ll laugh too,” “Maybe you can teach a lesson?”…

The melancholy continued at the institute. It was not difficult to get there. Exorbitant competitions existed only in a few prestigious universities, while the rest accepted almost everyone.

But our children will have to compete not only with their classmates, but with the whole world. With millions of smart Indians, Chinese, Singaporeans, Jordanians, Mexicans, Brazilians... And the difficult Russian language is not at all an escape from this competition. I'm not talking about hard physical labor. Not about the work of a janitor in the winter, which will be given to an unrequited Tajik, and not about harvesting, which will be hired by a Vietnamese. No. I'm talking about intellectual and creative specialties.

Do you need beautiful packaging for your product? A Moscow design studio will charge 10–20 thousand dollars for this work and in a month will show you three options. In Singapore, talented guys will do it three times faster and cheaper. And no worse. Artists on Arbat promise to paint your embellished portrait for $50? Through a webcam, a Chinese artist will do it for a tenner (payment by card, drawing by

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Internet).

Mobile anti-crisis governments will appear that will solve the problems of entire countries. An excerpt from the portfolio of some “Rurik International”: “We are not connected with your mafia, your officials and your oil lobby. We solve your problems! In four years we were able to pay off Greece’s external debt, and in six years we increased Slovenia’s GDP by 42%..."

All this will happen. It is impossible to avoid this, but you can prepare for it. And the ability to invent dramatically increases your chances in competition.

The world is changing very quickly. The very concept of a completed higher education will soon disappear. Because this is complete nonsense. Education can only be incomplete. A person must learn new things throughout his life. Otherwise, he will simply be uncompetitive.

Darwin is often misinterpreted here. He never said that the fittest survive. The world in this case would be inhabited only by tyrannosaurs and saber-toothed tigers. “It is not the strongest who survive, but the most receptive to change.”

Twitterization of thinking

No matter how your life goes, your mind will protect you more often than your sword. Keep it sharp.

Patrick Rothfuss

There is another very serious reason to train your brain. We are witnessing a tectonic shift in human thinking—in the way people think. More precisely, in the way they process information.

Usually, when talking about memory, it is divided into short-term and long-term. Or, if we draw parallels with a computer, operational and constant. Our “RAM” is responsible for the ability to think logically, analyze and solve problems regardless of previous experience. Permanent memory is the accumulated experience and the ability to use acquired knowledge and skills.

Until recently, permanent memory dominated. The schoolchildren kept in their heads pieces of the Bradis table, physical constants, formulas, dates of events and numbers of congresses of the CPSU. Large volumes of text and hundreds of poems were memorized. Now, when almost any information is at arm's length, it all depreciates very quickly. At a good institute, you will be able to bring any source of information to the exam - it is much more important not to remember it, but to be able to work with it. (I remember the story of how a student brought his graduate student friend with him to the exam. “You said - anyone!”) RAM begins to outweigh permanent memory. Who will remember the date of the Battle of Cannes if, if desired, the answer can be found in a few seconds? How many phone numbers can you remember now? Did the notebook on your phone relax your memory? And your parents memorized the numbers in dozens.

Today, to obtain a license, London taxi drivers must know the layout of 10,000 streets in order to find the fastest route for passengers. Tomorrow this knowledge will hinder them. Because the navigator will find the shortest path much better. Taking into account traffic jams and accidents.

Perhaps your children will work in a specialty that does not yet exist. And then they change it several times. What will be more important is not the ability to learn something once (to ram it into permanent memory), but the ability to quickly relearn. Perhaps we are the penultimate generation that is studying foreign languages en masse. Especially considering the speed with which machine translation is developing. And all this is a whole layer in the consciousness, a skill that greatly influences a person’s thinking. On one side of the scale there are two or three languages, which the vast majority of people use today, on the other - the ability to communicate/read in any of the existing (or dead) languages. The only difference is that you kept the foreign language you learned in your head. And they thought using the capabilities of this language.

A very interesting thing is happening before our eyes - a narrowing of areas for imagination. You can create a conditional rating in which a person is a co-author of a work of art.

In first place in the ranking is music (without words) - in it all the images and emotions are in the listener’s head. The second is literature. The reader comes up with the characters himself. On the third is the theater. Only there do you believe that the swaying piece of fabric is the sea. The invention of television and computers led to things more interesting than books and theater. This is very noticeable in how much children have changed and how they prefer to spend their free time.

And in television (cinema) there is very little room for co-authorship. Remember the old films - the action in them developed very slowly and there was time to empathize with the hero (and empathy is in some ways co-creation). Now the special effects and the very eventful plot of the film leave virtually no room for empathy. The main thing here is to follow the plot.

And even in computer games, everything is already chewed up for the player. Maximum realism. There's nothing to think about. And the brains rest.

Here is a screenshot of the computer game Rogue (1980). Dungeon crawl. Opponents were designated by letters: C – centaur, Z – zombie, etc. The scope for the player’s imagination was maximum. Not like in modern computer games.

It's a bit like moving from a village to a city. There is no shortage of physical work and walking in the village. City dwellers have to go to the gym for this. The same thing happens with our cognitive abilities. In conditions where a person does not need to train his memory to remember a large amount of information, which is always at hand, his thinking abilities weaken. Inventing something allows you to always keep your brain in good shape.

It is too difficult to assess the scale of future changes. We are part of the process and cannot look at it from the outside. However, some things can be predicted now.

The number of large texts in literature will be reduced. It will be too difficult for the reader to keep them in mind. The storyline will be simplified. The number of main characters will be reduced. For comparison: in the classic Chinese novel “The Dream of the Red Chamber” there are about forty main characters and almost 500 minor ones. But this is relatively recent – the 18th century. The Twitterization of consciousness cannot pass without leaving a trace.

The same thing will happen in cinema. Sequels and TV series will rule the roost. Stories with already well-known characters. And after a few generations, difficulties will begin with understanding the classics. The feelings and relationships of the characters will be too strange for an unprepared reader.

It is much more difficult to predict what the inevitable increase in RAM will give us. Most likely, relations between people will move to a qualitatively new level. People will become more emotionally developed. The brutal ideal of a man will become a thing of the past, and progress in empathy and intuition, coupled with technical capabilities, will lead human communication to some semblance of telepathy.

Gregor Reisch. Margarita Philosophica, 1503. Two dogs Veritas (Latin for “truth”) and Falsitas (Latin for “false”) chase the hare Problema (Latin for “task”), logic,

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armed with the sword of syllogism, hurries behind

Interestingly, this is not the first tectonic shift that occurs in consciousness. For example, the appearance of the book radically changed human thinking. Memory now has a “crutch” that people have learned to use very well. Although there were philosophers who sharply opposed the institution of the book. The book weakens the memory. A book is too dangerous. She cannot choose her reader. And it is completely unknown into whose hands knowledge may fall.

Every really good idea I've ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.

Grant Wood

The most important element of creative thinking is you (let me remind you, just in case, that there is no other thinking except creative thinking). First of all, you must know yourself very well. Know what you like and when you think best.

The first will help you reward yourself for a successful thought and, as a result, enjoy it. After all, the main condition for progress in any field is to enjoy the work you are doing.

And the second stimulates the thought process. For example, Schiller was brought into a creative state by the smell of rotting apples, Zola tied himself to a chair, Wagner loved to hold silk in his hands, Charlotte Brontë peeled potatoes, Agatha Christie washed dishes. Milton, Rossini, Leibniz, Kant and Descartes worked while lying in bed, Beethoven poured ice water on his head. When Balzac lived in poverty, he wrote on bare walls the names of objects that he would like to see in his home: “tapestry”, “Venetian mirror”, “chest of drawers”, “painting by Raphael”. This inspired him.

Some people think well during the rain, others - sitting by the fireplace. The British believe that almost all great scientific discoveries were made in one of the three b - bus, bed, bath (bus, bed, bath).

Smells play a huge role in inspiration. It could be the smell of freshly cut grass, rotten leaves, or the smell of ozone. For example, the “cannon king” Alfred Krupp was inspired by the “healthy rural air”. More precisely, the smell of manure. He connected the workroom and the stable with ventilation.

The method of denying yourself something you love works very well. This could be a chocolate bar, pistachio ice cream, a computer game or a fishing trip. Delay gratification until you come up with something interesting. And the reward will seem more desirable to you. And you will enjoy the thought process. Because a reward follows.

You can inspire yourself and others in any way you want. Difficulties can also be inspiring. Difficulties are challenges. In 1914, in order to find people to participate in the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, Ernest Shackleton published an advertisement in British newspapers: “Seeking companions for a dangerous journey. Small salary, cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. The likelihood of returning home is low. Honor and recognition if successful. Sir Ernest Shackleton."

It was not possible to achieve the goal then. One of the two ships was lost, covered in ice. But Shackleton managed to save the entire team - not a single person died.

In 1940, in his first speech as prime minister, Winston Churchill inspired the nation to fight the fascists by saying: “I have nothing to offer (the British) except blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Salvador Dali wrote about Catalan fishermen who decorate altar statues with their catch - dying lobsters. The spectacle of agony makes them sympathize with the passions of the Lord with special strength. Lobsters inspired fishermen to be compassionate.

Another great source of inspiration is PURPOSE. The more interesting it is, the faster your brain will work. If you can, come up with the most interesting goal possible. Raise the stakes. Compare, for example, the trip of the musketeers to England for pendants (saving the queen, and therefore all of France) with a trip to England to drink English beer. Which plot is more interesting to think about? If, for example, you are an employee, and the task facing you seems boring and uninteresting, try to imagine that this is your business. And that you mortgaged your apartment. And if you don’t do your job today, tomorrow you will have nowhere to live. Perfectly stimulating.

A person can do what he loves an order of magnitude longer than what he doesn’t like. And he will succeed in this much better. JK Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, had a good recipe for a happy life, consisting of only two points:

1. Choose an activity that you enjoy most in the world.

2. Find people willing to pay money for it.

When you are seriously passionate about something - philately, Kabbalah or annelids - it begins to seem to you that the world is helping you. Like a puzzle, you try to attach any object to your world. And when the puzzle matches even a little, you consider it a Sign. And that moves you further. Conclusion: get carried away. Believe in what you are doing. And the whole world will work for you.

There is no reason to go to a job you don't like. In this case, you are simply throwing your life in the trash. And she is priceless. The likelihood of your being born is practically zero. Imagine the huge number of accidents that led to your birth. Your parents might not have met and fell in love with each other; anything could have happened to you dozens of times. Now multiply this by at least several generations. Add war and disease. Neither you nor I should have been alive. Treat your life as an amazing, incredible gift. Our life is so arranged that we can only waste it. You cannot now, while you are in a bad mood, not live, but then, when it improves, you can live through what you have accumulated. It is up to you to decide how to spend such a precious resource as time.

Read this book in its entirety by purchasing the full legal version (https://www.litres.ru/dmitriy-chernyshev/kak-ludi-dumaut/?lfrom=279785000) on liters.

Notes

The vocabulary of an American child aged 6–14 in 1940 was 25,000 words. Today – 10,000 words.

In the United States in the 1960s, fathers spent an average of 45 minutes a day talking to their children. Today – 6 minutes.

End of introductory fragment.

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Here is an introductory fragment of the book.

Only part of the text is open for free reading (restriction of the copyright holder). If you liked the book, the full text can be obtained on our partner's website.

Dmitry Chernyshev (born in 1966) is a St. Petersburg poet and prose writer, editor, critic, ideologist of the Shinkage-ryu literary school, and a famous Russian blogger. Today it ranks 7th in popularity among LiveJournal users. It is read by about 37 thousand people.

Complexity of presentation

The target audience

Everyone who would like to go beyond stereotypes and give a shake-up to thinking, who cares whether our children will think on their own or someone will do it for them.

The book describes the theme of “ordinary” things that we do automatically and perceive the environment around us only at the edge of consciousness, devoting mental activity exclusively to work. The author tells how to fuel creativity from the outside through the process of thinking.

Let's read together

Today, the most important human activity in the world is generating new ideas, for which our flexible brain is responsible. With the help of long-term memory, we solve problems without relying on past experience; we use analysis and logic. Thanks to short-term memory, we accumulate knowledge and actively apply it in everyday life. Life has become easier due to all sorts of gadgets and computers, but the brain needs to relax periodically more than ever.

It's time to think about how well we know ourselves. Inspiration can come suddenly while cleaning your apartment or cooking dinner. But it is important to understand how to attract him if it is required, for example, at work. We can put off doing something pleasant for ourselves until inspiration strikes us - after all, the closer the reward, the faster and more successfully the work goes. When we clearly understand what goals and objectives have been set, the brain begins to actively work in our favor.

It is important to love what we do every day, to live our days as if it were the best gift in life. It’s paradoxical but true: the more chances we have to have unlimited information, the less we value it. But if knowledge is acquired with difficulty, it becomes extremely important and valuable.

It is children who are able to generate great ideas and improve games by changing the rules and immediately adding new ones. They always have something to do, but with age this wonderful quality disappears somewhere. Every day a child receives incredible discoveries, comprehending the world and becoming interested in everything. Children, unlike adults, know how to combine all sorts of options and invent new ones. Fairy tales wonderfully develop imagination when a child sees something that does not exist in nature. Riddles also attract children's attention because they help them find chains of sequences and meanings and connect logic. It is useful to solve them at any age, as the brain gets excellent training and does not want to retreat until it has mastered the riddle to the end.

People not only sometimes look the same - they also think according to the same template. Actions, mistakes, options - we initially try to make sure what brought success, so that it works now. We remember how we behave when we want to achieve something, and we begin to act in the same pattern when we find ourselves in a similar situation. And it’s no secret that to find the answer it is important to ask the right question. The clearer and more clearly formulated it is, the more likely it is to see the solution in it.

What do I need to do? First, change your usual routine and try different combinations. Alas, these actions are not taught at school or college. Growing up, we get used to one set task with one answer, but life often shows us a completely different side.

There are different ways to get out of the situation with dignity, but this takes time. It seems to a person that as soon as he makes every effort, a positive result will not be long in coming. But this doesn’t happen, so you shouldn’t be afraid of mistakes, but take risks and try. When we give up trying halfway, we give up, while other people continue to discover the world and enjoy life.

In reality, it is not possible to restart if something goes wrong. We either lose or we fight to the bitter end and taste the glory and pleasure of knowing we are successful. Mistakes give us the opportunity to act and find the right solutions, to be smart not in words, but in practice. Non-standard thinking helps us look for similar signs in different things and the meanings that unite them. All brilliant ideas actually lie on the surface, and we shouldn’t despair that the most interesting things have already been created before us. You can play with sizes and shapes, change functionality, and use your imagination. Following literary terminology, we can use exaggeration and understatement, dividing the whole into parts through the use of metonymy, when various objects are hidden under one general word.

You need to look around more often and find amazing things. For example, when returning from work, we can take interesting pictures on our mobile phone along the way. Repeating this route every day, we will be very surprised how many good pictures we managed to take. One only has to change the angle of view for a parallel universe to open before us

When all sorts of disasters occur in the world, people are looking for ways out of crises. It is then that scientists and designers generate ideas that have never occurred to anyone before.

We should also pay attention to what we dream, because in dreams beautiful and amazing pictures appear that seem extremely true to us at that moment. You can train yourself to write down what you dreamed, although this is difficult to do when waking up, since we immediately forget the details and essence of what is happening. But it will be very interesting to look at these records after a certain number of years.

When we look for inspiration, we can do the following things:

Listen to beautiful music.
Break the whole into parts.
Imagine yourself as pioneers.
Remember the most effective actions.
Communicate on abstract topics with others.
Turn objects over.
Asking someone for advice.

These points can be written down on pieces of paper and pulled out the first one we come across when we are in a bad mood or depressed. This method works great when we are at a dead end in life.

If we also look at the situation through someone else’s eyes, we are able to see several times more. Any action is productive when we do not fight alone, but unite with loved ones. In many organizations, it is customary to use brainstorming, when a leader gathers subordinates to make a common decision. All people have different experiences, so they often look at things differently, but at the same time they continue to think according to the same principle.

It is worth listening to the opinions of people living in other cultures and living conditions. A foreign culture may well become a source of inspiration in order to feel part of it. For the Japanese, a broken thing is closer and more valuable than its analogue; they believe that any essence of things can be revealed only with time, while for a Russian person this looks somewhat strange.

Many geniuses were subject to mental disorders and deep depression, but no one's schizophrenia diminished human talents. Yes, you shouldn’t go to extremes, but it’s important to remember that people can be truly brilliant, even if from the outside it seems that they have a problem with their heads.

Best Quote

“A person can only be responsible for what he said. But, as a rule, he has to answer for what he heard.”

What the book teaches

Sometimes it's the strange things and strange people that turn out to be brilliant.

The brain needs a constant load so that it looks for different paths and thinks about what actions can lead to. To do this, we need to forget everything we were taught at school.

We need to truly love what we do, because inspiration only comes where there is love. When people are in a state of pleasure, they generate great ideas.

From the editor

Sometimes people not only think according to the same template, but also look the same, trying to follow generally accepted standards. A stylist knows how to become yourself, defeat stereotypes in clothing, and find your own style. Evgenia Nikitina. You can find her advice in the article:.

In order for our brain not to lose the ability to analyze, remember and look for innovative ways to solve problems, it needs constant load and strengthening of cognitive abilities. What is a cognitive base and how to develop it, says an expert in the field of effective learning technologies, teacher Nina Shevchuk: .

Our brain does not like to leave a well-worn rut, because using a non-standard method does not at all guarantee victory. Why do we enjoy being winners so much, but losing causes negative emotions? Part of the answer can be found... in our veins. Read more in the article by a psychologist Angela Grippo: .

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Information from the publisher

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright holders.

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Creating new ideas is an operation accessible to everyone and quite simple: it is enough to know in what concentrations to mix the obvious and the impossible.

Peter Hein

From the author

Clear thinking requires courage, not intelligence.

This book is an attempt to understand how people think.

I've taught many workshops where people have come up with two to three hundred ideas related to whatever subject they brainstorm. It seems to me that just reading a book is not enough. It's like a lecture - just listening is not very effective. You can't learn to do something without trying. Therefore, the book will contain many tasks typed in a different font, like this:

This is the first task.

Alphabet of thinking

Philosophy is the struggle against the witchcraft of our intellect through language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

All kinds of thinking traps. From admiration for authorities and public opinion to persistence in one’s own opinion and wishful thinking.

A cloud of meanings and associations surrounding any word.

The intersection of two clouds of meaning. The vast majority of new ideas are located in the area of this intersection.

Constant change in both the world around us and our ideas about it.

Classification of the reality around us. Man's desire to sort everything into pieces.

Deconstruction. Analysis of any object or concept into its constituent parts.

Searching for something new and interesting in something that has been taken apart.

Combinatorics. Enumeration of options.

Contrast/war. Potential difference.

Aikido principle. Using existing energy flows for your own purposes.

Changing the size and number of objects. Changing their functions.

Inversion. Changing the meaning to the opposite.

Constructor. Object structure.

Chaos. Chaotic selection of options.

Third Eye. Change of point of view.

Black hole. Absence of an object or part of it.

Formulation of the problem conditions.

Continuous effort. Transition to a qualitatively new level.

Guided dreams.

Theory

Why do you need to think?

The missing link in the chain between an animal and a real person is most likely you and me.

Konrad Lorenz

The melancholy continued at the institute. It was not difficult to get there. Exorbitant competitions existed only in a few prestigious universities, while the rest accepted almost everyone.

All this will happen. It is impossible to avoid this, but you can prepare for it. And the ability to invent dramatically increases your chances in competition.

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home » Ulcer » How people think to read online - Dmitry Chernyshev. Dmitry Chernyshev - how people think

Dmitry Chernyshev How people see

Words of gratitude to people without whose patience and help this book would not exist

Smelsky Alexander Sergeevich and Maxim

And also to people whom, unfortunately, I know only by nicknames:

Introduction (the word “introduction” does not mean that this text should not be read)

Start

Development of imagination

End of introductory fragment.

Information from the publisher

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From the author

Alphabet of thinking

Theory

Why do you need to think?

Dmitry Chernyshev
How people see

Introduction
(the word “introduction” does not mean that this text should not be read)