Learn the process of LT I

THE PROCESS OF LATERAL THINKING I

I have already introduced the essentials of lateral Thinking and given you the simple exercises to perform and train the brain.
Now to get into the detail on how to train the brain. In one of my posting (on Transaction Analysis) I had defined the thought process with the illustration of the term BALL. Hence general thought process are directly visualized for the contexual understanding.

The visualisation plays a very important role for the exercise to lateral thinking.

As I had already said that the values and beliefs plays a very imortant role in visualisation, and value system cannot be flexed (will not be flexed) it’s the same with the beliefsystem. So wat can be flexed is the vision itself.
To illustrate, how to flex the visual system let us take the following example which we had already seen, the picture which has to be divided into four equal parts.

When I had this problem given to many of the students or professionals they were only seeing this in the wholesome (i.e) the full picture, not many tried to divide this into smaller components – like 3 different squares put together


Now the perspective being on visualization – It seems to get clearer, as I said the value system dominates (out of Mathematics) these individual squares can be divided into 4 equal parts;


Getting all those small pieces together for a bigger picture might still lead to confusion on how to get the 4 equal parts from this, here again our value system comes into play ( i.e) 12 small pieces divided by 4 which is 3. Hence 3 pieces must go together to make one full component – The question is which of the 3 pieces ? Logic is they will have to be the adjacent ones it can never be 5, 2 & 10. So visualizing the 12 boxes the adjacent can be only 1,2&3 or 5,7&8 or 10,11&12 only the pragmatic visual pattern will lead to a solution.

THE FIRST LESSON IS TO LOOK INTO THE PROBLEM PRAGMATICALLY - DIVIDE THE PROBLEM INTO SMALLER COMPONENTS