ALIEN Thinking

How do people come up with truly original ideas? For the past decade, the authors of this book have studied individuals who have made leaps of creativity-inventors, scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs and artists-and concluded that there are five patterns of thinking that distinguish them from the rest of us.

These five patterns-Attention, Levitation, Imagination, Experimentation and Navigation-lead to a fresh and flexible approach to problem-solving. Alien thinkers know how to free the imagination so it can detect hard-to-observe patterns. They practice deliberate ways to retreat from the world in order to see the big picture underlying a problem. And, they have learned how to change their prototype ideas in systematic ways to reflect feedback and the constraints of...