One little anthro

Share this post
Blending, bending, and breaking
www.1littleanthro.com

Blending, bending, and breaking

Muse #217 - the art of mixing up the patterns

Srikanth Ramanujam
Aug 26, 2021
Share this post
Blending, bending, and breaking
www.1littleanthro.com
Credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/54VAb3f1z6w

A brain is a pattern machine. And I continue to learn about it from different perspectives. I just completed another awesome book on creativity and the brain by David Eagleman - “The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World”

One of the key things that I acquired from the book was the type of manipulations the brain does - at a high level we call it connections. David made it easier for me to simplify the types of pattern connections that we do - bending, blending, and breaking.

In bending, we stretch the patterns to things that are beyond what that pattern is meant for. In blending, of course as the word means, we create new composites and hues of the patterns of knowledge and experiences to create new ones. And breaking enables us to decompose known patterns into smaller bits to use in different and other contexts. All these three help us with our creativity and imagination. And our brain often does this autonomically and unconsciously.

Whether we are analyzing a problem, coming up with a solution, or deciding on what action to take in something we do, it is useful to consciously step back from our understanding of the problem, our answers, or our decisions to see whether we can blend, bend or break them up to come up with newer additional patterns. When we have access to more patterns, we have the possibility to create more options. And when we have more options, we have a wider range to pick from.

Share this post
Blending, bending, and breaking
www.1littleanthro.com
Comments

Create your profile

0 subscriptions will be displayed on your profile (edit)

Skip for now

Only paid subscribers can comment on this post

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in

Check your email

For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.

Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in.

TopNewCommunity

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2022 Srikanth Ramanujam
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Publish on Substack Get the app
Substack is the home for great writing