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.