想学会创造性思考，你需要掌握什么技巧？|creative|思考者

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由于我们具有偏见和预测性的大脑机制，大脑会用旧的解决方案自动解决新问题。因此，为了创造性地思考，我们必须系统地重新定义一个棘手的问题，直到它转变为一个旧方案可以解决的新问题。如果这个重新定义是可行的，并且因重新定义引起的解决方案与原始问题的常规解决方案有很大不同，那么我们就有了一个创新。

许多专家认为，创造性思维会要求人们质疑他们对世界运作方式的先入之见和设想。比如，一个常见的说法是，我们所有人解决问题所依赖的思维捷径阻碍了创造性思维。如果你的思维过程植根于过去的经验，你如何能创新？

可是，对源自过去经验和设想的偏见提出质疑，可能并不是创造性解决问题的最佳途径——它似乎与大脑的实际工作方式不相符。

丹尼尔·卡内曼（Daniel Kahneman）和已故的阿莫斯·特韦尔斯基（Amos Tversky）的诺贝尔奖获奖研究认为，经济决策者受到根深蒂固的认知偏见的影响，他们让思维过程在决策中的作用变得突出。锚固，即人们运用曾经在类似问题上所做的决定来解决新问题，可以解释许多经济决策的不合理性。

因此，我们似乎可以合理地认为，通过补偿或纠正偏见的方式引入更多的理性可以创造更好、更具创造性的决策。卡内曼自己抱怨称，当人们凭直觉而非理性思考时，认知偏见会致使他们做出糟糕的决定。

可是，卡内曼和特韦尔斯基也认为，认知偏见之所以存在是因为它们是有效的生存工具。比如，锚固偏见有助于人们更快地响应变化。旧的解决方案可能并不总是有效，但从进化的角度讲，它们大多是有效的；而且，每个人都知道如何将旧的解决方案付诸实践。

可是，如果所有的解决方案在某种意义上都是旧的，那么我们为何还如此擅长提出新的解决方案？在思维运转和不断变化的世界之间似乎存在着根本性脱节。有创造力的思考者似乎也不太可能通过理性思考的过程来提出所有这些新鲜的想法——多数人报告称，创造性的想法是一瞬间意外出现的，而不是深思熟虑的结果。那么，新的解决方案是如何形成的呢？

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英文原文

Many experts argue that creative thinking requires people to challenge their preconceptions and assumptions about the way the world works. One common claim, for example, is that the mental shortcuts we all rely on to solve problems get in the way of creative thinking. How can you innovate if your thinking is anchored in past experience?

But I’m not sure that questioning biases from your past experience and assumptions is the best path to creative problem solving — it simply does not seem to fit well with how the mind actually works.

The role of thinking processes in decision making was made prominent by Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky, whose Nobel Prize–winning research argues that economic decision makers are subject to deeply held cognitive biases. Anchoring, in which people address new problems by applying decisions they have made on similar problems in the past, explains the irrationality of much economic decision making.

It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that the way to better, more creative decisions is to introduce more rationality by compensating for or correcting biases. Kahneman himself complained that when people think intuitively rather than rationally, cognitive biases lead them to poor decisions.

But Kahneman and Tversky also believed that cognitive biases exist because they are effective survival tools. The anchoring bias, for example, helps people respond to change more quickly. From time to time the old solutions may not work, but mostly they do, evolutionarily speaking, and everyone knows how to put the old solutions into practice.

But if all solutions are old ones in some way, then why are we so good at producing new ones? There would seem to be a fundamental disconnect between the workings of the mind and a world that is in a state of almost constant change. It also seems unlikely that creative thinkers are going through a process of rational deliberation to deliver all those fresh ideas — most people report that creative ideas come unexpectedly, in a flash, rather than as conclusions to deliberation. So how do new solutions emerge?

西奥多·斯卡尔特萨斯（Theodore Scaltsas）|文

西奥多·斯卡尔特萨斯是苏格兰爱丁堡大学古典哲学讲座教授。

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