Skip to content

Adventures in Experimental Philosophy: Training Your Brain to Innovate

Where do new ideas come from? One tactic is to train your brain to innovate through the use of thought experiments.
Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Where do new ideas come from? One tactic is to train your brain to innovate through the use of thought experiments.


In his Big Think Mentor Workshop, the experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats offers a bold, if not fully comprehensive prescription for looking at the world in new ways. Keats says:

Ask naïve questions, invert perceptions, combine incompatible ideas, remix metaphors and pursue paradox.  By no means are these comprehensive and they’re rather glib yet I think that if you take these as a point of departure, as I sometimes do, you’ll find that you get outside of yourself in terms of your routines, your education and your common sense.  And you start to look at the world in different ways that may lead you to ideas that you never knew that you had. 

Watch the lesson here:

Content not available

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Related

Up Next