How to save the world?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) May 24, 2005 -- How to save the world?

Twelve Ways to Think Differently
The Idea: Twelve methods that will exercise parts of your brain that rarely get it, and make you more creative and better able to understand the world.

1. Meditation: Or whatever 'stand still and look until you really see' attention techniques work for you. Anything that can still the noise of the machine in our heads, anything (like Getting Things Done) that can empty the detailed minutiae of your life from your memory and make room for something new. Because the better you are at paying attention, the more likely you are to be able to see and appreciate other perspectives.

2. Reconnect With Your Senses: Do exercises that increase your awareness and the sensitivity of your senses. Most of what you learn is perceptual rather than conceptual, and you can learn an astonishing amount by just becoming more aware of nature, and of yourself, and of the connection between your senses and the senses of all life on Earth.

3. Reconnect With Your Intuition: We are taught to distrust it, but for three million years it informed us about the world and how to deal with it successfully and happily. It's all there encoded in your DNA -- how to live, how to handle any situation, what to do. The perspective you can get when your intuition provides one viewpoint on a situation and your 'book learning' another is remarkable. It's like suddenly seeing stereo when all your life you've only seen with one eye. Instant depth perception.

4. Analogies and Metaphors: "Science is Metaphor" said Timothy Leary. Analogies and metaphors allow you to 're-see' something abstract as something concrete, something conceptual as perceptual. Lakoff points out that "We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit", and analogies and metaphors permit us to think things we probably otherwise couldn't. My recent "If the Shoe Were On the Other Foot" article was an example of this.

5. Conversations and Interviews: A wonderful enabler for thinking differently is the shared context that comes from conversations and interviews. Several of my most popular articles have been conversations with myself or with other people, because they help people understand my thought process much better than analytical discourse. Like everything natural, they are inefficient but extremely effective. Interviews work the same way. Face-to-face and recorded conversations and interviews, if they are natural and probing and improvisational, are even better, because you learn more of the participants' worldview from the vocal nuances and body language.