Braindancing

• Book Title: Braindancing - brain blazing practical techniques in creativity for immediate application
• Author: Dilip Mukerjea
• Year written/published: 1998
• Summary: Various techniques for playing with our mind in imagination and on paper
• My Comments:   it’s a fun book! Especially i loved the historical examples he provided… which i quoted them below.
• Some extracts:

Creativity Quotient…

Curiosity, Flexibility, Resourcefulness, Challenging, Trendspotting, Proactivity, Openness, Self-Belief, Vision/Goals, Intuition, Simplifying, Risk-taking

most of the greatest developments in our lives emerged from the minds of people who were not specialists in those disciplines…

• Wright brothers pioneers the first airplane, but they were bicycle mechanics
• A journalist invested the parking meter
• an undertaker developed the automatic telephone
• a television engineers developed the long-playing record
• a veterinarian developed pneumatic tyre
• a sculptor invented ballpoint pen
• a musician developed Kudachrome film
• a painter developed Morse Code

metamorphical thinking can make beautiful connections between seemingly unrelated things…

• Michael Faraday imagined electricity to be like a flowing fluid
• DNA molecules were pictures by Watson and Crick as a spiral staircase, able to split into 2 rungs and reconnect
• Neils Bohr, conceived the atom as a miniature solar system with electrons orbiting around the central nucleus
• simple fire pump gave william harvey the notion of how the heart works
• Humming bird with its ability to hover and fly backwards inspired the invention of helicopter

When in a state on creative mental block, look to the nature for inspiration …

• by observing a shipworm tunneling through timber, Sir Marc Brunel solved the problem of underwater construction of tunnel
• da Vince was truly prolific ion observing nature. Studying natural life in minute detail, he then transformed his observations into a deluge of inventions, real and virtual
• human eye provided the inspiration for the modern automatic focus and exposure cameras
• military for the idea of camouflage from creatures in the wild who used this scheme as an act of concealment from predators
• fish’s swim bladder inspired the design of the submarine’s usage of the underwater ballast

and lastly… an astonishing account of time… in our lifetime on average we spend

• 5 years standing in line
• one year looking for misplaced objects
• 8 months opening direct mails
• 2 years returning calls
• 25 years sleeping
• 6 years sleeping
• 4 years doing chores