You can seed your own creative process with almost anything:

Free-associate from the first random stimulus you encounter via one of these methods. What does it make you think of, and how does it relate to your project? You may find po [Hack #21] useful here to join ideas together.

Follow that thought as far as you can, possibly employing techniques such as SCAMPER [Hack #22]. Don’t be afraid to be silly. Sometimes a great idea is several silly ideas down the line from the seed. When you reach a dead end, seed again!

If you are having a brainstorming meeting in an empty conference room of the sort already described, bring some books, a magazine, music, pictures, anything that can act as a creative seed. The Oblique Strategies [Hack #23] are explicitly designed with this purpose in mind. If the rut you are in extends not only to your project but also to the rest of your life, try rolling the dice [Hack #49].

While working on my latest board-game design on the bus to work, I passed a sign in an industrial zone that read “American Frame and Alignment.” I decided to use the word frame as the seed for my brainstorm. One thing led to another, and I soon had a bunch of ideas dealing with enclosing games within rule structures, with recursive games and frames within frames, like those pictures that show a person holding a picture of herself holding a picture of herself, and so on. This one seed for my mental random-number generator eventually shaped the design of my game system a great deal, and it is now called GameFrame.

It’s a sure thing that my " creative DNA” determined the shape of my game, at least partially. For example, I’ve been fascinated with recursion and self-reference at least since I read Gödel, Escher, Bach when I was 14. These powerful inclinations are analogous to the rigid programming of one’s PC. However, the street sign bumped me out of my rut. Before I gave my random-number generator a seed to chew on, the only idea I came up with was that my game might use drinking straws as components!

The basic process for making forced connections, as outlined by Koberg and Bagnall, is simple and sound:

The result will be a randomly generated list of possibilities, none of which might be just what you’re looking for, but most of which will probably be interesting. Feel free to fine-tune the results. For example, you might not like the suggestion “orange, tetrahedron, a meter on a side,” but “orange, tetrahedron, half a meter on a side” might hit the spot.

Of course, you can force connections with a pen and paper, as recommended in The Universal Traveler, but computers have become widespread since 1972 and you might find them to be a much more efficient tool. To that end, this hack includes a Perl script called pyro, which is a somewhat streamlined successor to a HyperCard stack for the Macintosh called Inspirograph that I released in the 1980s.³

Inspirograph could generate anything from New England place names (like Lake Nattagoonsucketpocket) to random tabloid headlines. Because the examples I included were humorous, many people who downloaded the stack thought it was only good for a laugh, but it was actually intended for serious design, as is pyro.

Place the following Perl script in a file called pyro and make it executable. You also can download the pyro script and accompanying utopia.dat file from this book’s page on O’Reilly’s web site (see the Preface for details).

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
my $infilename = $ARGV[0];
my $basevar = "\@$ARGV[1]\@";

my $pickatrandom = 1;
if (($ARGV[2]) && ($ARGV[2] eq "all"))
{
    $pickatrandom = 0;
}

# Seed the output file
my $outfilename = "/tmp/pyro.txt";
open(OUTFILE, "> $outfilename")
    or die "Couldn't open $outfilename for writing: $!\n";
print OUTFILE "$basevar\n";
close(OUTFILE);

local $/;
undef $/;

open(INFILE, "< $infilename")
    or die "Couldn't open $infilename for reading: $!\n";
$infilecontents = <INFILE>; 
close(INFILE);

open(OUTFILE, "< $outfilename")
    or die "Couldn't open $outfilename for reading: $!\n";
$outfilecontents = <OUTFILE>;
close(OUTFILE);

while ($outfilecontents =~ /\@[A-Za-z0-9]+\@/)
{
    local $/;
    undef $/;

    open(OUTFILE, "< $outfilename")
        or die "Couldn't open $outfilename for reading: $!\n";
    $outfilecontents = <OUTFILE>;
    close(OUTFILE);

    # $baseline is the first line in OUTFILE with a variable.

    if ($outfilecontents =~ /^(.*?)(\@\w+\@)(.*?)$/m)
    {
        $baseline = "$1$2$3";
        $varname=$2;
    }
    chomp $varname;

    if ($infilecontents =~ /\#$varname\n(.*?)\n\n/s)
    {
        $varblock = "$1\n";
    }
    else
    {
        die "Did not find variable $varname in $infilename.\n";
    }

    @varblockarr = split (/\n/, $varblock);
    @outlinesarr = ();
 
    if ($pickatrandom)
    {
        # Generate a random string from the input elements
        $randline = $varblockarr [ rand @varblockarr ];
        $curline = $baseline;
        chomp ($curline);
        chomp ($randline);
        $curline =~ s/$varname/$randline/;
        push (@outlinesarr, $curline);
    }
    else
    {
        # Generate all possible combinations of the input elements
        foreach $varline (@varblockarr)
        {
            $curline = $baseline;
            chomp ($curline);
            chomp ($varline);
            $curline =~ s/$varname/$varline/;
            push (@outlinesarr, $curline);
        }
    }

    $outlines = join ("\n", @outlinesarr);
    $outfilecontents =~ s/\Q$baseline\E/$outlines/s
        or die "baseline not found.\n";
    $outfilecontents =~ s/\n\n/\n/mg;
    open(OUTFILE, "> $outfilename")
        or die "Couldn't open $outfilename for writing: $!\n";
    print OUTFILE $outfilecontents;
    close(OUTFILE);
}

if ($pickatrandom)
{
    print $outfilecontents;
}

Here are the first 20 lines of a datafile (called utopia.dat) for the pyro script. You can use this file to generate interesting settings for fantasy and science fiction stories. The values for the variables were culled from two reference works on speculative fiction.^4,5

#@place@
@type@ made of @material@ @location@, inhabited by @inhabitants@, @govt@, @special@

#@type@
a cavern
a city
a country
a forest
a jungle
a mountain
a planet
a sealed habitat
a village
an island

#@material@
a superstrong material
crystal
flesh
gold

If you have Perl installed on your system, save the pyro script and the utopia. dat file in the same directory, and then run pyro by typing the following command within that directory:

perl pyro utopia.dat place

If you’re on a Linux or Unix system, you might also be able to use the following shortcut:

./pyro utopia.dat place

Each variable in any pyro datafile you create should be wrapped in two @ signs, as in this example. To assign a set of possible values to a variable, place the variable on a line by itself preceded by a hash mark (#).

Each successive line should contain one possible value. Separate variable/value sections with blank lines, and leave two or more blank lines at the end of the file. You can create variables whose values contain other variables, as shown with the place variable in this example.

Table 3-1 shows the data from utopia.dat in tabular form. Each column of text contains the 10 possible values for one variable, whose name is at the head of that column. There are six columns of 10 items, so you can generate 10⁶ or a million possible fantasy places from this data.

If you have a 10-sided die (or, even better, six of them), or if you have some other way to generate random digits, you can create fantasy places using Table 3-1, generating digits sequentially and selecting one item from each column. For example, Utopia #895779 is “a village made of wood in the fourth dimension, inhabited by insects, ruled by an ancient ritual, whose location changes.”

The pyro script will do the same thing faster. It takes two mandatory arguments and a third optional one:

Thus, the following command will generate all one million possible fantasy places and leave the results in the file /tmp/pyro.txt:

./pyro utopia.dat place all

But this command will simply generate one fantasy place:

./pyro utopia.dat place

Here’s a slightly edited console log of running the previous command:

$ ./pyro utopia.dat place
a mountain made of rubber in the sky, inhabited by fish, ruled by a hereditary monarch, 
where learning is exalted
$ ./pyro utopia.dat place
an island made of crystal in the fourth dimension, inhabited by aliens, an anarchy, which is microscopic
$ ./pyro utopia.dat place
a sealed habitat made of paper in the dream world, inhabited by giants, a 
socialist utopia, where learning is exalted
$ ./pyro utopia.dat place
an island made of flesh in the fourth dimension, inhabited by fairies, an anarchy, 
which is boundless
$ ./pyro utopia.dat place
a mountain made of a superstrong material in the dream world, inhabited by apes, an 
anarchy, where cannibalism is practiced
$ ./pyro utopia.dat place
a cavern made of porcelain in the polar regions, inhabited by intelligent plants, 
ruled by a council of many species, which is microscopic
$ ./pyro utopia.dat place
a sealed habitat made of stone in an unknown place, inhabited by giants, ruled by a 
magical elite, where everyone is insane
$ ./pyro utopia.dat place
a sealed habitat made of flesh in the desert, inhabited by giants, 
ruled by a corporation, where cannibalism is practiced
$ ./pyro utopia.dat place
an island made of paper under the sea, inhabited by fairies, an anarchy, which is 
boundless
$ ./pyro utopia.dat place
a forest made of flesh in an unknown place, inhabited by fairies, ruled by computer, 
exceedingly warlike

While pyro is useful as it stands, it’s certainly possible to improve it. More robust error checking could be added (such as checks for circular variable definitions, and lack of a newline at the end of the file or between entries), and it might be nice if the number of random strings to be generated were an alternate value for the third command-line option. It’s open source, so hack away!

Provocative operations with po come in three basic kinds, which de Bono calls PO-1, PO-2, and PO-3.² Each is useful to provoke certain kinds of thinking and move a creative situation forward in a different way.

The subtitle of de Bono’s book Po is Beyond Yes and No. According to de Bono, the problem with much of human thought is that we prematurely accept or reject ideas with yes or no, and once we accept one, we cling to it far longer than is useful.

The word po is intended to provide a kind of breathing space outside of what de Bono calls the “YES/NO system,” where we can pause and coolly consider all the possibilities. Metaphorically speaking, instead of automatically turning to yes or no when we see an idea, we can jump up and look at them both from a higher viewpoint.

Po is a terrific tool for isolated brainstorming scenarios, but it can be highly useful in the heat of everyday life as well. For example, if someone cuts you off in a car, your natural reaction might be to get hot and lean on the horn, cussing loudly. If instead you mutter “po” to yourself, you might remind yourself to invoke what general semantics calls a semantic pause or the wedge of awareness:³ a pause to reflect on what you are doing before you do it. You can then ask yourself whether it’s really worth upsetting yourself over the incident.

Similarly, if your spouse knows the word po, one of you can say it to remind yourselves that an argument need not have a winner and a loser, but that both parties can retain their different viewpoints. By saying “Po!” you’re saying, “Let’s agree to disagree.” You can also use it to reach a reasoned decision together. When you’re tempted to run to opposite sides and dig in your heels, you can both step up onto po and look at the situation from the same calm spot.

Use SCAMPER as a checklist. Choose an object to think about creatively, such as a drinking cup, and then run down the items in the mnemonic checklist (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, and so on), asking yourself the question associated with each one in Table 3-2, which explains the basic structured brainstorming techniques of SCAMPER. The word target refers to the object you’re thinking about, such as the drinking cup in the previous example.

For example, if the item is Substitute and you’re working with the drinking cup, ask yourself, “How can I substitute something else for the cup? How can I substitute something else within the cup?” You might come up with the idea of a new kind of bottle to drink from instead of a cup (here in hydrated Seattle, everyone I know drinks from Nalgene bottles and the like), or you might develop the idea of substituting a better material for the one the cup is made of. What about an indestructible titanium cup? The only cup you’ll ever need!

The SCAMPER technique is basically a cross between seeding your mental random-number generator [Hack #19] and using mnemonics (your dear, dear friend) just as you can use them to remember 10 things to bring when you leave the house [Hack #1]. In this case, however, the seeding is done in a very structured way, with “known fruitful” mental seeds, and the mnemonics are used to remember to carry mental tools with you, instead of physical ones.

I recently applied SCAMPER to the traditional card game Rummy (http://pagat.com/rummy/rummy.html) to develop the basis for a new card game, Scrummy.

In case you haven’t played Rummy, it’s a card game based on collecting sets (cards with the same number, such as 5, 5, and 5) and runs (cards in sequence, such as 5, 6, 7, and 8). These cards are laid on the table in groups called melds; players can also add to a meld on the table by laying off their own cards in front of themselves. A Rummy game ends when a player goes out by playing her last cards.

Here are some ideas that came to me by applying SCAMPER operations to the basic rules of Rummy. Note that I didn’t use the SCAMPER tools in strict order. You don’t need to, either. Also, I might not use all the ideas I generated in the final game. SCAMPER is best used for brainstorming new ideas; editing the possibilities is a job for later development.

And so, by applying SCAMPER to an old game, I quickly developed the outline of a new game. What new places can you SCAMPER to?

This hack will examine three of what I consider the most important and popular creativity decks currently available: the Oblique Strategies, the Creative Whack Pack, and the Observation Deck.

The Oblique Strategies

The Oblique Strategies are a creativity deck developed in 1975 by British painter Peter Schmidt and musician Brian Eno (noted for his mind music [Hack #27]). They have since gone through several editions.

The strategies were originally intended for musicians and other artists. Each card contains a strategy for solving a problem in the studio or another work environment. The cards are intended to remind the user of ideas that might not seem obvious under pressure. All of the strategies were originally important working principles for someone: initially Eno and Schmidt, and later their friends and colleagues such as Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catal og.

Although no magical powers are claimed for the deck, an Oblique Strategies consultation has a subtle, mysterious, gnomic feel to it, somewhat like the I Ching. Often, the user has to tap intuition to interpret a card, which adds to the divinatory feeling. Here is the text from some typical cards:

• Ask people to work against their better judgment

• Which parts can be grouped?

• Take away the elements in order of apparent non-importance

• Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place

• Water

Over the years, the original Oblique Strategies have been made available in multiple editions and in a variety of formats. For example, they were recently released as a widget for Mac OS X.¹ Figure 3-1 shows what the widget looks like before and after turning over the virtual card.

Figure 3-1. The Oblique Strategies widget for Mac OS X

The strategies themselves have also become applicable to more situations than just music and painting, although vestiges of the original purposes remain. If you are a smart, creative person who prefers elegant ambiguity to having everything spelled out, the Oblique Strategies deck might be for you.

You can find Oblique Strategies applications for numerous platforms, including the Palm, at the official Oblique Strategies web site.² As I mentioned, you can also consult the strategies online.³

The Creative Whack Pack

The popular Creative Whack Pack,⁴ developed by Roger von Oech in 1992, is similar to the Oblique Strategies deck in concept, but is positioned more for businesspeople than artists.

The deck has 64 cards with text and graphics taken primarily from von Oech’s book, A Whack on the Side of the Head. The cards are split into four suits of 16 cards each: Explorer (blue), Artist (orange), Judge (green), and Warrior (red). These suits represent von Oech’s view of the main roles in creative thought, similar to Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats.⁵

You can obtain the Creative Whack Pack and related materials from the author’s web site,⁶ where you’ll also find an online version of the deck that you can try. Figure 3-2 shows a sample page with the text and image of a typical Judge card from the Creative Whack Pack.

Figure 3-2. An online sample card from the Creative Whack Pack

The deck comes with numerous exercises other than just drawing a card and following instructions. For example, the “Three Day Agenda” exercise instructs you to pick five cards for actions you’d like to take in the next three days, returning those cards to the deck as you complete them.

To get started on writing the current hack, I pulled a card from the Observation Deck. It was “Ask a Question.” The inspiration for the card came to Epel from columnist Jon Carroll, who quoted Rudyard Kipling when asked where he got his material:

Epel describes her interaction with Carroll in the book that accompanies the Observation Deck, and suggests there that the reader create yet another deck of cards. She writes:

Create a deck of question cards to use whenever you feel stuck. Print one question on each of seven blank cards—you should have six serving men cards and one that reads “What if?”

Epel’s idea is that the reader should draw a question card at random and then use that question to go deeper into his material. When I started writing the current hack, I made my own “serving men” deck. I drew the “Who?” card first, so I started by learning more about the creators of the various creativity decks I was going to describe, such as Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, Roger von Oech, and Naomi Epel herself. I didn’t use all the material I gathered, but it was a great jump-start.

Here’s a somewhat less artificial example of using a creativity deck. On one recent technical writing job, I was working with a particularly intransigent literate programming tool—and some particularly intransigent upper management. I consulted the Oblique Strategies. I think the strategy I drew was “Disciplined self-indulgence,” which led me to ask myself which parts of my job I enjoyed the most and whether I could use them to solve the problem. One of the aspects of my job that I enjoyed most was scripting the documentation build process, usually with Perl, so I came up with the idea to post-process the troublesome documentation with a series of Perl scripts, which I quickly wrote.

When I showed the final product to my manager, she was amazed and all but called me a magician. She asked me how I had gotten the idea for the solution, so I showed her the online Oblique Strategies application I had consulted. She was crestfallen. Suddenly, I was no longer a magician, but a mountebank.

In this case, the Oblique Strategies certainly helped me solve the problem, but I found a possible pitfall with creativity decks: people who don’t understand them may believe that the decks are doing your thinking for you.

Likely, you have a creative project to which you would like to apply this method. If so, start thinking about constraints that might apply to it. Find one or two that suit you from the following list or from one of the sources listed in this hack’s “End Notes" section. Exploit it to the max!

A few sample constraints can be illustrated with text and music.^1,2

Being a great fan of the Oulipo, I have used their techniques many times; for example, in the 1990s, there was an explosion of interest in the artistic form of the Glass Bead Game as imagined by novelist Hermann Hesse. You might like to explore thinking analogically [Hack #25]; my own experiments in formal constraint, such as recursive use of the Old Norse poetic form called the kenning, were highly influenced by the Oulipo.

Generally speaking, the influence of the Oulipo has been historically somewhat narrow. Even so, many people have used Oulipian techniques without knowing it. Oulipians jokingly consider such people to be unconscious plagiarists and call their forebears (Lewis Carroll, for example) anticipatory plagiarists. Read the Oulipo, then, for examples of the highest development of the Oulipian art. Graeco-Latin bi-squares toured by a chessboard knight are simply not used every day to plot novels! Examples of “true” Oulipian work by writers in English are therefore hard to cite. Still, you find Oulipian constraints where you least expect them....

Perhaps some of the works you read every day incorporate constraints without your knowing it; there are two schools of thought in the Oulipo, one of which says a work’s constraints should be made utterly explicit, the other that they should be hidden. E-Prime [Hack #52] is used as a hidden constraint in some of the psychological texts of Albert Ellis [Hack #57]. Reversed is the situation of the French novel La Disparition (as well as its English translation, A Void, by Gilbert Adair), in which the disappearance of the letter E from the world (and the text) is made the central plot element and a highly explicit constraint. Explicitness of constraint, or the lack thereof, can itself be a constraint on a work, of course. Catalog the number of constraints you can exploit such as explicitness, exercises in style, record setting, E-Prime, and so on; then try a few, and you’ll see that these seeming shackles are really keys to greater creativity.

Although there are many ways to approach the process of creating and exploring analogies, this hack focuses on two of them— tables of correspondences and kennings—and the ways in which they’re related.

 thought  ::    sex   
 creation    offspring

One of my most successful recent game designs grew from filling in a blank that I noticed while making a table of correspondences about games. While the card game Hearts is so popular that it has been adapted to many different types of decks (what I call card game systems), it had not been ported to my fellow game designer Tim Schutz’s alphabet deck: Alpha Playing Cards.⁷

I designed a Hearts game for Alpha Playing Cards using a subtable or internal table of correspondences that compared the internal features of the standard deck of cards to the internal features of Alpha Playing Cards. For example, I compared the four suits of the standard deck (hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs) to the two pseudosuits of Alpha Playing Cards (consonants and vowels). I named my game Consonants, because only consonant cards score points in it, just as only heart cards score points in Hearts. This was, in fact, a kenning: I was saying that consonant cards were the heart cards of Consonants, and heart cards were the consonant cards of hearts.

Thus, a blank space in a table of correspondences showed me an opportunity for a creative act, and I used a subtable to analyze the structural analogies between my starting point (the standard deck of cards and the game Hearts) and my target (Alpha Playing Cards and my new game, Consonants).

I call this technique analogical design, and it’s powerful. For an even more practical example, consider The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2). H2G2 started out as a radio show, was adapted into a series of science fiction novels, then a TV show, a computer game, comic books, and so on. Each of these involved a kind of internal table of correspondences as the author, Douglas Adams, and his colleagues decided how best to translate a joke, character, alien, or bit of technology from one medium to another.

One blank space remaining to be filled was a Hitchhiker’s movie. A movie was finally made after the death of Douglas Adams, and while it might not have been an artistic success, it has grossed more than $51 million as of August 2005. You might say that the creators of the movie found an empty niche in the memetic ecology and filled it successfully.

Good, clean, fulfilling memetic sex is the birthright of anyone with a brain, so it’s important to educate yourself about memetic sexual hygiene. Here are nine points to keep in mind.

This hack works because genes and memes are replicators: forms of information that reproduce and evolve.

Evolution occurs when:

Since memes share these properties with genes, memes behave in much the same way as genes.

Although author Scott Thorpe does not seem to have encountered the idea of memetics, he has numerous suggestions for fruitful “cerebral sex” in his book How to Think Like Einstein.² Here are a few suggestions, inspired by his book, from the most risky to the least risky.

Get yourself a good pair of headphones that are as sonically isolated as possible, and make yourself a mind music MP3 CD or playlist on your iPod that you can fill with music to help you concentrate and focus on thinking. You might already have an idea what music this might be; if not, see the “In Real Life" section of this hack for some ideas.

Condition yourself to think while this music is playing so that it becomes a kind of musical thinking cap: put it on and you become a thinker for the duration. To that end, listen to this music only when you intend to think so that your conditioned response of thinking hard while it is on does not become extinguished accidentally. You don’t need a lot of different pieces in your mind-music collection, because your response will probably be stronger if their scope is limited.

You must decide how much music should be in your mind-music collection. A short, quickly repeating loop of music drives some people crazy. However, if you have a good sense of how long one of your typical working sessions is, you can use your mind music as a timer. You can pace your work like a workout, with both warm-up and cool-down music. When you hear a certain piece of music, you will know that it is time to start wrapping up.

A short music loop can nevertheless be useful, because you will sometimes associate certain thoughts you are having with a certain part of the music you are hearing, so that on the next time through the loop, you will be reminded of those thoughts when you hear that part of the music again, in an interesting—and sometimes creatively fruitful—mental echo effect.

Instrumental music is preferable, because research has shown that people need to keep the speech centers of their brains free to think about complex information. As pointed out in “Talk to Yourself” [Hack #62],¹ you can listen to pop music or talk radio while driving a familiar route without many turns, but if you get off the highway and need to locate a new destination, you’ll turn off the radio because it’s distracting you from thinking.

But don’t rule out music with lyrics entirely. If you’re in a good mood and the music is upbeat, you might find the music will occasionally toss up lyrics that seed your creative random-number generator [Hack #19] as well as get your toes tapping, so you are filled with new ideas.

Chants (such as Gregorian chants) and music in foreign languages are a gray area in this respect. To some extent, you are likely to hear a voice in another language as just another instrument, or your brain might treat the music as a verbal Rorschach test onto which to project some creative and interesting lyrics of its own. Yet another alternative is that you will unconsciously strain to make out the foreign-language lyrics in your own language so that they interfere almost as much as lyrics you do understand. Gauge your own reaction, which will probably vary from piece to piece.

Here are the pieces on my mind-music CD, all instrumental:

Specifically, I have found that almost any Bach is good for thinking, because of its formal nature. I chose Glenn Gould’s performance of the Goldberg Variations because it is legendary; the confluence of a composer and a performer of genius spurs me on. I placed the two fugues on the CD into a separate folder so that I can put just the Goldbergs on repeat mode if I wish; they already form a kind of musical closed circle, so this is appropriate.

Almost at the other end of the spectrum, Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano bubbles with playfulness. It is less subdued than the other pieces on my disc and therefore more suited for filtering out noise from the environment. I listen to it when I am designing games, or when I need some playful energy; not only have I loved this piece for a long time, but also I have fond memories of a late friend at Yale who in the spring used to play its flute part barefoot in the courtyard. He was one of the most creative people I ever knew, and I like to think of his playful spirit occasionally entering my work. Thus, one can choose mind music for personal reasons as well.

If you are not familiar with ambient music or Brian Eno, become so. Ambient music is not to all tastes, but as the title Thinking Music, Part IV suggests, it is specifically designed to enhance rather than detract from one’s ability to concentrate.

As Brian Eno writes in his 1978 "Ambient Music Manifesto:”

Whereas conventional background music [e.g., Muzak] is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to ‘brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.²

As for the two Eno pieces in my collection, Thinking Music, Part IV is deep and somewhat dark, suitable for ponderous thoughts, and Music for Airports is somewhat lighter. I note with satisfaction that many other people online have chosen this piece as “thinking music,” too.^3,4

To undertake an onar expedition, you will need a quiet place to doze and some way to take notes (in the dark, if necessary). The following seven steps comprise the onar process:

Depending on how sleepy you are, your arm might not so much fall as merely twitch. Don’t worry about it; as long as you can enter hypnagogia and bring back interesting thoughts and images, onar should work for you.

Hypnagogia occurs when you’re falling asleep. As you fall asleep, your brain turns inward, shifting from the alpha and beta waves of ordinary waking consciousness and sensory processing to the deeper delta and theta waves of later stages of sleep, including dreaming.⁵

With few or no sensory anchors during hypnagogia, the sleeper begins to hallucinate. (I hypothesize that a similar phenomenon occurs during sensory deprivation experiments in "float tanks.”) As sensory references disappear, conceptual boundaries also tend to be blurred or lost. This means that ego boundaries are lost, and frames of reference might be blended. Many cognitive psychologists today believe that the blending of conceptual frames is the primary mechanism of creativity.⁶ (See “Think Analogically” [Hack #25] for more details.)

I decided I would employ onar on the topic of onar itself, as an example for this hack. I laid on my back one night before sleep with my catch notebook [Hack #13] and flashlight by my side. Actually, I always have them there, because I find that many good ideas come to me during hypnagogia, regardless of whether I want them to.

The first result I obtained while focusing on the concept of onar was the word alarm, signifying my current use of my arm as a kind of alarm clock.

As I fell deeper asleep, I “saw” a diagram like the one in Figure 3-3 that compared using onar to keeping a dream journal [Hack #29].

Figure 3-3. A hypnagogic image

The last interesting result I obtained did not relate to this onar hack, but to the Hotel Dominic [Hack #7] instead. It was the idea of using the Hotel Dominic to keep a mental file on each of my friends and acquaintances, containing not only their spouses’ and children’s names, ages, and so on, but also any personal preferences I might not ordinarily remember, such as whether they like people to remove shoes when entering their houses.

After that short dip into hypnagogia, I relaxed and let myself fall fully asleep, satisfied I had brought back some interesting specimens from the mesopelagic zone of the mind’s ocean.

Keeping a dream journal is very simple. Just place a piece of paper next to your bed. When you wake up, write down key words about any dreams you had. If you had no dreams, write down “no dreams last night” on the paper—first thing, right out of bed.

That’s really all there is to it, and it always works. If you’re getting a lot of “no dreams last night,” however, when you wake up, don’t immediately leap to write “no dreams last night.” In fact, don’t move at all.

Instead, as soon as you realize that you are awake, start searching your mind for dreams. If you can find some leftover fragment of a dream, hold on tight to it. Mentally probe it; you should be able to get some more details. If you’re lucky, the whole dream will recur to you at once.

In your mind, start taking notes. (Don’t move! Don’t get out of bed!) Find keywords to describe what you are experiencing, and memorize them; you don’t want to forget. And you can forget: if you get up too quickly, you’ll forget everything, except the sensation of having looked through a nondescript dream.

Keep exploring your memory of the dream, and keep taking mental notes. When you are confident you have the major parts of it, string the keywords into a sentence in your head. Repeat it over and over and over, just as when you hold a seven-digit phone number in your head, so you can write it down. Mnemonic techniques, such as the number shape system [Hack #2], can be handy here.

Then move, get out of bed, find your pen right next to your journal, and write down those keywords—immediately! Quickly start writing details. The dream should remain in your mind. Then, write out more details—full sentences, paragraphs, whatever you have time for. If you ride the bus, keep writing what you can remember.

Your memory of the dream should now be fully integrated into your working daily memory.

I like to draw annotated maps of places that I’ve seen in dreams and pictures of scenes and peculiar objects I saw. If you can remember the full text of a dialogue, write it out; I once had a good joke told to me in a dream!

Every so often in my life, I reinvestigate my dreams. First, I start remembering a dream a night. After a week or two of paying attention to them, I remember two dreams a night. After another week, I remember several dreams per night. I usually have to stop around here: I start waking up several times in the night, because I keep waking up immediately after (or during) dreaming and have to write them down. It interferes with sleep, and I decide to stop investigating my dreams.

When it gets to be too much for you, and you just want a good night’s sleep, just stop paying attention to your dreams. Poof! Uninterrupted nights of sleep.

Lion Kimbro

The key to this hack is that by repeatedly asking the question, you set your mind in such a way that you are receptive. When something relevant crosses your path, your mind will catch it, because it’s seeing the world in terms of that particular question. By framing your experiences with the question, you have created a context for the answer to fit into when it comes your way, as in the following examples:

You might not need to put a whole lot of effort into using this hack; your mind will probably provide the suggestions to pull you in the right direction, as long as you are focusing on the question. You’ll build curiosity and attentiveness as you stay focused and turn the question around to see all its sides.

“Well, that’s obvious,” you might say. “I ask questions, I research, I find the answer.”

OK, but the point of this hack is twofold: to increase your receptivity and help you think about how many ways a question can be answered, and to help build your confidence, because confidence is another key to finding answers.

When we get frustrated, we are usually in a complex situation. Questions regularly have complicated answers, and it’s not unusual that we find ourselves lost in complexities. But complexities can be frustrating.

Confidence and believing that an answer will come can help cut through all that. This hack is simple. By reminding yourself that “all you have to do” is hold the question in mind, you can relax, perhaps put active investigation (or worry) on hold, and let the mind and the world do whatever it needs to do to help you answer the question. Don’t give up on the question, but, rather, just look at the world freshly, holding the question in mind. Sometimes just that little bit of relaxation helps a lot.

When you relax, you might notice something from outside of your usual way of thinking that helps you see something new that might lead to your answer.

With time, everything will show itself to you. Somehow, it will all piece together.

Time limits on your seeking, though, are an entirely different matter.

Lion Kimbro

Let’s change the key of this hack from music to religion. Consider the short-duration personal savior (ShorDurPerSav).¹ By temporarily (for a short duration, as opposed to the rest of your life) adopting the viewpoint of another person, even an imaginary one—or one you would ordinarily find repugnant—you can learn much.

Why limit yourself to asking, “What would Jesus do?” (WWJD?) when you can not only ask “WWBD?” (“What would Buddha do?”) or “WWMD?” (“What would Mohammed do?”), but also:

Get all New-Agey for a minute and channel that person. Although this hack is related to the old occult idea of the magical personality, you don’t have to believe that you’re literally in contact with another being magically; what you’re after is the state of mind you’re in when you see a movie, or when you act in one. What would that person do? How would she solve your problem?

When you watch Gone with the Wind, you don’t literally believe that Scarlett O’Hara exists, but a chill goes through you (admit it!) when she raises her fist to the sky and cries, “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!” Most of the time, you’re empathizing with her, feeling what she’s feeling, but you can go a step further: you can emulate Scarlett in the same way that a desktop PC circa 2005 can emulate a Commodore 64 circa 1980. The worldview of another person, even (or especially) a fictional one, is like a program that your brain can run.

Try it now. How would each of these people or characters react to finding that they had a flat tire?

Both method actors and psychotherapists have refined the technique of adopting another person’s viewpoint.

Actors must learn how to become another person during a performance. Part of the technique of method acting is deliberately not interfering with the process, but letting the alternative personality come through and not censoring its thoughts. Preparation for method acting involves accessing actors’ personal memories of the emotions that must be brought forth to give the performance life. They draw on their inner resources to call forth emotions they have experienced at other times and places, and then transform them into the words and motions of the characters they’re playing.²

Psychotherapists sometimes use role-playing to feel their clients’ emotions instead of intellectualizing about them. This helps the therapists understand their clients better. Having a supervisor and a set procedure for de-roling afterward enables a therapist to go deeply into the experience.³

The next time you’re confronted with a daunting 11-page tax form, try method-acting a tax attorney. Knowing that there are people who don’t mind such forms doesn’t make the task of filling them out easy, but adopting the mindset of an attorney who sees such forms every day, and who is anything but intimidated by them, can help.

Such confidence might even help you find more advantageous ways to fill out the forms that you might not have thought about. You might also want to adopt another personality trait: eagerness to finishing the task. If you know someone named Fred with that personality trait, go ahead and ask yourself, WWFD?

One of my friends role-played a bird and learned that wing beats are synchronized with a bird’s breathing, which turned out to be true. Albert Einstein contributed to his theories of relativity by imagining he was a photon, and Jonas Salk made progress on his polio vaccine by fantasizing that he was a virus.

Whether it’s Scarlett O’Hara’s spunk or the knowledge of what it’s like to travel at the speed of light, by pretending to be what we’re not and switching to other modes of thought, we can often gain access to information and abilities that we don’t normally use.

One approach is to look at the emotions around idea formation. Try this out the next time you have one of those “Aha!” moments, while the emotions around the discovery are still new. Notice the emotions around the discovery. You might have both positive ones and negative ones. Both are part of your normal discovery process. Use the positive emotions to reward your mind for the connections it has just made. It might feel strange, but do it anyway. This in itself might lead to clarifying related ideas that were just below the surface.

The negative feelings might have been expressed in thoughts like, “I should have seen that sooner.” Instead of doing nothing with that feeling, treat it as something useful: a spur to return to what you were thinking just before the idea struck and, if possible, how you felt just before you made the connection. It’s important to do this right when you have the idea, while the context of the idea is fresh in your mind and easier to go back to.

If this works for you, the pre-idea thoughts might not be entirely logical; in fact, they can be images or feelings, a sense of what’s important, or a fleeting impression that felt right. You’re not trying to explain the thought process; just reaching it again is enough. Sometimes the idea came because you were also thinking about something else at the same time. Going back to the moments when you made the connection makes you more aware of how you made it, which helps you make similar connections in the future more easily.

The rapid change of emotions around a discovery can make it harder to reach the thoughts that happened earlier. Those thoughts happened in a different emotional context. The approach I’ve described to get back to those thoughts works consciously with the emotions. It uses the energy of the emotions of discovery to get back to the earlier emotional context.

Thought formation is often nonverbal, yet reporting on it tends to lead to a more verbal way of thinking. To counteract this, the hack deliberately looks for the nonverbal connections.

The key aspect of the hack is the conscious act of looking at the process of a discovery at the time of making it, which can be by this route or by a route of your own invention. By giving attention to a process that might normally be taken for granted, you make opportunities to encourage and enhance the process.

The point of reviewing the process of reaching an idea isn’t just to understand the process that got you there. It’s also to look for an alternative route that could have gotten you there more rapidly or brought you more related ideas. Robert Floyd, winner of the 1978 ACM Turing Award for Excellence, has this to say about his own process of discovery:

In my own experience of designing difficult algorithms, I find a certain technique most helpful in expanding my own capabilities. After solving a challenging problem, I solve it again from scratch, retracing only the insight of the earlier solution. I repeat this until the solution is as clear and direct as I can hope for. Then I look for a general rule for attacking similar problems that would have led me to approach the given problem in the most efficient way the first time. Often, such a rule is of permanent value.¹

Floyd’s suggestions help streamline the process of discovery. More than that, they also help to clarify how seemingly unrelated discoveries may be related at a deeper level.

I had a small epiphany that led me to a method for estimating the number of wing beats per second for a wasp. The “Aha!” moment was the realization that the pitch of the note I could hear in a wasp’s buzz gives an indication of the rate at which it beats its wings. Lower notes are slower; higher notes are faster.

Tracing it back, I found that I didn’t arrive at the idea by any logical process or argument, but more intuitively. Part of the idea was remembering that one of the pioneers of computers, Herman Hollerith, taught his clerks to count decks of punched cards by flicking through them and listening to the sound. I was imagining this being done slowly (click-click-click) and then speeded up. Part of the idea was imagining the wasp flying in slow motion, slow enough that I could see the individual cycles of wing movement. The idea of rapid counting brought these two ideas together.

Could I have gotten the idea more quickly? Probably so. If I’d thought about the changes in sound an aircraft engine makes as it slows down, I might also have thought of the relation between the pitch of a sound and speed.

James Crook

There’s not much to the technique of directed thought, but that doesn’t mean it’s as easy as getting hit by a bus, either:

Step 3 is the hardest, but if you have some experience with meditation [Hack #60], you can return your attention to your problem as if you were returning your attention to your breath during meditation.

In meditation, you allow thoughts to slip through your mind, but in directed thought, you will probably want to hold on to your good ideas. You can do so with a catch [Hack #13], but I promised you this hack required no equipment, and it doesn’t. If your environment won’t permit you to use a catch notebook (you’re in a bumpy moving vehicle, it’s too crowded, it’s raining, etc.), you can use a mnemonic system to catch your ideas instead. Good candidates for a mnemonic catch include the following:

When you arrive somewhere that you can write, transcribe your ideas into your catch; later, move them from your catch into more permanent storage, such as a journal or a project file.

You can go far on a project even if you spend only your commuting time on it. As Ovid (43 BC–17 AD) wrote, “Add little to little and there will be a big pile.” I call this technique ratcheting, and you will be amazed at how well it works if you’re new to this idea.

Over the course of a couple of months on the bus, I accumulated a list of about 400 numbered ideas for my GameFrame game project; about 80 percent of the ideas were useful. Thinking on the bus also helped me feel better about my job by making my commute seem less like wasted time, and less like extra time I had to donate to my job instead of spending on my own projects.

Directed thought can be useful for simulating physical objects, too. Nikola Tesla was famous for being able to leave a simulation of a mechanical part “running” in his head for weeks at a time, then coming back to check it later for wear. I don’t know anyone with that power of visualization, but my wife, Marty, has it to a lesser degree. She saves on time and materials for her art projects by trying out various assemblages and techniques in her head before finally putting the pieces together and often ends up with more interesting implementations of her original ideas.

Here are two examples of foreign words that are useful, but that are almost untranslatable. Please note that you don’t need to speak German or Portuguese to appreciate the problem!

From German, we have Gemütlichkeit. It’s a description of a good mood, the warm feeling of being together with good friends, and it usually also involves wine or beer. How should it be translated? Happiness? Companionship? Smugness? It’s none of these and all three. Figure 3-4 shows a visual way to represent the untranslatable.

Figure 3-4. Word spectrum for the German word Gemötlichkeit

The second example is once again a word that describes a mood, but this time from Portuguese. The word saudade is a mix of homesickness, nostalgia, and good memories, with a tinge of sadness. There simply is no direct translation into English. In one context, it might translate to nostalgia, in another to homesickness. If you visualize nostalgia and homesickness as being at two ends of a spectrum, saudade lies somewhere in between, as shown in Figure 3-5.

Figure 3-5. Word spectrum for the Portuguese word saudade

So, what about new concepts in English that don’t yet have words for them? Biologists run into this problem time and again; evolution just doesn’t respect the boundaries made with words.

For example, many of the components in subsystems that repair damage to the body are also part of the normal growth and development system. Repair and growth can be placed on a spectrum. The system that strengthens bones where they are under greatest stress could be classified arbitrarily as being a repair system, because it repairs microscopic damage from mechanical stress.

Alternatively, the bone strengthening could be seen as part of the normal growth process, bringing the right components to the place where they are needed most. It all depends on your point of view. As with the foreign-language examples, it looks as if there is a word missing that combines aspects of growth and aspects of repair (Figure 3-6). The hack of visualizing repair and growth as being at two ends of a spectrum makes it easier to explore the connections between those two concepts.

Figure 3-6. Word spectrum for the English words repair and growth

The value of finding spectra between words isn’t confined to biology. In computer programming, recursion and dynamic programming are sometimes taught as if they are two entirely different techniques. In reality, dynamic programming and recursion are at different ends of a spectrum of programming techniques that break larger problems into smaller ones. This is a useful idea to have, because a recursive formulation of an algorithm may be a lot simpler than the corresponding dynamic programming formulation.

This hack works because language is inherently a process of using discrete words to cover ranges of meaning. Visualization of word positions, as in the triangle of words for Gemötlichkeit, encourages us to see the continuous range of meanings again. We can then home in on meanings that have been missed by the words available to us. The visual position gives us a handle for a particular meaning.

The actual visualization of the words doesn’t seem to be absolutely essential to the hack. The essential part is identifying that the endpoints are related and that there is some possibility between them that combines their elements. However, visualization makes the hack easier to apply, and the visualization helps map words to ranges of meaning.

James Crook