Stimulating Exceptional Abilities: Pumping Our Teeming Brain
Are people fascinated by so much because of their intellectual development, or does consciously feeding our mind stimulate high level thought and creative ability?
Writer Steve Pavlina poses that intriguing idea in his book Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth.
“What you learn in one area can often be applied to others,” he writes. “For example, Leonardo da Vinci, considered a genius by any reasonable standard, achieved competence across a diverse set of fields, including art, music, science, anatomy, engineering, architecture, and many others.
“While some would argue that such wide-ranging interests were a result of his intelligence, I think it’s more likely that they were the cause of it—or at least a major contributing factor.
“By exposing himself to such a rich variety of input, da Vinci found patterns that others never noticed. This vastly amplified his problem-solving abilities. What’s considered commonplace in one field often has creative applications in other disciplines.”
One of the questions in a giftedness self-test from the Gifted Development Center is “Do you often connect seemingly unrelated ideas?” One way to help track those ideas and stimulate more awareness of a wider range of disciplines – which may turn out to be related – is to use mind mapping or idea mapping.
The image is from imindmap.com, site of Tony Buzan, author of The Mind Map Book.
Continued in article Pumping our teeming brain.
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Book: 
“One of the questions in a giftedness self-test from the Gifted Development Center is “Do you often connect seemingly unrelated ideas?”
I do, but I have always tended to find this a hindrance to problem-solving as much as a help… to the point where I often remind myself that my connections will be wrong 50% of the time. (I don’t know if that’s the actual percentage but seems like a nice round number!) I sometimes feel like this is a misfiring in my brain or something. Many times the connected ideas don’t seem to be useful, or I can’t get others to understand them, so I let a lot of them go.
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