How does creative thinking work?

Often we do not notice that our brain generates a large amount of information during the thought process and interaction with the environment. At the same time, there are some tasks that are performed according to already recorded patterns, for example, walking the path from home to work or cooking your favorite dish. But in those moments when a person encounters an obstacle that was not previously on his way and he is forced to come up with a way to get around it, creative thinking mechanisms turn on.

Let us suppose that a person has gone down a previously unfamiliar path and has stumbled upon a ravine or a stream. In order to cross it, he takes one or more oblong objects at hand, lays them across the stream and passes the obstacle. If a particular person does not use such a technique every day, then with the help of past experience (everyone has seen bridges since childhood, even if they have never walked on them) and the method of its implementation, he built a new abstraction (idea) - a bridge over a stream with the help of improvised means.

The whole essence of the creative functional of thinking lies in the generation of new abstractions with the help of former experience and ways of applying it. It means that in order to generate a new object, thinking carries out manipulations with the old ones. And the manipulation itself, in this case, acts as a function, a way of acting with this object.

Since we are accustomed to the fact that abstractions are born in the head, it is easier to use this term to denote the formed new objects based on the old ones. The point is not even how viable this or that abstraction is (we will talk about this later), but that this possibility of the brain is the creative process of thinking. For example, let's take an abstraction about a blue (black, purple, or any unnatural) apple. Suppose that a person could not see a blue apple in nature and use this abstraction from previous experience (no, now he knows about a blue apple and can even google videos with it). Accordingly, the blue apple abstraction was generated in the process of thinking. The abstractions apple and blue were taken as the initial ones, and the abstraction to color became the function or method of interaction.

This is exactly how the process of generating everything new actually happens. The apple example only simplifies the explanation of the creative component of the thought process. You can also consider thinking on the example of mathematics, which operates with abstractions and functions (and does not even hide it). The unit is an abstraction, the addition is a function. By adding one to one, we get a new abstraction - two. Many more examples could be given, but I think the point is clear.

If you dig deeper, you can find only two components in any creative process of thinking: synthesis - the creative part of thinking (what we described above) and analysis - a method that uses thinking to isolate characteristics from ready-made abstractions. For example, the characteristic blue, in which we mentally painted an apple, was taken by us from the blue lake abstraction.