Creative people take their intuition seriously, looking for patterns where others see confusion, and are able to make connections between discrete ar… - Tom Butler-Bowdon

The work of both Piaget and Kinsey suggests that while biology is always a dominant influence on behavior, environment is critical to its expression.

Burns lists ten “cognitive distortions,” such as all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions, and giving ourselves labels. By understanding these distortions, we are led to the awareness that “feelings aren’t facts,” they are only mirrors of our thoughts.

The lateral thinking concept emerged from de Bono’s study of how the mind works. He found that the brain is not best understood as a computer; rather, it is “a special environment which allows information to organize itself into patterns.” The mind continually looks for patterns, thinks in terms of patterns, and is self-organizing, incorporating new information in terms of what it already knows.