Krishna: Different feelings, thoughts and perspectives. That is how creativity originates!

Divergent thinking is the opposite of convergent thinking and involves more creativity. With this type of thinking, you can generate ideas and develop multiple solutions to a problem. While divergent thinking often involves brainstorming for many possible answers to a question, the goal is the same as convergent thinking—to arrive at the best solution.

Divergent thinking is about solving problems that allow you to have multiple possible solutions, to find out which one of them is working. Most of the time, this happens in free-flow, or you can say it spontaneously. In a small amount of time, already tried and tested solutions were studied to develop an unconventional connection that can provide a solution.

Divergent thinking can help you in identifying new opportunities, find creative ways to solve problems ,assess ideas from multiple perspectives, understand and learn from others. Being able to create multiple ideas, answers, or plans of action will put you in the intellectual bracket.

Fast results and predictability may work some of the time, but this way of thinking won’t help you stand out from competitors. This doesn’t work well in scientific research.

Many variables can influence divergent thinking abilities, including educational level, diverse knowledge, intelligence, WM (working memory) abilities, speed of processing, health and even sleep.

Man thinking : art work credit: Pasieka

Convergent thinking is said to be the problem-solving technique that helps in bringing back together different ideas from different people who are from different fields, in an attempt to provide the single best solution to the given problem.

Lateral (horizontal) thinking involves moving beyond logical or straightforward deductive reasoning to find solutions to problems. Lateral means from the other side, which means a person can look for the answer differently, more like think outside the box.

Critical thinking is primarily concerned with judging the true value of statements and seeking errors whereas lateral thinking focuses more on the "movement value" of statements and ideas. A person uses lateral thinking to move from one known idea to new ideas.

Critical thinking is a kind of thinking in which you question, analyse, interpret, evaluate and make a judgement about what you read, hear, say, or write.

You can reach your higher potential only when you can think clearly and differently from others.

You have to decondition yourself to reach this state, erase most of the things that influence your thought and start with a clean slate using only the facts and evidence as guides.

Scientific thinking is the process of reviewing ideas using science, observations, investigational processes, and testing them to gain knowledge. The goal is to make outcomes of knowledge that may be meaningful to science. The scientific method is how scientists and researchers apply their scientific thinking.

So divergent thinking, convergent thinking and lateral thinking are all good in certain ways in the fields of art, business and literature, but I think critical thinking and scientific thinking should guide all these types in all the fields, especially this is most important in science.

Feelings? We were told to keep them outside of our labs. Feelings have no place in scientific thinking.

We can understand how others feel and how we feel too but keep these feelings under tight leash when we enter our labs.

So feeling the same as others or different doesn’t make sense in the context of labs.

How or what I 'feel' doesn't guide me in any way while thinking.

This thing called feeling might help in other areas of life, though.