Exercise For Skill I: Conceptual Integration

1. Ask: “Of what do I want a more cohesive conception?” Maybe it’s the Early National Era in the US. Maybe it’s the Union of European Football Associations. You pick.

2. Make sure you know about this thing. Hit the books. Watch a film. Take a class. Already know a lot about this thing? Good. You can skip this step.

3. Make note cards with key terms (events, ideas, people, etc.). No need to define them if you already know about them. You just need a deck of concepts.

4. Shuffle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffle) your deck. Riffle, Hindu, Pile or Weave and Faro, it doesn’t matter. Just randomize.

5. Pick two cards and ask yourself what relationship(s) exists between the terms. Answer yourself.

6. Keep doing that until you can rapidly identify the relationship(s) between any two concepts in the field.

Note: You may want to throw a third card in the mix. Generate a set of cards that deal with overarching themes and concepts within the subject matter and state a relation in the context of that theme.

Exercise for Skill II: Analogy.

See Steps 1-5 Above

1. Set a number of paired cards down on a big table.

2. Identify sets of pairs with analogous relationships.

Exercise for Skill III: Creative Thinking

1. Get your handy note cards.

2. Do the above-mentioned conceptual integration and analogy exercises with cards from unrelated fields/ schema.

Skill I: Conceptual Integration. This skill involves the ability to rapidly identify the relationship between any two concepts.

Skill II: Analogy. Be able to apply meaning from one subject to another.

Skill III: Creative Thinking. There is a wide range of ways to understand creativity, but it is generally understood to be the ability to create something new and valuable. A person thinks creatively by blending concepts from different scenarios together to generate unique ideas. This phenomenon, essential to the arts, sciences and humor goes on in the subconscious while awake and asleep. By increasing conceptual integration and awareness of analogy among ideas in seemingly unrelated schema, an individual can consciously engage in creative thinking. Creativity involves the de-compartmentalization of information and the reorganization of concepts in order to combine different ideas in a way that will synthesize a new idea.