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Elastic Thinking: Staying Competitive in Our Fast-Paced World

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Elastic Thinking: Staying Competitive in Our Fast-Paced World

Posted on August 13, 2018

Dana Asby, CEI Intern

Current societal demands have us multi-tasking our way through our

days: texting while making breakfast, checking the news while waiting
for the bus, and lling every free moment gaining or exchanging new
pieces of information. To keep up with this information overload and
adapt to our ever-changing world, Leonard Mlodinow says that we need
to put down our phones to make room for boredom or at least give our
brains minds some space for ideas to incubate Mlodinow, a theoretical
physicist who has written best-selling books with Stephen Hawking and
teleplays for Star Trek: The Next Generation, teaches us how to enhance
our elastic thinking in his new book Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of
Change.

Whereas more and more people are aware of neuroplasticity, or the brain’s ability to heal and form
new neural pathways, Mlodinow is talking about the elasticity of the thinking itself.  According to
Mlodinow, “Elastic thinking endows us with the ability to solve novel problems and overcome the
neural and psychological barriers that can impede us from looking beyond the existing order.”
(2018).  He claims that elastic thinking, also known as exible thinking, is the most sophisticated
level of thinking.  According to Mlodinow, there are three levels of thinking,

The most primitive and common type of thinking that occurs in animals from insects to
mammals is scripted thinking, during which your brain relies on xed action patterns and
innate reactions to stimuli in the environment to make decisions.
The next level, logical and analytical thinking, requires the brain to synthesize multiple
pieces of information from short and long term memory. While this is more complex than
scripted thinking, it still relies on past patterns to make decisions.
Only elastic thinking synthesizes new ideas with the associations already in your mind. This
is how creativity is generated and paradigms are shifted. Flexible thinkers crave novelty and
work best when a task involves breaking boundaries (Shah, 2018).

In his 2018 article in Psychology Today “Your Elastic Mind,” Mlodinow explains that elastic thinking
helps us overcome the psychological barriers that make it dif cult to see beyond the normal to
solve novel problems. He gives us a de nition of elastic thinking by enumerating its nine aspects:

Capacity to let go of comfortable ideas

Capacity to become accustomed to ambiguity and contradiction
Capability to rise above conventional mindsets
Capability to reframe questions
Ability to abandon assumptions
Ability to open ourselves to new paradigms
Propensity to rely on imagination and logic equally
Willingness to experiment
Tolerance of failure
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Perhaps all that daydreaming you did in class actually did you some good,
because elastic thinking is what happens during the brain’s unconscious
state.  Neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen who has written about creativity
and genius (2005) explains that during times of rest, our brains are
constantly working to uncover new connections by looking for patterns
among information we’ve recently learned (Mlodinow, 2018). Even though
this is usually occurring undetected in the background, these ideas don’t
pop to the front of our brains because of cognitive lters that keep the
“crazy ideas” at bay. Mlodinow argues that we need to let some of those
crazy ideas come through a little more often and the way to relax those
lters is by enhancing elastic thinking.

Getting Rid of Cognitive Filters. Surprisingly, we may be best at accessing our elastic thinking
when we feel mentally depleted. Mlodinow discusses a team of researchers who gave participants
tasks that required exible thinking. The participants who had previously done tasks that required
use of executive functioning, leaving them burned-out by the time they started the elastic thinking
task, actually out-performed the participants whose minds were fresh and ready to go. Being
mindful of that when scheduling, you may be able to enhance your imagination if you work on
tedious chores that require concentration prior to tackling creative projects. When your brain is
tired, it’s not going to be as ef cient at putting up those cognitive lters to block the far out ideas
that have brought us things like Uber, Google, the Mona Lisa, and PokémonGo, all products of
elastic thinking (Shah, 2018).

The lters in your brain making sure you’re not overwhelmed by your own ideas don’t fully mature
until around age 25 (Suarez, 2018), which is why children tend to have more creative thinking and
can access a wacky idea much easier than us adults. The strength of these lters weakens over
time, so when we reach our later years, our thinking becomes more elastic again. Those of us in the
middle part of life will bene t by exercising our brains in a particular way to increase the elasticity
of our thinking. To do this, we must put away our technological and other distractions and turn off
our brains.

The Bene ts of Meditation and Being in the Flow

An easy way to access the unconscious mind, the center of elastic

thinking, is through meditation. To get to a place of non-thinking, you
need to get into a focused ow. This can mean sitting down in lotus
position with your eyes closed to let your thoughts drift away, but it can
also mean losing yourself in running, gardening, painting, or any other
activity where you reach a ow state and your actions become
automatic. In addition to stretching your thinking, Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, father of positive psychology, reminds us that reaching
a state of ow where your ability to perform a task meets a presented
challenge will also increase your happiness (Beard, 2014). While
practicing these sorts of activities will help you think more elastically, Mlodinow emphasizes that
to truly think elastically requires more than just practicing an exercise; it requires a mindset shift
similar to what you experience when you practice mindfulness.

Shifting Perspective
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Another essential aspect of elastic thinking is understanding how to shift perspective or our
mindset, including how to incorporate the perspective of others to become more compassionate
towards others and oneself. If you understand your own false assumptions and are able to dismiss
them to see a new perspective, the answer to a problem will often become obvious. There are
many ways to approach this in schools with students of different ages. Creative exercises where
various endings are supplied to stories will help to expand their ability to consider alternative
views. For older students activities such as debate, or simply listing assumptions and then nding
the aws in their thinking, will provide good practice. As adults, we may nd it useful to examine
our own lives through therapy to help identify false narratives and change our behavior.

Editor’s Note: Watch for more on elastic thinking in upcoming CEI Blogs.

References

Andreasen, N. (2005). The creative brain: The science of genius. New York, NY: Plume

Beard, K. (2015). Theoretically speaking: An interview with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on

ow  theory and development and its usefulness in addressing contemporary challenges in
education. Educational Psychology Review, (27), 2, 353-364.

Mlodinow, L. (2018). Your elastic mind. Psychology Today.

Mlodinow, L. (2018). Elastic: Flexible thinking in a constantly changing world. Penguin UK.

Suarez, R. (2018). A sesson in ‘elastic thinking.’ On Point radio show.

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