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2 • The Ability to Hypothesize and Suspend

Hypothesizing is making a statement of what may possibly be true, and then using that statement to make assumptions and to reason upon, just as if it were true beyond a shadow of a doubt. The objective of hypothesizing is to enable you to reach some truth that is not known with certainty at the time you begin.

Suspension, in the sense we use it here, means to stop, or cause to stop temporarily, the act of hypothesizing. In this way, an assumption which has carried you to a certain point may be tem­porarily "frozen" for closer examination and analysis.

These are two mental processes that usually occur in combina­tion. The creative mind will alternate or oscillate back and forth between the two. This is necessary, because in the creative process you must, to a large extent, speculate—you must assume that what has not yet happened, or what is not yet known, is still possible. However, the starting point, as we have seen, is the fa­miliar. And the step from the familiar into the unknown is through speculation. Therefore, the creative thinker must use hypotheses of various kinds, because they are often the only bridge available from where he is at the moment to where he thinks he wants to go.

Often a speculative answer or theory will look good enough to test and experiment with in an attempt to prove it out. Or there may be a great temptation to capitalize on even a small step into the future. This is where suspension comes in.

Rather than quit with an immediate profit, the creative thinker will hold that first possibility in suspension—"put it on a mental shelf"—where he can always come back to it if nothing better turns up. He is then free to continue his speculation and try to improve still more on his "suspended" theory, or he may go off into a completely new direction to see if he can find something still better.

This process can readily be visualized by thinking of it as a mental progression up a staircase, as in Figure 2. The "familiar" used as a starting point is the "tread" marked No. 1. Now, through hypothesizing, the creative mind rises to a new level—No. 2. At this point, a new idea is in existence—possibly good, possibly bad.

Fig. 2

The creator may stop here and try to utilize this new idea, or he may temporarily suspend his judgment and continue through new speculation on up to tread No. 3. Here, again, he arrives at a new hypothesis, now twice removed from the familiar down at No. 1 level. Now, at No. 3, he again has the choice of settling for his new idea or of suspending, and going on to No. 4. And, once at No. 4, the choice is again to go on or stop. If, at any of the steps, further speculation did not yield a new progression, he could then go into experimentation with any of the ideas that had been developed.

This may sound strange or involved in view of the more popu­lar concept of an inventor or artist at work. Most people believe that the way an inventor gets his start is by going into the labora­tory or workshop and beginning to "try things out." But actual experimentation is generally the last step—wherein ideas are tested—rather than the first. It was said that Nikola Tesla, men­tioned earlier as the inventor of the alternating current generator, had the advantage of possessing a mental laboratory in which he could build the most expensive equipment without cash outlay. He was supposedly able to conceive not only the abstract ideas, but the machines themselves down to the last details. He never bothered to make blueprints of his machines, because he stored these brilliant images in his mind.

In exercising these faculties of hypothesizing and suspending, the creative worker is predatory in his search for ideas. He will use every tool, fact, reasoning process, and probability to build his hypothesis. If necessary, he will at times resort to pure fantasy. This is because the mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. And this is not enough to raise the thinking above the already familiar, commonplace, or mediocre. There comes a point when the creative mind must take a leap—a jump to a higher plane of theory or knowledge—even if it cannot then prove or discover how it got there.

In this respect, of course, the creative process is a regenerating one. It never ends. No sooner has one "familiar" been left behind than the new speculation becomes a familiar. At this point, the creative mind is ready for a new leap. It wasn't so very long ago that we "knew" that the atom was the smallest unit of matter. This was the familiar—the commonplace—belief. Then, through speculation, our scientists theorized that the atom could be a whole universe in itself. Experiments confirmed this. Today this great new concept is a "familiar," taught even in high school physics courses. What new scientific insights and leaps into the future this new "familiar" will generate we can only guess. But one thing we do know: the speculations have started.

An important point to realize about this dual procedure is that it is a "fail-safe" method when you are looking for even just an improvement on a present situation: if your speculations carry you up to one promising possibility, and you suspend it at that point while you go out looking for something still better, you know you can always fall back on what you already have. There­fore, there is no reason to stop with the first "better" idea that comes along. You can always go back to it if further effort, or a deadline, leaves you without a higher-level idea.

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