Creativity, Serendipity, and Cross-Chunking
Professor Barbara Okley in Learning How to Learn [1] indicates that successful professionals and innovators, such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and others; do engage in extended (week-long) periods of reading, allowing to keep engaged with “not yet forgotten ideas” that can “network”.
Reading as a Journey Project for the Mind
Therefore, a reading experience can be a good example of a project for the mind, depending on the reading can be an open session that is preserved while such journey is running, creating many opportunities for ideation, iteration, insights to be kept active, to be positioned in ways that eventually they can become part of something bigger, of an arc, to connect with other ideas, for example, to become meaningful amid a purpose and goal or to become an important piece of value for an open challenge, you name it.
When the Reading of the Moment influences our Dialogs and Interactions
Recently I acknowledged to Vanessa that I was sometimes providing feedback to her quite influenced by thinkings related to the books which I was reading. (these books about management, productivity, self-development.) But such realization became clear when I noticed that she was doing that too. She once expressed interest for a given book which I didn’t read. I then decided to see an online talk from the book’s author and liked. A few weeks after I gave her the book a comment she made to did resonate with something “I once heard”. It took me a bit of time to realize it was because related to the talk and that the talk was related to the book she was reading.
Conclusion
The first situation shows how that a certain engagement session, such as an immersive reading experience, can offer a realm of chunks (in the sense of chunking in Learning How to Learn) that eventually can connect — aside from the book story they can be intertwined to events of our lives and become building blocks for us to develop our goals, dreams, projects, you name it.
The second situation shows how such chunks also can be objects being used in discussions, and collaboration, leading perhaps to cocreation of new ideas and developments for groups.
