Uncorrelated thinking? Is that a typo or are my eyes just a bit tired which means that I am muddling some of the words up.

It’s not a typo but rather an intentional brain teaser. When we are taught selected subjects in our schooling we are asked to look for the correlation between things. This makes then relational and means that they can then be weaved together to form a structure of a narrative.

So, how is it then that we can teach ourselves to think in uncorrelated ways?

I will try to use the concept of unstructured and structured learning.

Unstructured learning allows you to explore things outside of the bounds of a fixed structure. If you research machine learning you will quickly discover that they use two different types of data sets to train models. In the unstructured data scenario, the model is exposed to data from a variety of data sources and it looks to make sense of the different elements. Looking for connections that fall outside of immediate patterns of connection.

Structured learning guides your learning within instructional methodologies. Staying with the machine learning example, in this case you will give the model selected data sets to reference and to learn from. This means that it will get more effective and efficient over time because these is a high correlation in the patterns of the data.

One of the most valuable lessons that I learnt early on in my journey through life is that we all have our unique view point when we look out onto the world. Even if two people are standing side by side looking out at the same view. This means that we will all have different ideas float into our heads based on the various triggers and the situations we expose ourselves to. Recognising this taught me to sit with seemingly uncorrelated ideas or concepts and challenge myself to find ways to bring them together. There is value in structure, but there is also value in combining things that at a first glance appear unrelated to one another.

Just because spaces or ideas may seem uncorrelated, this does not mean that you should ignore them. Sit with it for a bit and ask your mind to explore potential connections. You will be amazed by the patterns you are able to build out.

*the header image was generated by DALL-E using the following prompt, “A 3D render of an open design space, filled with nature”