The 6 Thinking Hats is a systematic, structured,
parallel-thinking framework designed by physician and thought-organization expert
Edward de Bono. The framework is designed for better decision making, problem-solving, reducing conflict, and exploring any issue from six different
perspectives.
Each thinking hat plays a distinct function and role. Each
thinking role is identified with a colored symbolic “thinking hat.” By mentally
wearing and switching “hats,” you can easily focus or redirect thoughts, a
conversation, or an interaction. Looking at things from these perspectives
ensures that you direct your thinking in the best possible way rather than letting
it run on auto-pilot.
1. 1. White Hat (This type of thinking focuses on
facts, just facts. Separate facts from feelings. It's all about information. It
focuses on available data, facts, and identifying information gaps.)
2. 2. Yellow Hat (This type of thinking focuses on
benefits, brightness, and optimism. Balancing fear with possibility. It
explores the positive, optimistic, and beneficial aspects of a decision.)
3. 3. Blue Hat (This thinking hat is all about
management, direction, and organization of thought. It enables the person to
stop getting stuck in a spiral and set an agenda that will steer them forward.
It's a control mechanism to minimize stress and stay organized.)
4. 4, Green Hat (This thinking hat is all about
options, creativity; the possibilities, alternatives, and new ideas. Is there
another way to do this? Is there an alternative to this? This hat questions
like these.)
5. 5, Black Hat (As the name suggests, this thinking
hat focuses on identifying the dark or negative things, the risks before they
create trouble. It Identifies potential problems, risks, dangers, and critical,
logical reasons for caution. When used wisely, this thinking hat is
tremendously powerful, but when overused, it can amplify the problems and
generate unnecessary doubts or fears.)
6. 6. Red Hat (Red Thinking Hat is all about feelings,
emotions, hunches, intuitions, and gut reactions. This thinking process calls
for investigating, understanding, and being aware of our deepest feelings,
fears, likes, dislikes, loves, and hates, so instead of driving your life, you
take the driver seat and direct them)
In the trenches of a secluded world lived a woman
who sat by herself, drenched in utter grief after her lover departed to another
world to fetch some fish and never returned. She sat by herself, missing him.
From day till night, she sat soaked in melancholy, waiting for him, his face
swimming before her eyes.
When twilight overshadowed the sunlight, she sat in
her garden gazing at the moon, thinking that he too would be gazing at it,
remembering her. With the coming of morning sunlight, she pulled out her diary
and spent her day writing poems of loss, depression, grief, melancholy, and
yearning.
Will he ever return and meet her? The question constantly hovered
above her head. As time went by and she couldn’t hold back her longing, she
started talking to the trees, to the birds, even to the winds. She would tell
the wind to go and see whether he was on his way to her. She would ask the Sun
whether she could see her lover in another world. She would tell the trees to
rustle so fiercely that the scent of their leaves rushed through the sky and
reached him.
At night, she would whisper to the stars, telling them secrets
only he knew about her, telling them about the stories and fantasies she shared
with him before he departed to another world. Why he departed, she didn’t know.
Years passed. He didn’t return. The books in her home were overflowing with
words she felt pulsing in her heart when she missed him.
And then, one day, someone came to her house and
rang the doorbell. She opened the door. Standing there was the Mad Hatter with
a bottle of coke, a packet of potato chips, and a box of novels.
She grabbed
the bottle, guzzled down the coke, ripped the packet, wolfed down the chips,
snatched the box, and flanked shut the door to slip inside her blanket and read
all the novels.
In the words
of non-writers, this story would probably come under the category of bad jokes
or gross humor. But for writers, this can be a fabulous technique to add some
spice to their piece of writing.
The
technique is “Amplified Absurdity Technique.” As the name suggests, it presents
a piece of writing or a narrative in a way that depicts the absurdity of human
life in an amplified manner.
In contrast
to Edgar Allan Poe’s Single Effect Theory I explained in the earlier video that
is based on spinning the entire story based on one, singular emotion, the
Amplified Absurdity Technique involves an abrupt, sudden break or jump in the
initial emotion, often catching the reader by surprise.
When writing
a piece with this technique, the goal is to maintain the Single Effect right
until the final line or the ending, and then jolting the reader or the viewer
into an abrupt twist that is trivial, pathetic, darkly ironic, or grossly
humorous. The idea is to twist the initial emotion into an absurdity so instead
of following its typical loop of neurons, it takes an absurd turn and forms a
new neural pathway. Right when the initial emotion is at its peak, the twist
sends the viewer or the reader into a jaw-dropping burst of dissonance.
The
technique is based on the fundamental nature of human mind. Human mind is not a
solid block. It is a malleable entity, just like clay. Just as a jeweller uses
raw gold or silver to craft a variety of jewels, earrings, bangles, and
necklaces, the mind can be shifted or changed according to what your
intelligence wants, in a given moment. While Poe’s Single Effect Theory
re-enforces a particular emotion and amplifies it to the peak, the Amplified
Absurdity Technique drops the entire amplified cloud of emotion with a splash
of humor, irony, or an eye-opening sense of life’s weirdness.
It magnifies
the psychological conditioning or programming in the person’s mind, and then suddenly
shatters it with violation of expectation by inserting an unexpected absurdity
in the path of the initial emotion. For the writer or the storyteller,
Amplified Absurdity is also cathartic and mind-bending, as it literally enables
them to express a difficult emotion and finally shift it.
The concept
can also be related to H.P. Lovecraft’s ideas of “Horror of the Mundane,” or
the “Cosmic Horror,” that work on seeing the ridiculous in the sublime and the
sublime in the ridiculous. Lovecraft famously re-instated through his work that
human concerns are irrelevant to the vast, indifferent universe.
The Amplified
Absurdity technique helps the writer and the reader to embrace a difficult
emotion and right when the emotion is amplified to its peak, then introduce a
dissonance spike by creating a sudden, jarring jump in the emotion. From dread
to humor, for instance. It’s just like a high-speed car taking an abrupt turn.
The concept
is just like the character of the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, whose
stories nobody believes but they make people feel good and cheerful. Amplified
Absurdity, this concept relies on the fact that the state of human mind can be
changed with a story that is absolutely weird, absurd, or illogical. And hence,
it can be a powerful tool, not just for writing and storytelling, but also for
self-reflection.
In the above
story, the technique amplifies the emotion of grief to its peak, ultimately
leading it into a sharp drop to advertisement-style humor and therefore,
cunningly twisting its pathway.
This
technique can also be observed in a scene in the Bollywood movie 3 Idiots.
To delve
deeper into the science behind how this Amplified Absurdity Technique works,
think of a cute white rabbit dressed in a clothing that makes it look like a
frightening fire-spitting dragon. You make the reader “believe” in the terror
of the dragon and right when they are frightened to the peak, you violate their
expectation and unmask the dragon to reveal the rabbit. First of all, this
twist creates an incongruity, a cognitive dissonance, a defamiliarization, a
dopamine spike. It disrupts the regular rhythm of thinking and bends it to
generate a new thought pattern in the brain. By introducing an absurd element,
the writer forces the reader and themselves to feel a difficult emotion to a
heightened intensity and then release it and feel something different.
The
technique is a masterful exploitation of the mind’s basic nature to shift the
current state of mind, in a cathartic or a positive manner.
The Neural
Science of Amplified Absurdity Technique
This is how
the Amplified Absurdity Technique works in the brain. At first, the target
emotion is amplified to peak intensity with consistent repetition of high-stake
elements and imagery. As the emotion reaches it peak, it activates the Amygdala,
the part of the brain that deals with processing emotions.
The amygdala signals
the other department in the brain called the hypothalamus. Hypothalamus is
responsible for triggering a fight-or-flight response, which floods the
person’s body with adrenaline or stress hormones.
Sensing the
commotion in hypothalamus, another two parts of the brain get activated. A part
called the Temporal Parietal Junction (TPJ) registers the abrupt shock, the
sudden introduction of absurdity, or the surprising break in the expectation.
Another
part, called the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC), starts processing the
“conflict” generated in the brain as a result of violated expectation, the
conflict between the predicted outcome and reality. The extreme mismatch then
activates the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC), a part that deals with flexible thinking.
The incongruity breaks the brain’s meaning management model and jolts it into
existential meaninglessness, which can sometimes be cathartic and mind-changing.
The setting sun filled the sky with orange, but
when she looked up from her room’s window, the sky appeared grey. It was a
cold, winter evening and after 6 pm, a clock on her room’s wall had stopped
ticking. Outside, a street dog yelled a frightening call. He must be feeling
cold, she wondered.
She flung a thick pink shawl on her shoulders and reached
for the attic to get an old sweater from the trunk. The wooden stairs were
rickety and old. As she climbed, they creaked.
She hadn’t climbed this staircase
in the past three months. The lights upstairs needed to be changed. Most of
them had their glass broken by an aggressive storm that came a few months ago, in
the monsoon. She had to carry a lamp as she climbed the stairs. As she put one
foot after the other, the lamp dangling from her fingers oscillated from side
to side like a pendulum. As it did, it spilled pools of glowing yellow light on
the giant paintings that hung on the side walls. The gold trimmed edges of the
paintings glittered in the lamplight. Some pools revealed expressionless faces
of her family members that looked as if they were gazing right at her, not in a
happy way.
She reached the attic and unbolted the door. Everything inside was dusty.
The murmuring dust particles formed a disturbing halo around the lamp. She
walked to the bronze trunk and tried to open it. It wouldn’t open. Its super-old
antique handle seemed to be rusting with years of neglect. She placed the lamp
on top of an empty shelf. To squeeze out maximum strength of her muscles, she
stretched her right leg from the back and started pulling on the trunk’s
stubborn handle vigorously.
It must have been close to five minutes when the
handle appeared to surrender to her will. She pulled it from the knob, swung it
upwards, and settled it against the wall. The inside of the trunk looked like
another world in contrast to the suffocating desert of dust that surrounded the
trunk.
Lounging within the dark blue velvet lining of the trunk, there were expensive
and colorful fabrics, apothecary-style glass bottles of perfume, thick
hardcover books, and boxes of mysterious trinkets that glittered in the lamplight.
She bent down to dive into this vast ocean of luxury and pulled out a silk bag.
She pulled a string and unfastened the bag and pulled out an orange sweater.
The sweater appeared to have been sewen for a toddler. Above one sleeve, near the
left shoulder, there was a ripped strand of orange wool. For just as much time
as the sound of a sparrow’s chirp lasted outside, she stared at the sweater,
lost in thoughts.
Then, as if jolted back to the present moment, she flumped
the trunk close, grabbed the lamp, and rushed down the stairs. The stairs
creaked even more, the echoes of their groaning sounds screaming at her as she
walked away towards the front door. She flanked the door open and stepped out
on the street, where she thought, was the dog that was yelling the frightening
calls due to cold.
The dog wasn’t there. She stood there for a long time. She
looked here and there, on the sides and around the neighbours’ gardens. The dog
had disappeared. Where did he go? Will he die in the winter? She looked at the
orange sweater. If he would have waited just a little bit more, she could have
saved him. With the saddening thought possessing her, she walked into the house
and closed the door tight shut.
She walked to her room, turned off the lights,
and slipped inside the blanket on her bed. Moon’s uncaring white light entered
through the window and spilled itself here and there. The curvy crests and
valleys of her blanket cast shadows on the ceiling. She was still sitting, not
lying down for sleep.
She could not know whether it was her time to sleep yet,
because the clock had stopped ticking. So she took out the orange sweater clenched
under her elbow. Faint shadows of a tree leaves crept across the floor. She didn’t
notice it. She was busy looking at the sweater, as if recalling something she
thought she had forgotten.
Then it came to her, tumbling like a rush of
chemicals inside her body. She couldn’t see in the dark but she knew that
droplets of sweat were bubbling up on her forehead, inside her chest, and
between her legs. She remembered it, scene by scene, sound by sound. As she
did, she started crying, at first in faint sobs, then in full-blown screams.
The
frightening screams shook awake a street dog from his sleep. He thought someone
around was feeling cold. He shivered. In the sky, the moon hid behind a cluster
of clouds.
What emotion this short story triggered inside you? You’ll
probably say, grief. And although, there are bits of horror, mystery, and humor
in the story as well, the primary emotion that it evoked was grief. You may
like to call its emotional cousins like melancholy, depression, sadness, or
pain, but essentially it was grief.
For this story, grief is the primary pintuck that is holding
together the entire fictional narrative. This illustrates what the celebrated
writer Edgar Allan Poe called the “single effect theory,” also known by phrases
like “unity of impression” and “unity of effect.”
According to Poe, the “single effect theory” is a brilliant way
to learn how to craft a short story. The theory states that a short story
should revolve around a single, intense emotion, such as dread, grief, anger,
fear, etc. You can refer to Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions for a full list
of emotions you can use as starting prompts for your story.
The idea of Poe’s Single Effect Theory is that every
sentence, every incident, every detail, or character should converge to provoke
one, singular, pre-conceived, desired emotion in the reader. It can also be a
single psychological or intellectual state, such as confusion or contemplation.
Nothing that is extraneous to this singular state should be added to the story.
It’s like, looking at the story as if it were a machine engineered
with various elements where each element worked together to serve a singular
purpose. You can also imagine it with the example of a song’s guitar notes. The
notes might have different leads, multiple chords, but there is always a dominant
chord that guides the rest of the melody.
Poe believed that writing isn’t a random craft born out of
spontaneous bursts of inspiration. Rather, it’s quite alike solving a
mathematical problem. A story doesn’t come out from a random burst of inspiration,
but is constructed piece by piece with words, sounds, images, and other
elements. He, himself, applied this technique in his work, where he explored
the darkest recesses of his mind, the madnesses, the obsessions, the
psychological terrors.
His poem, The Raven, is centered around the emotion of
deep melancholy. Many of his works express the emotion of poetic beauty often
linked to sadness and loss.
His “Single Effect Theory” is a fascinating lesson that also
teaches us a way of exploring our own inner psyche, where we can magnify each
emotion and lay it out bare and naked on the paper for our mind to see and
reflect. It’s a focused meditation into the self carried out on the vehicle of
words, via writing. It’s both a prompt and the way, whichever way you like to
see it, and use it.
