Examples of ways to look at information from a construal level perspective

Every object, sensation, idea, and experience can be processed at multiple levels called the construal levels. Each level explains the object with a level of specificity. Calling your phone an iPhone is very specific, calling it a communication device is less specific. A car can be a glorious gray triangle or it can be a curvy, finely designed mode of transportation. A single concept can be defined with a combination of construals. From space, the earth is a large sphere. From your toilet, it is a location that contains your toilet.

Changing construals change your perception by changing your sensitivity to information. From up close, you can look at the earth and see all the buildings, people, pigeons, mountains, oceans, etc. which have various shapes, skylines, sounds, textures, colors, etc. From far away, the entire Earth is just a smudge in space, almost indistinguishable from other planets and stars.

Humans can mentally manipulate construals which entail different perspectives, sensitivity to information, level of details, etc. This approach can help us in identifying unique patterns – a high-level cognitive skill.

So far, we’ve looked at creative thinking based on examples and features of a concept. Specifically, examples of a “construal” – level of understanding & processing. By taking an idea like a mobile phone, which is an example of a communication device, we traveled through multiple construals to link to other concepts and examples like computers, charging cable, radios, etc. But, there is a lot more to this. People think in different ways and some may be predisposed to look at things from a specific construal level – that is, some people will think of their iPhone as an iPhone, and some will think of it as their computing/communication device by default.

In cognitive psychology, there are 2 popular ways to characterize thinking styles – analytical and holistic. Analytical thinking focuses on details (low construal) and holistic thinking focuses on the essence and big picture. People may be biased toward one of these in certain contexts.

When someone does something we dislike, we end up thinking in one of 2 ways – “He put me in a bad mood” vs. “He said we need to….. and then we quarreled about…… and I said… and he shouted calling me a …… and then he guilted me…..” This is a classic example of processing an emotional event at 2 different construals or with 2 different thinking styles. By now you’d know which is which.

One related insight into creative thinking comes from a study^[6] that examined the relationship between learning through examples and thinking styles. In a study on creative performance, learning examples before a task was beneficial for those with an analytical thinking style but not for those with a holistic thinking style. This is partly explained by how analytical thinking can allow fixating on certain examples and exposure to more examples can increase the construal level to a more abstract level – a level conducive to creative thinking. For those with a holistic thinking style, examples might ground their thinking at a lower construal preventing abstract, broad, and seemingly odd mental connections.

Tip: To be creative: when you are analytical, think of higher construal examples. When you are holistic, don’t because it’ll hamper your creativity.

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How you process and form concepts is your way. You can make jumps between ideas by traveling the construal level spectrum. Abstract links appear creative and concrete links appear obvious. Quite often, abstract thinking is about processing information at a high construal.

Now, let’s get to the neural organization. Neurons all over the brain are responsible for memory. However, a single memory has parts of it represented in different areas. All of them come together to represent an idea or memory. Because contexts and informational relationships are important, their representative neurons form attachments with other neurons. This network is pretty rich but access to the whole network is not easy and maybe beyond conscious control.

Traveling across the construal level helps in accessing a larger portion of the whole network. It lets you enter a new focal point in the network and fetch related ideas. This is a combination of parallel feedback- & feedforward-based processes. Jumping construals can reveal links to new ideas which can further make it easier to activate neural representations in a different context. The network allows information to travel and traveling information allows “creative jumps” in thinking.

The network of ideas is virtually infinite – A typical neuron connects to 10,000 other neurons and a typical idea connects to insert a random high number of ideas. You get to actively increase the connectivity by using your attention to travel between ideas and form relationships. So it is a layer of neural webs embedded with another layer of mental webs. It isn’t necessarily a 1 to 1 relationship between the 2 webs.

We don’t know enough about memory and neural representations yet. Things that complicate the issue are – memory can be stored across the brain in surprising ways, blocked/inhibited neurons can break a concept and even make it hard to remember, etc. Emotions can do this too, mood can affect how the network of information is accessed. It’s not easy to pin-point how these factors affect deliberate creative thinking but they give us some limitations.

An idea can be influenced by random sensory noise and random neural activity… and that can fuel a though process. This is an example of how ideas just click. Activities like spacing out from work facilitate such clicks. The brain’s default mode network (a network of brain regions that allow mind-wandering) plays a role in ideas clicking. The default mode network lets us make quicker and random jumps even when we aren’t truly aware of those jumps.

This is a crude framework that explains some types of creative thinking. Especially the deliberate & improvised creativity.

Learning and practice (basically repetition) often create robust and efficient neural circuits. These are easier to travel across so sometimes your practice and experience can prevent creative thinking. Specifically, practicing a well-defined process automates the process, creates a default tendency to use that process, and block other competing processes. This is a common problem for “experts” where their experience makes them un-creative and rigid in solving a problem – even though they are the best at solving it, they fail to solve related and novel problems. Their neurons default to their most optimized pathway blocking all other possible pathways. There is a word for it – the Einstellung effect.

Traveling across neural circuits and construals is influenced by a number of factors: background noise, the difficulty of processing, recent and past experiences, previous trains of thought, existing information in your environment, choice of words used to describe, probability, failure to send neural signals, types of neurochemicals which are dominating a circuit, etc.