Reading and creating your own!?

Question

How does reading stimulate the mind to become creative? For example, how does reading other people's discoveries or ideas in biology or chemistry textbooks help you create your own ideas? after all, what we are doing is just taking other people's ideas and not creating our own.

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

well, Aristotle read Plato, and Galelio read Aristotle, and look what kind of stuff he did

Answer 2

Robert: The brain is actually very complicated and only mildly understood. To answer your question scientifically, as you read, solve, and do you learn. Learning is the consequence of new nueral pathways being created in the mind, which interconnect to existing nueral pathways. You brain can be likened to a switching network, where the new networks added become part of the whole. Similar to the Borg idea from Star Trek which is not that far fetched. Only not practical yet. In addition to the new networks existing ones become modified. Stimulation of these networks happens through reading and the existing networks associate, which can commonly lead to creative ideas. Now you may have a new idea. This is possible. Through reasoning your brain will try and set a path to realization of that idea, by prompting you to test your rationale through experimentation. Your experimentation may not be based on anyone's theory or idea. Hence it is new.

Answer 3

Let us see. Einstein read Newton and saw that Newton's laws did not fully explain gravity.

Most ideas are built on what has gone before, or are suggested by findings made in the past.