سخن سردبیر
عنوان مقاله English
نویسنده English
New or fresh is something or someone that is different from existing and known objects or people; for example, new poetry is poetry that is different from existing poems and poems that people are accustomed to. Therefore, innovation is providing something that is different compared to mental structures resulting from habit. In other words, innovation means distancing from habit.
But not every kind of distancing from habit and existing mental patterns can be considered real innovation; rather, this distancing must be to the extent that it attracts attention. If we want to express this distance or difference in scientific language, we should say that innovation means deviating from existing mental patterns.
Today, the concept of "new" plays a very important role in cognitive psychology; but its creation dates back to the period before the "information processing" period, that is, to the period of cognitivism, which can be seen in the works of Donald Alding Hebb, a famous Canadian theorist and others. In information processing theory, "new" is used in the sense of "providing a mass of information." The concept of new can be expressed very simply without the help of technical words that are often incomprehensible to ordinary people. The living environment of people is constantly changing, and this change itself has its own degrees. One of the roles of the human cognitive system, the cerebral cortex, is to store in memory the traces of information presented and useful for adapting to the environment. Memory, in addition to storing traces of incoming information, identifying them in time, and thus providing memories, can create new mental structures by integrating existing information. This is where we are talking about concepts, prototypes, schemas, perceptions, etc., which are all products of learning. Therefore, any information that enters the cognitive system is immediately processed by comparing it with the mental structures present in it; that is, the information entered into the cortex, the brain, is immediately compared with the memories present in it and examined. The information that enters the mind in this way is new or fresh in itself; Because it is an event that has not left any traces before, but is effective for the first time, this information is not necessarily such that it can be said to be "completely new" or to bring innovation. If this information is very similar to existing structures, it will not be processed as new information. On the contrary, if it is more or less distant from existing mental structures and is not completely coupled with them, then it will have the following characteristics.
1. It will leave significant traces and will be considered innovation.
2. It will force the specific abilities of the mind to activate in order to process it and push the organism towards solving the problem it is facing.
It will change the mental structures themselves and, as a result of this change, it will adapt to information of the same type that enters the mind.
The mechanisms mentioned, especially the change and adaptation mentioned in paragraph 3, correspond to what the Swiss cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget called assimilation and adaptation. According to Piaget, absorption means introjection and adaptation means extrajection. In absorption, the child places new experiences into existing schemas and patterns; for example, the pattern of grasping or sucking is present in the child from birth. The child grasps everything and sucks everything until he finally learns to grasp useful objects and sucks the mother's breast or a bottle. In adaptation, the child adapts himself to the outside world; for example, he takes his hand out of the bed rails and grabs an out-of-reach toy and wants to bring it into the bed. At an early age, the child does this very clumsily and may want to force the toy into his bed, but over time he understands how to turn his hand so that the toy does not get caught between the bed rails.
Innovation can also be used as a basis for creativity; Because creativity has been defined as: "The ability to produce new works by applying new behaviors and finding new solutions to a problem. Those who can find existing and predetermined solutions to the most difficult problems in mathematics, physics, chemistry, algebra, geometry, and even biological problems are not considered creative or innovative. Creative is someone who provides unusual, predetermined, and innovative solutions. Having ordinary solutions and constantly following them causes a person not to see new solutions and lacks initiative. Of course, ordinary solutions may be very effective in life; because not having ready-made methods to apply to common problems can reduce efficiency to a minimum. For example, if a person wanted to wash his face every time he had to go back to basic principles, test his thoughts on whether this was right or wrong, and make sure again that using soap and water is the best way to remove dirt from the face, life would be difficult; Therefore, in most everyday problems, the usual solution still works best, but it is not always the case, and the difficulty lies in finding the right solution when you pause and look at the problem from a new perspective, that is, abandoning the existing solution and looking for a better one, and in fact, innovating.
But abandoning or changing an existing solution is not always easy, even when the need for change arises. It is especially difficult to change an existing solution if it has been used for a long time. According to laboratory research, people are less likely to abandon a solution that has been approved and look for a new one, even if they feel that it has been working for a long time.
