"I detected a pattern suggesting that something everyone else had overlooked often became the basis of an inventive solution,” he says. This revelation led McCaffrey to study aspects of human perception and cognition that inhibit our noticing obscure features. “I felt that if I could understand why people overlook certain things, then develop techniques for them to notice much more readily what they were overlooking, I might have a chance to improve creativity.”
Psychologists use the term “functional fixedness” to describe the first mental obstacle McCaffrey investigated. It explains, for example, how one person finding burrs stuck to his sweater will typically say, “Ugh, a burr,” while another might say, “Hmmm, two things lightly fastened together. I think I’ll invent Velcro!”
The first view is clouded by focusing on an object’s typical function. To overcome functional fixedness, McCaffrey sought a way to teach people to reinterpret known information about common objects.”
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