Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of when I suggested that it might be done systematically. I hope that a pre-written list wouldn’t be necessary though, since I think such a list would also cause priming unless it were completely exhaustive.
Also, a separate idea I just thought of—although making a list as you suggest is a big step forward in generating ideas, I would speculate that every idea is still primed in some way, even if only by your previous thoughts. (For example, if I forget a thought that I wanted to consider more, often thinking about what I was thinking about right before will let me produce that thought again, even though the previous thoughts were ostensibly unrelated. Similarly, a category like “jobs” will tend to elicit different initial thoughts in different people, which would then prime their next thoughts, etc.) So I’m suggesting that making a list could perhaps be interpreted as “preparing many unrelated ways of priming yourself beforehand so that when you exhaust one search you can re-prime yourself from another starting point.” And then you would cover a much larger region of idea-space as a result—although I’m not sure how this different interpretation might help in the search for more ideas.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of when I suggested that it might be done systematically. I hope that a pre-written list wouldn’t be necessary though, since I think such a list would also cause priming unless it were completely exhaustive.
Also, a separate idea I just thought of—although making a list as you suggest is a big step forward in generating ideas, I would speculate that every idea is still primed in some way, even if only by your previous thoughts. (For example, if I forget a thought that I wanted to consider more, often thinking about what I was thinking about right before will let me produce that thought again, even though the previous thoughts were ostensibly unrelated. Similarly, a category like “jobs” will tend to elicit different initial thoughts in different people, which would then prime their next thoughts, etc.) So I’m suggesting that making a list could perhaps be interpreted as “preparing many unrelated ways of priming yourself beforehand so that when you exhaust one search you can re-prime yourself from another starting point.” And then you would cover a much larger region of idea-space as a result—although I’m not sure how this different interpretation might help in the search for more ideas.