Negative space — the deliberate absence of marks — is how sculptors and architects think, but almost nobody applies it to thinking itself. The medieval Persian physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna) argued in his 'Floating Man' thought experiment that you can only know what a mind truly contributes when you strip away all sensory input: suspend the body, the room, the problem's familiar framing, and what remains is the structure of thought itself. Modern creativity researchers would recognize this as the difference between first-order thinking (what do I know about this?) and second-order thinking (what is shaping the way I'm approaching this?). The practical move: before you generate solutions, spend two minutes identifying what you're *not* questioning — the constraints you've accepted without examination, the shape of the problem you inherited rather than chose. That invisible scaffolding is usually where the real work is.

Name one constraint in a current problem you've treated as fixed — is it actually fixed, or just inherited?

Drawing from Islamic philosophy / Avicennian epistemology — Ibn Sina (Avicenna)