If you read other people's ideas, that will reduce your ability to have novel ideas. Anything you produce after that will be an offshoot of their idea or something created in opposition to it.
Ideas are a meme: a mind-virus that effects your brain and permamently alters its structure.
There is no cure.
You cannot "unread" something, once it has been read.
The counterpoint, though, is that you must be formed in a tradition to produce anything of value.
You can have all the original ideas you want; most of them will be garbage.
Read widely and learn from those who came before, and you'll scope out the landscape and see where the pitfalls and possibilities lie.
Yes, this is true. For example:
I got the word "meme" and the concept of a cultural "virus" from the book "The Selfish Gene", by Richard Dawkins. (Yes, I own a copy of it and have read the whole thing.) I'd read that before memes had come into popularity online, so I still think in his broader definition.
The general idea is the groups rise and fall with the combined strength of their genes and memes; a combination of sexual selection and tradition, basically.
Being broadly well-read and rooted in a particular tradition can actually free up your mind to be more creative in a particular field or application.
You'll find yourself naturally cross-applying or daisy-chaining ideas together, that previously seemed unrelated, allowing you to create novel combinations.
This is the opposite use of reading, than looking toward a leading solution for a particular problem and allowing it to override all of your own solution ideas.
I think this is why women who subscribe to the concept of wifely submission often seem radical, reactionary, or even libertine in their ideas about other topics. Digging up the classics, rampant libertarianism, crunchy hippy gardening, etc.
They're rooted in this one, major aspect and they simply don't have to think about it, anymore. So, they are free to think about absolutely everything else and much hilarity ensues.
What do women think about, when they aren't jostling for power with their lover?
They're thinking about how to take over the world, of course.
Every "new" idea is actually just a novel combination of very many old ideas. By working through one or several intellectual traditions, one can find the possible branching points and tie-ins with other threads of thought. That's where new branches emerge.
This is the best definition of "meme". Memes are the mental building blocks of culture, and culture is what makes humanity so flexible in adapting to new challenges and environments.
