Can Creativity Be Increased?

Increase Your Creativity

There is strong evidence that certain strategies definitely increase creative output. These strategies include…

Strategy 1. Embrace Your Problems
One of the most fundamental skills of creativity is the ability to recognize an opportunity and seize it. You have countless opportunities to expand your creative thinking skills. Such opportunities present themselves daily at home, while driving to work, during meetings or lunch – or while just hanging out with friends. There’s really no shortage of opportunities to refine and develop your creativity. The most basic approach is to recognize that a problem  may actually be a golden opportunity for a creative explosion – and seize the moment.

Strategy 2. Challenge Your Creativity Assumptions
It’s natural and necessary to make assumptions about the reality of our everyday world. We would otherwise spend all of our waking hours performing unnecessary mental analyzes of ordinary things. As a result, many times we see only what we expect to see. Our analysis of a situation or a problem is based entirely on assumptions based on our past experience or accepted knowledge. Plus assumptions can become so entrenched it doesn’t cross our mind to challenge them.

A problem may arise simply because we perceive a situation or condition through a set of false assumptions preventing clear thinking. Challenging your assumptions is an important component of creativity. This allows you to look beyond what is obvious or already accepted. And it leads straight to the creative breakthroughs you’re looking for.

Truly creative people in all fields of interest tend to automatically challenge both their own assumptions, and the commonly accepted knowledge about a problem. This mental attitude is the true source of all of the world’s great inventions and businesses. The moment you choose to challenge one of your assumptions as possibly untrue or incomplete,” you are on the way to discovering something new and different.

Strategy 3. Take Some Creativity Risks
A willingness to take risks is at the very heart of creativity. No creative person succeeds without first failing – as failures are part of the process of testing one’s assumptions. There is simply no creativity without failure.

To experience major creative breakthroughs, it’s important to become comfortable taking risks. Each failure you encounter will actually supercharge your creativity by generating new information. If you’re unwilling to take risks and deal with what ordinary people call failure, then you cannot expect to become a great creative thinker.

Modern neuroscience has shown that our brains are literally rewired each time we learn something new by making a mistake. The brain is designed to learn through the trial and error process.

Strategy 4. Use Alternative Thinking
To come up with a creative idea, you will often need a new vantage point. Creating a new solution to an existing problem, for example, may require looking at the problem from a fresh perspective.

There are many tools used by creative thinkers to create such a fresh perspective, including: Brainstorming, MESV creative visualization, and various other means of considering the problem from a fresh vantage point.

Additionally, a great way to kick start your creativity is to look at your problem from the vantage point of another profession. If you are a mechanical engineer, for example, how would an architect view your problem? Or if you are a product designer, how would an interior decorator approach your problem? This approach can lead to some remarkable creative breakthroughs.

Strategy 5. Accept Ambiguity
Many people prefer that everything be clear and unambiguous. They are uncomfortable with anything that seems vague, or could have more than one meaning or application. As a result they tend to be rigid, highly predictable thinkers.

A touch of ambiguous thinking during the idea generation stage of the creative process has the power to bring out genius-level ideas. People who can think ambiguously are fluid and flexible thinkers. The ability to think ambiguously can yield amazing creative insights. This is ability is experienced (and built) when you indulge in wordplay or humour.

Strategy 6. Expand Your Vision
An excellent way to build your creative muscles is to read and explore outside your normal area of interest. This can be especially useful when you are struggling to solve a creative problem.

Strategy 7. Massage your brainwaves
Creative thinking best occurs when your brain is in certain states called alpha and theta. You are in an alpha/theta state when your brain is producing a predominance of slower brain-waves, as opposed to the faster beta brain-waves associated with normal waking consciousness.

Alpha /theta brain-waves are the reason many people have creative ah-ha experiences during a nap, a stroll, or some other mentally-relaxing activity. But consciously entering into an alpha/theta state can be a challenge. Meditators spend years learning to initiate this state on will, but modern technology has introduced a much faster method of building alpha/theta expertise – Self Growth Planet. Be sure to check it out – your creativity will never be the same. Incidentally, a great side benefit of entering into the alpha/theta brain-wave state is virtually instant stress reduction.

Supercharge Your Brain
The one thing that robs you of creative energy more than anything else is stress. Bust your stress and you will raise your IQ, develop clear mental focus, study and learn better, and increase your creative output.  Get Creative

Posted by Jill Ammon-Wexler
Amazing Solutions

Daydreaming – The Ultimate Problem Solving Mode?

A new University of British Columbia study finds that our brains are much more active when we daydream than previously thought.

The study found that activity in numerous brain regions increases when our minds wander. It also found that brain areas associated with complex problem-solving – previously thought to be dormant when we – are in fact highly active during daydreaming episodes.

“Mind wandering (and daydreaming) is typically associated with negative things like laziness or inattentiveness,” says lead author, Professor Kalina Christoff, UBC Dept. of Psychology. “But this study shows our brains are very active when we daydream – much more active than when we focus on routine tasks.”

Subjects were placed inside an fMRI scanner, where they performed a simple routine task of pushing a button when numbers appeared on a screen. The researchers tracked subjects’ attentiveness moment-to-moment through brain scans, subjective reports from subjects, and by tracking their performance on the task.

The findings suggest that daydreaming – which can occupy as much as one third of our waking lives – is an important cognitive state where we may unconsciously turn our attention from immediate tasks to sort through important problems in our lives.

Until now, the brain’s “default network” – which is linked to easy, routine mental activity and includes the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), the posterior cingulate cortex and the temporoparietal junction – was the only part of the brain thought to be active when our minds wander.

However, the study finds that the brain’s “executive network” – associated with high-level, complex problem-solving and including the lateral PFC and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex – also becomes activated when we daydream.

“This is a surprising finding, that these two brain networks are activated in parallel,” says Christoff. “Until now, scientists have thought they operated on an either-or basis – when one was activated, the other was thought to be dormant.” The less subjects were aware that their mind was wandering, the more both networks were activated.

The quantity and quality of brain activity suggests that people struggling to solve complicated problems might be better off switching to a simpler task and letting their mind wander.

“When you daydream, you may not be achieving your immediate goal – say reading a book or paying attention in class – but your mind may be taking that time to address more important questions in your life, such as advancing your career or personal relationships,” says Christoff.

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Source: ScienceDaily

Why Sleep is the Best Problem Solver

Research by  leading sleep expert Dr. S. Mednickat the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine suggests that Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep enhances creative problem solving more than any other sleep or waking state.

Dr. Mednickat found that for creative problems you’ve already been working on, the passage of time is often enough to find solutions. But for new problems, only REM sleep seems to enhance your creativity. Mednick feels REM sleep does this by stimulating the creation of the associative networks that allow your brain to make new and useful associations between unrelated ideas.

The study participants were shown several groups of three words (for example: cookie, heart, sixteen) and asked to find a fourth word that could be associated to all three words (sweet, in this instance). 

Participants were tested in the morning, and again in the afternoon after either a nap with REM sleep, one without REM sleep, or a quiet rest period. The importance of REM sleep to creative problem solving was obvious: Unlike the non-REM and quiet rest groups, the REM sleep group improved by almost 40 percent over their morning performances.

And REM sleep is apparently also connected to memory. Dr. Dennis McGinty of the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Administration Healthcare System has conducted research that has clearly established that REM sleep deprivation reduces cell proliferation in the part of the forebrain that contributes to long-term memory.

According to avid dream researcher Bradley Thompson, perhaps the most remarkable problem solving comes from what is called lucid dreaming – actually seeming to wake up during your REM sleep. During a lucid dream you can actually direct your dream experience, and recall it all when you awaken. The creative problem-solving results can be remarkable.

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