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Creativity: It Isn’t All in Your Head

September 25, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

creative-brain

Creativity is the ability to see what already exists in a new light, to think of new ideas, and to make new things.

If whatever has been created (the new idea or object) is widely accepted (valued) in the field within which it was generated, it is called Big C creativity. Creative results that don’t meet both of those criteria are referred to as Little C creativity.

The fact that we can imagine something does not prove that it is possible. —Julian Baggini, The Ego Trick

Maybe your creative endeavors have—or will—generate widespread acceptance and approval; maybe not.

You don’t have to aim for Big C creativity, but if you aren’t engaging in Little C creativity, you’re unlikely to create anything big. And you might also be depriving yourself of a more enjoyable and satisfying life.

Even though personal creativity may not lead to fame and fortune, it can do something that from the individual’s point of view is even more important: make day-to-day experiences more vivid, more enjoyable more rewarding. When we live creatively, boredom is banished and every moment holds the promise of a fresh discovery. Whether or not these discoveries enrich the world beyond our personal lives, living creatively links us with the process of evolution. —Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

What Does It Take to Be Creative?

Are creative people different in some fundamental way from other people? Do they have exceptional intelligence? Are they more right-brained? Do they tend to be messy, unfocused, disorganized, and impractical? Are all creative people artistic? Highly talented in some particular area? Are they unconventional? Do they feel things more deeply? Do they have more vivid imaginations? Do they know how to think outside the box?

These questions are common, because we tend to think of people as being either creative or non-creative. End of story. But even the most diehard “non-creative” person will occasionally, sometimes accidentally, come up with a fresh insight. And even the most relentlessly “creative” person will run out of ideas from time to time. Regardless of personality, background, talent, or experience, just about anyone can get better at being creative because anyone can learn how the creative process works.

How Does the Creative Process Work?

Depending on who you ask, the creative process has anywhere from three to ten steps, maybe more. What it all boils down to is using the right part of the brain at the right time. In fact, the creative process isn’t significantly different from problem-solving—and a case can even be made that the way to approach art is as problem-solving.

Practicing problem solving in art projects gets the mind working, thinking and open to solutions not before considered. If the student can think about an “art problem” in new ways, then they not only build skills for the art room, but they train their minds to think in a problem-solving mode. —artist Valerie Mann, speaking at the University of Michigan School of Social Work

Find or identify a problem to solve and create an intention to solve it. This involves using both focused and unfocused attention. (What’s the difference between trying to solve a problem and trying to find a problem to solve?)
Immerse yourself in it. Grapple with it. Obtain the knowledge or information you need to have in order to solve it (focused attention/knowledge loading). Choreographer Twyla Tharp has a good exercise for this step. Write down 20 things you’ll need to know in order to be able to solve the problem.
Divert your attention. Step away from the problem to an unrelated activity (unfocused attention/System 1) to allow your unconscious to process the problem and arrive at a solution. You could turn to a repetitive task, take a walk, or listen to some music.
Fine tune and implement the solution.

Each experience with the creative process expands your mental model, which increases your creative possibilities. To get the greatest benefit, though, you need to take action (Step 4). We are embodied beings, and what we do has more of an effect on our mental model than what we think.

Counterintuitive Creativity Tips

Creativity involves both parts of the brain—the conscious and the unconscious. The trick, if there is one, is to know which type of thinking to use when. Sometimes you need to apply focused (conscious) attention, which is linear, logical, effortful, and slow. At other times you need unfocused (System 1/unconscious) attention, which is associative, non-logical, runs in the background, and is fast. Attempting to sustain focused attention is counterproductive.

New ideas are not spun from thin air. Creativity involves synthesizing, remixing, and re-envisioning what already exists.

Routines and habits are not by their nature creativity killers. They can actually increase your creative thinking by freeing up System 2 attention. The only real creativity killers are tunnel vision and inflexibility.

Constraints can be beneficial to creativity as long as you know they’re there.

If you want a brain that can think more complex thoughts and solve more complex problems, get in the habit of learning new things. And move!

Physical activity is cognitive candy. Exercise stimulates one of the brain’s most powerful growth factors, BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). According to Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey, “It keeps [existing] neurons young and healthy, and makes them more ready to connect with one another. It also encourages neurogenesis—the creation of new cells.” The cells most sensitive to this are in the hippocampus, inside the very regions deeply involved in human cognition. —John Medina, Brain Rules

As John Cleese says, Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating. In daily life, all over the world, we are faced with many problems, large and small. Why not operate on them creatively—and find some new ones to solve while we’re at it?

Character or Circumstances: Which Factor Is Stronger?

August 14, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

When it comes to determining how a person is likely to act or react at any given time, which factor plays a bigger role: personal character or the situation the person is in?

Research can be found that supports both sides, but I think we intuitively believe character plays the bigger role. We’re pretty sure we know how we would react even in situations we’ve never experienced because we believe we know who we are. And we behave consistently often enough that this belief isn’t usually tested or threatened. Feeling certain we know what we would do leads to many of the critical judgments we make about other people’s behavior.

On the other hand, classic experiments like Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment and Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments indicate that in some situations, ordinary people who would not otherwise do so are capable of behaving very badly toward their fellow humans. There has also been quite a bit of research on the effect of our environment on what we think and feel and the way we act. So before passing judgment on others, it has been suggested, we should try to “walk a mile in their shoes.”

This fascinating topic is addressed in one chapter of philosopher Julian Baggini’s book, The Ego Trick, which is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.

The answer to the question of which plays a bigger role, character or situation is, not surprisingly, it depends.

When someone’s character is variable, the situation plays a bigger role in determining action. But when someone’s character is consistent, the situation plays a lesser role.

It’s more interesting than that, however.

Passive or Active

Some of our character traits are passive: they are “the set of dispositions we just happen to have as a result of our genes, upbringing and experience, without any particular effort on our own part.”

And some of our character traits are active: they are “the set of dispositions that we have because we’ve worked on developing them. To use a philosophical term of art, dispositions are active if they are the result of an individual’s attempts at self-constitution, to build who they are.”

As Baggini states, you can’t tell from the trait whether it’s passive or active. Someone who behaves in an extraverted manner may have had that tendency all along, which would make the trait passive. Or a person with a tendency toward introversion may have decided to try to become more extraverted, in which case their extraversion would be considered an active trait. He also says that “in real life, traits are never purely active or passive. Rather, they tend to greater activeness the more they reflect deliberate efforts to mould our own behaviours.”

Variable or Consistent

He further distinguishes passive traits as either variable or constant across situations, and he does the same with active traits. This leads to four trait categories:

passive and variable
passive and constant
active and variable
active and constant

All of us have traits in each of those categories. All of us are affected to one degree or another by the situations we’re in. However, the more our traits lean toward the passive and the variable, the more likely we are to be affected by situations. And the more our traits lean toward the active and the constant, the less likely we are to be affected by situations.

Results of behavior studies indicate that the majority of people behave differently across different situations and only a minority behaves consistently.

The evidence is that unless you try to cultivate traits, whether you display them will depend more on circumstances than on you. So consistency in character is something to be created; it does not arise organically.

As philosopher Christine Korsgaard says:

Beliefs and desires you have actively arrived at are more truly your own than those which have simply arisen in you.

The Takeaway

If you want to be less at the effect of your circumstances, one way to do that is to make a deliberate effort to cultivate those character traits you value.

Don’t be entirely surprised when your behavior is “out of character.”

And don’t be so sure you would behave differently in a given situation than other people who are in it are behaving.

Grateful for My Brain: a 2014 Year-End Review

January 5, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 5 Comments

Doing a year-end review has always been one of those things that seem like a good idea but which I never quite get around to. This past year was unique in a number of ways, and so I decided—almost on the spur of the moment—that it would be prudent and productive to spend some time evaluating what happened.

I’m a huge fan of list-making, so instead of using any of the many different tools, processes, and resources available, I conducted my review in the form of making several lists. This turned out to be so helpful that I’ve already put it on my calendar to do again at the end of 2015.

Here are my list headings:

What I accomplished

This was by far the longest of my lists. Because I have a tendency to dismiss what I have done in order to berate myself for what has yet to be done, making this list helped me stop and smell the roses a bit. It gave me greater perspective on the multiple endeavors I’ve been engaged in. It also showed me the areas where my attention was focused—and the areas where it wasn’t.

What I didn’t anticipate

There’s no question that this was the most useful of my lists. The more than two dozen things I hadn’t anticipated—roughly half positive and half negative—not only had a significant effect on my life in general and what I was able to accomplish, they also provide concrete evidence that I can’t predict the future no matter how much my brain wants me to believe I can. We can—and should—plan ahead, but it’s important to remember that getting from here to there is rarely a straight line. Randomness and luck often play a larger role in both process and outcome than we’d like to acknowledge.

What worked

It was good to recognize what I’m doing right so I can keep doing more of that.

What didn’t/doesn’t work

It was also good to recognize mistakes I’ve made, opportunities I’ve missed, or areas that need major or minor tweaking.

What I’m grateful for

In addition to many other things—and people—I’m grateful for my amazing brain (yours is equally amazing, of course) and all the fantastic tricks it can do. Read to the end to see what my brain did with the material from my year-end review.

What I learned

One thing I learned is that I have a lot more to learn! But it was illuminating to see how much more I know now than I knew at the beginning of last year. It gives me hope and also some confidence in the face of the always uncertain future. Here’s actual evidence that I figured out how to do quite a few new things, so it’s likely I’ll be able to figure out how to do more things I don’t yet know how to do.

What I’m not satisfied with or what needs more attention

This list helped me focus on where to put my attention now. It was the last 2014 list, which made it relatively easy to complete and included a couple of surprises. I’m pretty sure it would have been more difficult to hone in on these things if I had started with this category, and I might not have seen things as clearly.

I created just two lists for 2015:

What I want to have happen this year

15 things that are sort of a hodgepodge of goals, intentions, and hopes. This list and the list of what I’m not satisfied with are the foundation of my short-range (3-6 months) planning process.

4 habits I want to keep; 4 habits I want to improve or change; 4 habits I want to start

Again, it was useful to identify what I’m doing that’s working before listing what I want to change (what isn’t working so well). I limited each category to 4 to keep it manageable. A limit of 3 might be even better.

I worked on these lists in bursts of time over several days, so the content was on my mind—and in my brain—throughout that period. As the brain tends to do, mine started looking for solutions for some of the bigger problems I’d identified. And not just during the day! One very long night, I was unable to fall asleep because I couldn’t stop trying to figure everything out logically (as illogical as I knew it was to be doing that in the middle of the night—or maybe ever).

Then, in one of those sudden moments of clarity I’ve come to know and love, the solution to one of the problems just showed up (thank you, System 1!), and as soon as it did, I realized that particular solution also took care of two other problems. I hadn’t even seen the three things as being connected. At that point, I immediately fell asleep, only to be awakened by the alarm clock an hour and a half later.

In the clear light of another day, and after a decent night’s sleep, the solution that appeared in the wee hours that morning seems both obvious and elegant. But had I not laid the groundwork for it by focusing my attention on all these areas of my life, I doubt I’d even have been able to identify the problems. And even if I had identified them, I’d probably be trying to find individual solutions for each of them—using the slow, logical part of my brain.

The moral of the story (which I should have tattooed somewhere on my body, sans parenthetical expressions and asides): Use System 2—the conscious part of your brain—to lay the groundwork, and then give System 1 an opportunity to do its thing (which includes seeing patterns, making connections, and putting the pieces together) to come up with a creative solution System 2 can only stand back, figuratively speaking, and admire.

Be Good to Your Brain

December 4, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Want to stay mentally sharp? There are all kinds of things you can do: listen to music, read a book, gaze at a building, help someone out, get involved in a hobby.

These activities not only make you feel good, they also happen to be very good for your brain in a variety of different ways.

Click on the links to read the full articles.

Listening to music benefits the brain in 8 surprising ways.

Playing a musical instrument benefits your brain even more by giving it an excellent “full-body” workout.

Looking at buildings designed for contemplation may produce the same health benefits provided by meditation—and with less effort.

Dancing, getting some hobbies, and reading (among other things) all help to keep your brain young.

Speaking of reading, ditching the e-reader once in a while and reading an actual book can increase your comprehension, make you more empathetic, and even improve your sleep.

No matter how old you are, learning a new language improves gray matter density and white matter integrity.

Finally, giving really is better than receiving—for you and for your brain.

Be good to your brain and your brain will continue being good to you!

What’s the Condition of Your Metacognition?

August 17, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

Metacognition is the awareness of our own thought process and the ability to make judgments about our thoughts. Another way to describe it is “thinking about thinking.” Although this is an abstract concept it has very practical implications.

Metacognition is how we identify our limitations and compensate for them. –Stephen M. Fleming, Scientific American Mind

In order to identify our limitations (as well as our strengths), we need to be able to assess them objectively, yet it can be difficult to be objective about ourselves. We have a tendency to feel confident about many things, but often that confidence is unwarranted. It’s part of the human condition. And, as Dan Ariely has said, “Thinking is difficult and sometimes unpleasant.”

Some of us have better metacognitive skills than others, and metacognition can be impaired as a result of mental illness or substance abuse. But most of us can develop the ability to observe and reflect upon our thinking. We can get better at metacognition.

One way to do this is to maintain an attitude of curiosity. Notice when your assessments turn out to be accurate and when they don’t. You’re likely to find that your thinking is more accurate in some areas than in others, which is the case for most people. If you begin to recognize some patterns, you’ll have a better idea of when your confidence is justified and when it isn’t. It’s much easier to be objective—as opposed to judgmental—when we’re able to be curious about everything that’s happening.

We all analyze our inner thoughts and feelings, but some of us feel anxious about what we might discover about ourselves while others feel intrigued and fascinated about ourselves. –Alain Morin, Science & Consciousness Review

Meditation is another means of developing insight into your thinking process. Regular meditation leads to changes in the brain that seem to be linked to metacognitive abilities.

Metacognition is one of the ways in which we come to know ourselves. The better we know ourselves, the likelier we are to make sound decisions, understand and connect with other people, and identify and achieve meaningful goals.

The practice of self-observation begins with a desire and resolution on your part: “I want to know what really is, regardless of how I prefer things to be.” –Charles Tart, Waking Up