Creativity Archives - Page 4 of 5

Routine: the Key to Creativity

March 20, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 3 Comments

At least six days a week for the past year, I have gone for a morning walk in my neighborhood. I never deviate from the route, and 95% of the time, I take bouncy music along via my iPod. I can do this walk almost completely on autopilot. There are a couple of street crossings where I have to check for traffic, and the pavement has a few dangerous lips I’ve stubbed my toes on. But I’ve since trained myself to walk heel-toe to lessen the risk of tripping.

Because my conscious attention isn’t focused on what I’m doing, my mind is free to wander. And wander it does! I get my best ideas during my morning walk. Solutions to puzzles or problems bubble up to the surface. Patterns get detected. Connections get made. It’s rare that I don’t have at least one “Aha!” moment while I’m walking.

That’s no surprise, since the conditions are perfect for generating creative insight. I’m not trying to take credit for this, since I didn’t set this situation up intentionally. In fact, I started this particular walking routine primarily for health reasons. Initially, the usual mind chatter occupied my thoughts throughout most of my walk. But over time and with increased repetition, that began to change.

Now, even if there’s something mundane or annoying on my mind when I start out, my brain quickly lets it go and kicks into a different gear. I don’t have to do anything to make this happen. That’s the beauty and wonder of a routine like this. I don’t need to exert any effort to get my brain to come up with ideas or “be creative.” All I have to do is clip the iPod to my belt, put on my jacket, head out the door, and take the same walk I’ve been taking nearly every day for the past year.

Check out poetdonald’s comment on my previous post to get someone else’s experience of routine opening the door to creativity. (And thanks again, Don.)

Creative Thinking = Making Connections

March 17, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 3 Comments

Q: Do you have to get out of the box in order to think outside the box?*

Popular wisdom has it that in order to think creatively—think outside the box, that is—we need to trick ourselves. Or at least we need to apply some special technique or exercise to get our stodgy old brains to see things from a different perspective.

For the most part, this is a counterproductive waste of time.

If we want to be creative or think creatively, we don’t need to manipulate or play games with our brains. We just need to get out of their way and let them do what they already know how to do.

The problem is that we identify with the slow, energy-sucking conscious part of our brain and not with the quick, energy-efficient unconscious part that sees patterns and makes connections outside of our awareness. Most of the action in terms of problem-solving, insight, and creative thinking actually takes place in the unconscious, which then serves up its ideas to our consciousness. It’s an amazingly wonderful arrangement that’s already in place.

The best thing we can do to help this process along is exactly the opposite of what’s usually recommended. Don’t change routines. Don’t take a new route to work. Don’t try a change of scene. Don’t go to a different café or coffee shop. Don’t try to think about things in a different way.

In terms of freeing our minds for creativity and creative insights, the more aspects of our lives we can turn into routines, the better. The less attention we have to put on things that don’t really matter, the more attention our brains can devote to problem-solving and idea-generating.

This is from an article by painter Robert Genn:

Choreographer Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit describes her morning routine of rising early and going through the same morning rituals; same coffee, same bun. She puts on the same leotards, goes down the same elevator to the same street corner, puts her same arm up in the air and gets into the first cab that comes along.

By the time she gets to the studio she has made no significant decisions. Stepping out onto the dance floor, her dancers await. It’s eight in the morning and her first decision is yet to come. It will be a creative one.

Genn has some suggestions for streamlining routine activities, such as:

Simplify morning rituals.

Keep regular habits by day and week.
Work in a space unsullied by impedimenta.
Use a day-timer—plan your work; work your plan.
Always ask—”Is this action necessary?”
Be businesslike—discourage time-wasters and interlopers.
Be efficient and mindful of wasted motion in your space.
As far as possible, get stuff delivered and taken away.
Be modern—pay bills, bank, book flights, etc., online.

Genn and Tharp have to be creative almost every day. They aren’t trying to get out of the box. They recognize that the box helps them be creative. It keeps them out of their brain’s way.

I’ve experienced the benefits of getting out of my brain’s way over and over and over again. My unconscious has connected some dots that didn’t even seem to exist in the same domains. I don’t take credit for those insights and ideas. My conscious brain didn’t come up with them. But I take credit for maintaining routines and practices that free my brain do its thing. I take credit for loosening the reins.

*A: You can’t actually get outside the box, so there’s no point in trying to think outside it.

Imagination

March 15, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The Place Where Dreams Are Born

January 10, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

To Wander or Not to Wander, Is That the Question?

April 14, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

A few years ago, a study by Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth made headlines—at least in the cognitive neuroscience world—by reporting two findings. One is that people tend to zone out nearly 50% of the time. The other is that “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

It should be noted that Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, specializes in affective forecasting—the ability to predict how people will feel in the future. He is the author of Stumbling on Happiness, which demonstrates that we actually have no idea how we’ll feel in the future, in spite of our firm convictions to the contrary.

Gilbert, then, is interested in studying what makes us happy. His research with Killingsworth consisted of interrupting people multiple times a day to ask them what they were doing and how happy they were when they were doing it. One of the things people reported being unhappy about was mind-wandering. (They reported being happiest when they were making love, exercising, or engaging in conversation.)

It seems that the most consistent response to this study, immediately following expressions of dismay, has been to try to get us to be more “in the moment”—in other words, to practice mindfulness. I’m a big fan of mindfulness, but I think there’s more to mind-wandering than whether or not it makes us happy. As I wrote about in an earlier post, people who pursue meaning in their lives rather than happiness aren’t necessarily happy, either. But they report being more satisfied.

As it turns out there are a few benefits associated with mind-wandering. One is that we can mentally escape from boring or unpleasant tasks or situations. An extreme example of mental escape was described by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning as to how some prisoners in the concentration camps were able to survive better than others:

Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature. …

The intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past. When given free rein, his imagination played with past events, often not important ones, but minor happenings and trifling things. His nostalgic memory glorified them and they assumed a strange character….

As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances.

Another benefit of mind-wandering is increased creativity. Neuroscientists have determined that our brains have a “default network” that is activated when our minds are free to wander. When our attention is focused on a task, on the other hand, our executive network is activated to oversee the operation. But sometimes when our minds are wandering both of these networks are active. Jonathan Schooler and Jonathan Smallwood, both of UC Santa Barbara, theorize that both networks are working on agendas beyond the immediate task—which could explain why people whose minds wander score higher on tests of creativity.

Eric Klinger, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota believes mind wandering “serves as a kind of reminder mechanism, thereby increasing the likelihood that other goal pursuits will remain intact and not get lost in the shuffle of pursuing many goals.” According to Dr. Klinger, our mind wandering gives us an evolutionary advantage.

So we probably shouldn’t rush to judgment and try to stop our minds from wandering in an attempt to make ourselves happier. Nor should we give our minds free rein to wander at will. Mind-wandering is something to be aware of. To appreciate. And to curb when it’s more appropriate to focus on the task at hand.

It isn’t as if we could put an end to our mind-wandering, anyway. We just need to learn when to go with the flow and when to direct the flow, which may be one more thing that is easier said than done.

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