Ever wondered how our brain's networks conspire to spark that brilliant idea just as you're about to fall asleep? Prepare to illuminate the shadowy corners of your mind with a simple technique for harmonizing the different brain networks involved in creativity. Toss out the conventional playbook and learn to indulge in a mental snack break that can lead to your next big idea.
Ever wondered how our brain's networks conspire to spark that brilliant idea just as you're about to fall asleep? Prepare to illuminate the shadowy corners of your mind with a simple technique for harmonizing the different brain networks involved in creativity. Toss out the conventional playbook and learn to indulge in a mental snack break that can lead to your next big idea.
Perhaps you've come here because you feel as though you are a particularly creative person and an excellent creative problem solver already and simply want to up your game. Or perhaps you're here today because you don't feel as though you're a particularly creative person or a particularly great creative problem solver and you want to become one. Either way, I'm going to give you a few simple steps to boost your creativity, including the use of something called an analogous abstraction, which sounds, I know, like some kind of bodily sore, but actually it's a simple, easy mental technique for elevating your creativity and problem solving in any situation. Now, regardless of whether you're here because you feel as though you're already very creative or because you fear that you're not, one thing that everyone has to understand about creativity is that, while some people certainly are more creative and better creative problem solvers than others, it is nevertheless not simply an innate talent. Creativity is a learned and practiced skill, and as we learn more about the brain, we're learning more and more ways to tap into and maximize creative networks.
Steve:One thing I want to do at first, though, is to dispel a myth While it is true that the brain has two hemispheres and that they broadly serve some different functions for our thinking. It is not true that one side is the purely creative side and one side is the analytic side. The lore goes that the left side of the brain is strictly analytic it's about all of our serious, conscious, deliberate thought While the right side of the brain is some kind of hippie artist finger painter that wafts around in pure creative expression. The truth is that the best creativity always happens when both sides of the brain are in communication with one another. That varies a little bit depending upon the nature of the creative task. If it's more of a purely creative task, it might indeed be a little bit more right side heavy, and if it's a more creative, problem solving task that involves analysis and other kinds of intellectual thought, it might be a little more left brain heavy. But in both cases creativity actually happens through communication between both hemispheres of the brain.
Steve:Now, if you want to know how to be more creative, what you want to understand is that there are actually three neural networks that are involved in creativity. The first of those networks is the Executive Attention Network. The Executive Attention Network is for deliberate, conscious intellectual thought, when you are trying to reason your way through something logically, using evidence, creating argument and so forth. That is where your Executive Attention Network is at work. The second network that is active during creativity is the Salience Network. The Salience Network is what your brain uses to determine what's interesting to it and what is not, and therefore what is relevant to the problem that you're facing and what is not relevant to the problem you're facing, or what is worth thinking about overall and not worth thinking about overall. For example, my Salience Network unfortunately has a passionate interest in the New York Giants, which means that every football season I have to sit through all of their games, which is an experience that typically ends in some kind of frustration or misery. Fortunately for most of you, your Salience Networks have not cursed you with that kind of interest in the New York Giants. So the first two networks again are the Executive Attention Network, which is our conscious, deliberate thought, and the Salience Network, which is determining what's interesting or worth thinking about or not.
Steve:The final network that's involved in creativity, which is the one most important for today's discussion, is what's called the Default Mode Network, while your Executive Attention Network is something that you control more deliberately and can switch on and off as you choose to think about certain things or not. Your Default Mode Network is kind of always running in the background, and what your Default Mode Network does is it creates subconscious connections and patterns between things that otherwise wouldn't get connected in your brain. It's effectively always scouring the corners of your mind for pieces of information and idea and experience to connect to whatever is happening presently for you, so as to make sense of the world. I think it's easy to appreciate why the Default Mode Network, which is making creative connections between things in your mind, is so integral to overall creativity. And so the question becomes how do we tap into and elevate our use of that default mode network? Well, I'm going to explain that to you in just a minute, but first I want to tell you something about the default mode network that's fascinating.
Steve:While your executive attention network is there to think about things that are real for you, in other words things that your mind perceives as important and meaningful and relevant at any given time, the default mode network is actually thinking about things that are imaginary. It is, in effect, imagining what kind of connections there can be to different things and what kind of things you might confront in the future, and what they're discovering is that the default mode network plays a significant role with respect to mental illness. In essence, for some people with depression or anxiety or other kinds of mental illness, the default mode network can be hyperactive. Children, for example, who experience a trauma, have a default mode network that is altered around that trauma and is hyperactive in worrying about and guarding against a similar future trauma. For another example, take someone who's returned from war, who has PTSD about explosions. Their default mode network has imagined associations between explosions and other loud noises, so that person with PTSD, having returned from war and otherwise perfectly safe from explosions, might hear hammering and the default mode network has imagined a connection between the hammering and an explosion. And so wonderful research is emerging for how to help people with certain kinds of mental illness to calm their default mode networks so as to treat their mental illness. There are already techniques emerging for that and there are even more emerging every single day.
Steve:So how do we tap into the default mode network? Well, in actuality, you do this all of the time If you've ever been thinking about a problem you needed to solve or trying to come up with an idea about something and you couldn't get there, and then you were out driving, or maybe you were in the shower and all of a sudden a solution came to you. Then you have experienced the power of the default mode network and everybody has. As I said, the default mode network is always operating in your subconscious. It is always connecting pieces together in ways that would be entirely in obvious to you if you were focusing on them deliberately. And whenever we're thinking about something there's actually an interaction between the executive attention network and the default mode network. Both are working simultaneously and when we're doing our best, thinking, that interaction is easy and optimized. But there's also an advantage at times to shutting off our executive attention network and allowing the default mode network to do its thing, which happens naturally under certain circumstances. But we're going to think about how to get there intentionally.
Steve:When we're exercising deliberate, conscious thought, our brain is emitting beta waves. Beta waves are fastest, most active brain waves and, as I said, they are associated with conscious thought. One notch below beta waves are alpha waves. Alpha waves are kind of a relaxed consciousness, relaxed attention to our environment, which means there's some degree of thought going on, but it's far less deliberate and governed than we would see with beta waves. And it's in those alpha waves, as well as theta and delta, which we don't need to talk about now, but it is in those alpha waves where the default mode network gets to shine. So here are your three steps to increasing your creativity.
Steve:Step one recognize your mental friction and fatigue. When you're thinking about a problem where you're trying to come up with an idea and you're deliberately working through that mental thought and it's feeling comfortable and you feel as though you're being successful and your attention is focused and you might be in a flow state, then keep going, but try to be more cognizant of the moment that it starts to feel like work. Pay attention to when you're starting to feel that mental friction, when you feel like the gears in your mind are starting to grind on each other. What's happening at that moment is that your executive attention network and your default mode network are no longer synced up very well. They're no longer having a very positive conversation, they're starting to argue with each other or misunderstand each other, and they're no longer working to each other's benefit as much as they could be. And so, while it is possible to force yourself to continue to think through that particular issue, at that time it's often far more profitable to stop deliberately thinking about it and take a break to allow the default mode, network time, to do its job. So step one just try to be very cognizant of when you feel friction in your thinking and in your problem solving and in your creativity.
Steve:Step two get yourself into an alpha state with relaxed attention. And there are two key, easy things that you want to do to get yourself into that state. The first is to do something that requires some physical activity. That could be as simple as going for a walk, taking a shower, doing some gardening, having a catch, anything that's occupying your body, because that partly also occupies your mind. But it doesn't have to be and often isn't most useful if it's particularly strenuous activity. Rather, you just want to use your body enough so that it occupies your mind a little bit. And the second thing is to pair that physical activity with some kind of mental activity, not a very low grade mental activity that doesn't require a tremendous amount of attention. Again, that could be something like having a catch or gardening. Perhaps you like to doodle, perhaps you want to draw a picture, it doesn't really matter. Find what works for you. So again, step one recognize when you hit mental friction. And step two step away from your activity and do a low grade physical, slash mental activity.
Steve:And here's your third key step, and this is where the analogous abstraction comes in. In between, feeling that mental friction and taking that break from deliberate thinking about the issue shock your brain with an analogous abstraction, which is a fancy word for an analogy to something that, on face value, has absolutely no direct connection to the thing that you're thinking about. So ask yourself how is the problem or the idea that you're working through related to just about anything else in the world, such as a rose, a rugby game, a pillow fight, the orbits of the planets around the sun? It's starting to force you to make connections and look at the problem in a way that you otherwise never would have. It's also a great thing to do in any kind of group problem solving situation, because it takes everyone out of whatever paradigm or framework they're already locked into in their thinking process, or takes a group that's stuck within a certain way of looking at something and suddenly shocks it into an entirely different perspective. But what it's also doing for our purposes here today is sparking the creativity in our minds and priming our default mode networks to go and make even more interesting associations in our subconscious.
Steve:By way of quick example and it's difficult to give any kind of thorough example here because it would require so much deep contextualization but imagine if you're a manager and you had to promote one of two different people. And let's say, for the sake of argument, that on paper each of these two different people are essentially equally qualified for the position. Thus there's no particular standout for which one to promote in terms of the metrics. You've worked with both of these people for a roughly equal period of time and you like working with both of them, and you just can't figure out which one to promote. And let's call them Ben and Bob.
Steve:So what happens if you simply try to think of each of them as a snack food? Which snack food would each of them be? And of course, this is something you would do knowing actual qualities about each of these individuals. I'm just going to make a whole bunch of stuff up. Ben, you realize, is kind of a sweet guy. Maybe he's kind of like a Snickers bar Sweet on the outside, maybe a little nutty on the inside, but not in a bad way, and actually, in that respect, a little substantive, and his thoughts, his ideas have a little chew to him. So there's Ben. On the other hand, bob guy's kind of more like a little bit of trail mix, not as sweet, maybe a little bit rougher going down, but still tasty, perhaps in the long run, a little bit more nutritious for you, going to provide a little bit more fuel and energy to the organization, but perhaps again not quite as easy to work with, not quite as sweet.
Steve:So you take that, you think about it for a few minutes, you don't judge it and then you step away from it and you allow your default mode network to go to work, having been stoked with a little bit of creativity. So as you start to feel that friction hit and you know you're about to take a break, take just a couple of minutes to think about and to write down, if possible, connections between what you're thinking about and some kind of analogous abstraction and it has to be an analogous abstraction that you've never thought about before. Don't reuse the abstractions for your analogies, because your brain will already have created patterns for thinking around that particular abstraction. Instead, come up with an entirely different analogy and what you'll find is a sense of relief. You'll find that as that friction is building up and you're starting to feel some frustration and you're starting to get tired and it's starting to feel like work that when you introduce this analogous abstraction to your thinking, it is going to alleviate so much of that pressure because you're going to be able to make some relaxed, playful, free associations to something entirely different.
Steve:And as you do so, in no way should you scrutinize any of the associations that you make. They don't have to make perfect sense, they don't have to be perfectly logical, and it would only hurt the process to try to constrain them with too much executive logical thought. The whole point of it instead is to free your mind from the constraints of the executive attention network, stoke the default mode network and allow yourself to be creative and free. And so there are your three steps for stoking your creativity One recognize when the friction starts to occur in your deliberate thinking, to free yourself from that thinking with some kind of analogy to something entirely abstract from what you were thinking about. And then three go, take a break, do something a little physical where you can have just relaxed attention on something else. Don't worry about that problem anymore. An answer will come.