Unlock your Divergent Thinking and Creative Problem Solving

Have you ever considered the fact that for the vast majority of humanity's existence, problem solving was almost always directly tied to physical movement?  After all, there were almost no problems--finding or hunting food, needing shelter, getting water, etc.--that didn't require a physical solution.  

Thus, physical movement actually affects brain function, and certain kinds of physical movement are shown to unlock more divergent, creative thinking and problem solving.  This podcast gives you a critical key to unlocking your divergent thinking!

Transcript

Speaker 0: 0:09

I want you to imagine somebody hard at work, at thinking. What image comes to mind if you think about somebody thinking very hard? You might have an image in mind, not unlike Auguste Rodin's the Thinker the classic statue of the man sitting with his chin resting upon his fist, contemplating whatever he's contemplating with considerable seriousness, pensiveness and also stillness. But then I want you to consider the fact that, for the vast majority of the time that humans walk this planet, thinking was almost always tied to physical movement, and that's because there was very little worth thinking about and very few problems that could be solved that didn't involve some kind of physical activity. For most of human history, there was simply nothing very complex to think about. The kind of exceptionally complex problems that we might just sit around and think about simply didn't exist. There was absolutely no opportunity, much less the need, to sit around and think about things like what Bitcoin's effect on the European economy could have, on Russia's unjust war against the Ukraine. There simply was just no opportunity to think about things so complex and so distant, things that only operated in the state of the mind and didn't involve some kind of physical activity. Instead, if you're hungry, you would have to likely travel some distance to forage for food and, worse, very often your food would try to run away from you, and that would require a far greater extent of physical activity simply so that you could eat. If you wanted clothing, you'd have to go out and physically acquire the resources for that clothing, and then you'd have to physically assemble the clothing. If you wanted shelter, you had to build it.

Speaker 0: 1:58

In other words, for virtually all of human history, thinking was almost always certainly not exclusively, but almost always directly linked to physical movement. Problems that needed to be solved were not just problems of the mind, they were almost always also problems of the body. And when we think of human history that way, isn't in effect sort of an oddity that when we think about thinking seriously and thinking well, we think about it in terms of relative stillness and focus? And while there's certainly a lot to be said for just sitting around and thinking, and while a great deal in human history has also been accomplished by doing so, that doesn't mean that our brains did not evolve with a connection between physical activity and thinking. And once that makes sense, it's not a far stretch to also appreciate that if thinking and movement are connected, the type of movement also matters, and while research does not tell us that there's a one to one relationship between the type of physical activity that we do and the kind of thinking that's accomplished thereafter, nevertheless there are some strong corollaries between the kind of thinking we might need to do and the kind of physical activity in which we might want to engage, and that's particularly true when it comes to divergent thinking. So if you want to be a more divergent thinker, or if you are in a circumstance where more divergent thinking is required in the short term, where, in essence, somebody needs to think outside of the box for a new solution, for a new way of looking at things, for a new approach, where there's a situation that everyone is looking at the same way but you want to stand out as the person who can look at it differently, or where you're feeling stuck in your thinking about a particular problem or about a particular topic and you want to snap out of your mental rut and try to think about it differently, then you really want to start to think about integrating a little bit of movement into your thinking process and not just any movement. Summarizing multiple research studies that have been done on the relationship between movement and divergent thinking.

Speaker 0: 4:04

Researchers make an interesting distinction between something called flexibility, which is the ability to come up with multiple different categories of ideas, and persistence, which is the ability to develop many ideas while remaining within a single category. So, as a very simplistic example, let's say that I gave you a paper clip and I said list for me all the categories in which one could use a paper clip. And you say well, it could be used as a toy, it could be used as a weapon and it could be used medically. That's mental flexibility, the ability to give multiple categories of ideas on a given topic. Persistence, on the other hand, applies more to how many ways you could use the paper clip in just one category. So if I said to you well, how might you use this medically? Then you might say oh well, within the medical category, I suppose it could be used to help pull out a splinter or to bind two fingers together if one is broken, or even, potentially, to suture a wound. Ouch. So both of those mental capacities flexibility and persistence are both important to being a divergent thinker, though many people also think that mental flexibility, that ability to come up with multiple different categories, is it more of a sign of divergence than persistences.

Speaker 0: 5:19

Regardless, what many studies show us is that physical activity helps people to be more divergent, particularly with respect to mental flexibility. In other words, when they've run controlled experiments with people and they've had people either be more sedentary or get up and move, the people who have gotten up and moved for even just 15 or 20 minutes then show greater divergence, specifically with respect to mental flexibility, than the people who were more sedentary. And if you think back to what I was saying about the relationship between movement and thinking throughout all of human history, then that shouldn't be too surprising. But that relationship becomes even more specific, for what researchers have found is that the type of movement actually matters. While there's certainly some variation in the research on this, there nevertheless seems to be a relationship between more creative movement and more creative thinking, as well as, to some degree, the intensity of the exercise itself.

Speaker 0: 6:18

So if you're facing that moment where you need to think more divergently, where you want to get out of your mental rut and change your thinking process or kickstart your creativity, then any physical activity is better than just sitting around. But yoga, as a series of slow, prescribed movements, will not do quite as much to stimulate your divergent thinking as running on a treadmill. But running on a treadmill, though more active than yoga, is still a series of highly repetitious movements, and so running on a treadmill probably will not be quite as effective at stimulating your divergent thinking as a dance class, because a dance class is also highly physical but also involves a far greater range of movements, a far greater range of physical expression than does running on a treadmill. But taking a dance class probably would not do as much to spark your divergent thinking as simply putting on some of your favorite music and dancing, however it is you like to dance. Because relatively intense movement combined with freedom of expression in terms of that movement, actually is shown to do the most to spark your divergent thinking. And guess what? Whether or not you're in the mood to do it has almost no impact on whether or not it works. And that's because, as I noted before, there's simply an intrinsic connection between our thinking processes and movement. So, once again, this particular relationship between physical activity and divergence that I'm talking about today refers much more to mental flexibility the ability to come up with many different categories to get outside of that box than it does to mental persistence, the ability to develop ideas while staying within a given category, both of which are important parts of creative problem solving. But nevertheless, if you want to get your brain outside that box, if you really want to think differently, if you want to be known as that divergent thinker in your group, then get out there and move.

Speaker 0: 8:16

But before I end this podcast, I would be remiss if I did not point to our educational system and ask you to reflect upon the emphasis that our educational system puts on learning while sitting in a chair and being relatively still.

Speaker 0: 8:30

I do not suggest that that's not important at times Of course it is. But just as when you're sitting and thinking about something, you would know the times when you need to get up and move, so can our children, and it might help our educational system a great deal simply to allow for children to have a space outside the class where, when they need to, they can get out there and move a little bit. I know that immediately raises objections from so many people with respect to them stepping outside of the lesson and missing all of those important things, and I recognize the questions that are going to emerge around practicality. But in terms of helping our children become more divergent thinkers and helping them understand that issues of mind can also be issues of body, then somehow allotting for a little bit more movement here and there could do quite a bit to help a lot of children learn a lot better. But, returning to the immediate topic at hand, when you need to think a little bit more divergently,