Ever wondered what actually goes on inside your head before you land an idea?

Modern neuroscience has revealed how we come up with ideas.

Brain scans and other research show that the brain is like an Amazon warehouse. It takes in different pieces of information, stores them on different shelves of memory, then picks and retrieves various pieces to combine and recombine until it hits upon a combination that solves the problem at hand.

As with most brain tasks, the more familiar the problem, the faster the answer. The brain grows accustomed to drawing that piece from that shelf for that problem. The result is a habit or expertise – what’s known as “unconscious competence” in psychology. The whole exercise has become second nature.

To solve new problems, you must add more shelves to increase the possible combinations your brain can make. In other words, to come up? with new ideas, you have to search beyond your area of expertise or habit to make unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas.

“But”, you may say, “isn’t that what AI does also?” And you would be right. Many kinds of AI, including the large language models used by ChatGPT & others, work on the principle of being trained on vast numbers of different language and literary inputs, thus filling up more and more shelves in the model’s Amazon warehouse.

The broad difference between an AI model and human creativity is the way in which connections are made between the different shelves/boxes. AI can do connections, maybe even synergies, but way-out & brilliant non-sequiturs like Monty Python's semaphore version of Wuthering Heights? Only a human could make such an unorthodox but winning connection.

Creativity is about thinking bigger

The process of searching for examples of innovation inside and outside of our area of expertise is what determines the overall quality and level of creativity of new ideas. Professor Sheena Iyengar calls this method “Thinking Bigger”. ?

From business to art, the biggest innovators have thought bigger. Henry Ford took inspiration from the slaughterhouse to automate car production and Picasso took inspiration from African art to create cubism.

Thinking bigger is non-disciplinary rather than interdisciplinary, which is why nobody in any company or agency should have the monopoly on ideas. We all have the potential to be creative in different ways.

There is creativity in motion

The very act of moving your body is scientifically proven to improve thinking bigger. You’ve probably come across the most reliable measure scientists use for being able to draw connections between diverse and unrelated things – the Alternate Uses Task.

Subjects are asked to suggest unusual uses for everyday items like a rope, a brick or a spoon – and scored on how many they can think of and how varied and original those uses are.

Based on this measure, any movement boosts your divergent thinking – dancing, running up the stairs, doing star jumps or just going for a walk around the block. The most beneficial movement for your creativity though is related to your experience of it.

What you need is an activity that gets you into a different state and perspective that allows your thoughts to wander. It doesn’t matter how low or high intensity the movement is, or surprisingly, where it happens.

Whilst exercising outside and being in “green spaces”, has lots of proven benefits, it has no incremental effect on divergent thinking. Marily Oppezzo, a behavioural and learning scientist at the Stanford, has shown that walking, whether it was inside or outside, raised subjects’ creative output by 60% on average, compared with sitting still, regardless of location.

Physical activity like this that isn’t mentally demanding can induce a state of “transient hypofrontality”, in which the part of the brain responsible for paying attention, decision making and reasoning is temporarily turned down, allowing your thoughts to float free.

How does brain-storming fit into thinking bigger?

It doesn’t – because when you have a bunch of people sitting around a table where any idea goes, what you’re tapping into is each person’s learning and experience to date, which is great. But unless they’re innovators in their field, you’re unlikely to arrive at a ground breaking idea.

Therefore bringing rich stimulus from a variety of disciplines to a brain-storming session can help everyone think bigger. It adds more shelves to each member of the group’s brain inventory. In this way “best thinking” stimulus can act as a kind of quality filter on the outputs.

The value of “The Third Eye”

You get “The Third Eye” by asking others what they see in the idea so that you can see it better for yourself. This is not the same thing as asking for feedback or judgment of the idea. Nor does it require ?formal research with your target audience.? All it involves is talking to anyone outside of your bubble that can help you spot things you can’t spot on your own.

In practice this means finding a few random people who know nothing about the subject you’re working on to run strategic or creative ideas by. It helps if they’re the kind of critical thinker you don’t want asking you awkward questions at the end of a presentation, or someone you admire for being a straight talker.

What about computer or AI generated creativity?

When you think about what’s involved in thinking bigger, computers are at a distinct advantage in that they can draw on an infinitely rich source of knowledge and come up with a bewildering number of novel combinations. The question is whether they are of any interest?

It’s not like shaking marbles in a bag. The marbles have to come together because there is some intelligible, though previously unnoticed, link between them which we value because it is interesting in some way – funny, thought provoking or otherwise illuminating.?And we don’t just form links, we evaluate them too. We can tell when a joke is in bad taste or when a message is likely to offend. This is why many brands end up unwittingly supporting AI generated junk content online with their advertising.

There is a world of difference between Christmas cracker style jokes and one-off jests that play off a particular person’s quirks, cultural norms and historical context. Ask yourself, for example, how a computer could write the opening sentence of?Pride and Prejudice: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ How would it know that this is humorous?

Creativity involves value as well as novelty, and what constitutes value in terms of humour, aesthetics or morality is in constant flux. Even if we could identify and programme a computer to inform and monitor its activities according to our ever-changing definitions of value, people would still disagree about whether the computer even?seemed?to be creative.

In a recent study published in Scientific Reports, AI chatbots achieved higher average scores than humans in the Alternate Uses Task. This doesn’t necessarily mean that AIs are developing an ability to do something uniquely human though. It could just be AI can mimic human creativity by passing creativity tests, not that they’re actually creative. In fact the best-scoring human responses were higher than for the AI chat bots.

In sum, whilst AI has enormous creative potential, it lacks the emotional intelligence that humans possess, which can help in decision-making processes that require empathy or intuition. Furthermore, AI does not have the ability to experience emotions or personal connections, which are often drivers of creativity too.

So what?

If you’re lucky, all I’ve done here is explain why you’re so creative and/or have been right about how creativity works all along. If not, all you need to do to is think bigger. Then move around in whatever way best frees up your mind to make some new connections. It’s just one of the many things AI cannot do! Leave the elaborate processes and logical processing to them. It won’t increase their strike rate of coming up with valuable ideas any more than it does for us humans.

#creativity #AI #ideas

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