Improve your creativity

In this short article I'm going to show you how to become more creative. First, what do I mean by being creative? It's the act of coming up with new innovative ideas in any discipline, whether art, science or business.

In a 1996 Wired interview, Steve Jobs said: "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something... That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesise new things". 

So how do we connect the dots? Neuroscientists Irving Biederman and Ori Amir studied professional and amateur comedians to see what happens to the brain's physiology when cracking a joke. They found the area for structured planning and decision making (medial prefrontal cortex) and the area for abstract processing (temporal lobe) fired up when telling a joke - providing insight into how the creative thought process works.

Interestingly, the area for abstract processing was found to be more on fire for the set of professional comedians. The professional - funnier and more experienced - comedians relied on the part of the brain that lets free associations give them their creativity, while the amateurs relied more on structured planning.

This insight provides us opportunity to improve our creative thought process by

1) having more experiences (creating dots); and 

2) training our brain to connect the dots through abstract processing

I can't help you with the first, but for the second I've created several games you can play to help you warm up the temporal lobe. I came up with the idea for Sensical after studying improvisation and happily stealing methods (connecting the dots!) to help with idea generation.

To be good at improv - as with creativity - you need to drop the mental filters that cause us to second guess ourselves and force us to think the way we think we should think (structured planning). 

To complete the games in Sensical, you have to think fast - there is no time to pause or discuss - and rely on creative thought through promoting unencumbered, free flowing idea generation (abstract processing).

You can download the Sensical app at the Google Play store. Or try some practice games on the Sensical website www.sensicalgame.com.

Have fun!