This one type of meditation can help your creativity
Nick Skillicorn
Transforming a billion people's Creativity & the Innovation capabilities of a million companies
In today’s world, there are so many things which are constantly distracting us. And we know that being distracted can be detrimental to our creativity .
As a result, many people are trying to build up their internal ability to ignore distractions and be able to focus better in order to live a happier life.
One of the fastest growing ways to do this is meditation.
Meditation is a practice in which an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.
While meditation has existed for thousands of years in cultures across the world, it is gaining in popularity recently.
A 2018 report from the USA CDC showed that within the past 5 years, the total number of people who had tried meditation had more than tripled.
So the next question is: If people are feeling better and calmer due to this meditation, does it also have a positive impact on their creativity?
Interestingly, there has been research done on this topic.
The most important research on the topic comes from the 2012 research paper: Meditate to create: the impact of focused-attention and open-monitoring training on convergent and divergent thinking
In this paper, the researchers looked at two different ways of meditating and assessed their impact of participants’ ability to perform divergent and convergent thinking . While the sample size of 19 participants was quite small, it is the best research I have come across.
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The two different ways of meditating represent the main techniques of Buddhist meditation practices:
Indeed, the results of the research showed clearly that after OM meditation, participants performed better on divergent thinking creativity tests .
However, after FA meditation, they did not perform better on either divergent or convergent thinking tests.
This was thought be to since OM meditation allows you to accept any thoughts which come into your mind, it allows the ideas and thoughts in your mind to evolve and build upon one another , which is exactly the sort of skill required for divergent thinking creative tasks.
So if you are looking to use meditation to enhance your creativity, you should seek out a practice based on Open Monitoring Meditation rather than Focused Attention Meditation.
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Nick, Thanks for this fascinating article. Can you explain the OMM method a little more since this was the one proven to lead to better divergent thinking? I can't figure out specifically how to practice this just based on the limited description you provide in the article. Thanks again.
Alchemist of Creative Transformations | Creative states and where to find them | Writer, artist, creative publisher
1 年The problem is that when we look at things in this compartmentalised way we lose the big picture. For a beginner open monitoring cannot exist without focused attention meditation. One first need to stabilise the mind and to train oneself to become aware of where one’s attention is at every moment. Focused Atention techniques provide tools for it. It is a step towards Open Monitoring. It is generally the problem with research on how meditation affects creativity: we are trying to establish direct correlations between two very complex phenomena. The conclusions of each separate study, for me at least, who is intimimately familiar with the science of creativity, with the creative process and with meditation, often don’t make sense. One needs first to understand how the two systems are interrelated at the theoretical construct level and then, based on that, weave the results of individual studies into a system. Big picture, we need to look at the big picture.