Your Creative Brain

Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life

Shelley Carson

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470651438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Kognitive Psychologie & Kognition

Research-based techniques that show everyone how to expand creativity and increase productivity

Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson?s provocative book, published in partnership with Harvard Health Publications, reveals why creativity isn't something only scientists, investors, artists, writers, and musicians enjoy; in fact, all of us use our creative brains every day at home, work and play. Each of us has the ability to increase our mental functioning and creativity by learning to move flexibly among several brain states.

• Explains seven brain states or "brainsets" and their functions as related to creativity, productivity, and innovation
  
• Provides quizzes, exercises, and self-tests to activate each of these seven brainsets to unlock our maximum creativity

Your Creative Brain, called by critics a?new classic? in the field of creativity, offers inspiring suggestions that can be applied in both one?s personal and professional life.

PART 1

Meet Your Creative Brain

Chapter 1

Wanted: Your Creative Brain

YOU ARE IN POSSESSION of one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, one that has virtually unlimited potential not only to change your life, but also to change your world.

This supercomputer has the ability to adapt to ever-changing environments, understand subtle patterns, and make connections between seemingly unrelated things. It can design skyscrapers, cure life-threatening illnesses, and send humans into space.

It can make you successful, rich, happy, and fulfilled . . . and it’s located right inside your skull.

The supercomputer I am talking about is your brain, that miracle machine that allows you to do everything from brushing your teeth in the morning to presenting complex facts and figures to your boss in the afternoon.

Think about it: our brains have shepherded us through some pretty amazing evolutionary developments in record time. In the past 10,000 years, we’ve invented the wheel, built the pyramids in Egypt, discovered penicillin, developed the Internet, and sent devices of our own making beyond the outer regions of our solar system.

To put it into perspective, consider the fact that the turtle has been around for roughly 220 million years and has yet to make an innovative lifestyle improvement.

So what separates us from the turtle? The answer is: our creative brain. Our brain allows us to feel, love, think, be, and, most important, create.

You may think that creativity is a gift only certain types of people possess, like the Einsteins, Mozarts, or Shakespeares of the world. However, the latest neuroscience research suggests that creative mental functioning involves a set of specific brain activation patterns that can be amplified through conscious effort and a little practice. These are skills that anyone can master. By learning how and when to turn the volume up or down in certain parts of the brain, you can develop your creative potential to achieve greater success and life fulfillment.

In the following chapters, you’ll learn about seven brain activation patterns—the CREATES brainsets. You’ll see how each brainset affects the way you experience the world around you and how each contributes to the process of creative problem solving. Through entertaining exercises, you’ll learn to use these brainsets to take advantage of your creative potential and enrich your life and the lives of those around you.

But the purpose of enhancing creativity is not only for enrichment; it’s a vital resource for meeting the challenges and dangers, as well as the opportunities, of the accelerated-change climate of the twenty-first century.

The information and technology explosion, along with cyber-communication and globalization, is transforming the way we learn, the way we do business, and the way we form relationships with each other. The rule books for virtually every aspect of human endeavor and interaction—from corporate life to personal life to dating and even parenting—are being rewritten right in the middle of the game. So if all the old bets are off, how do you survive and thrive? The most important asset you have for negotiating this rapidly changing world is your creative brain.

Your creative brain can lead you to discover a new and better way to manage some aspect of your business. It can help you to express your unique life experience in a way that inspires or educates others. You can use it to ensure that the best traditions of the past get incorporated into the future or to add beauty to your environment. Your creative brain can even reshape your vision of retirement so that you continue to grow and prosper throughout the decades ahead. There is truly no limit to the potential of your creative brain. . . .

Regardless of your mission for the future, it is crucial that you develop your creative capacities. By developing your creative brain, you can not only adapt to the changing world, but you can make a contribution to that change. By developing your creative brain, you will also prime your brain to discover, innovate, and produce your original contribution to what is shaping up to be a twenty-first-century Golden Age.

Before we go further, let’s define exactly what we mean by that nebulous term creativity. Though philosophers and writers have come up with a number of definitions for creative, there are two elements to the definition that virtually all of us who study creativity agree need to be present in the creative idea or product. First, the creative idea or product needs to be novel or original, and second, it has to be useful or adaptive to at least a segment of the population.1 Note, for example, that the scribblings of a toddler who has just learned to hold a crayon are novel . . . but, as a product, they are not considered useful or adaptive.

You can take these elements of novel/original and useful/adaptive and apply them to virtually any aspect of your life to increase your productivity and happiness. You can also apply them to the betterment of your community and to the enrichment of society. When you learn to use your creative brain more efficiently, there is no limit to the innovative ideas, products, and new ways of doing things that you can explore.

Your brain is the repository of a unique store of information: it contains autobiographical, factual, and procedural knowledge that no one else on the planet has access to. When you combine pieces of this knowledge in novel and original ways, and then take the resulting combinations and find applications for them, you are using your creative brain as it was built to be used.

Neuroimaging techniques, such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), PET (positron emission tomography), and SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography), have allowed scientists to peek into the brains of highly creative people to see how they unconsciously manipulate their brainsets at various stages of the creative process. For example, different brainsets appear to be activated in highly creative people when they’re coming up with new uses for a household item than when they’re combining information from a variety of sources to find the solution to a unique problem.2 The brainsets you’ll become familiar with in future chapters reflect what we’ve learned from those studies. You’ll learn:

• Strategies for accessing brainsets associated with creativity
• When in the creative process to access each of them
• And finally, how to switch easily between different brainsets to enhance your productivity and reduce creative “block”

If you’re still unsure about how these brainsets can really benefit your life, then you’re in good company. Two of the most common questions I hear in my seminars are these: “Isn’t creativity mainly for artists, writers, and musicians?” And “What if I’m just not a creative person?” Let’s address these questions right now.

“Isn’t Creativity Mainly for Artists, Writers, and Musicians?”

It’s true that when we think of creative individuals, we tend to think of those with careers in the arts and sciences. We think of those who have brought richness to our lives by painting a Sistine Chapel, revealing human nature through the lines of Hamlet, uplifting us with an “Ode to Joy,” or illuminating our night hours with the electric light. In fact, most of the formal research that’s been conducted on creative individuals has concentrated on achievements in the arts and sciences because it is easy to recognize creative accomplishments in these domains of endeavor. The creative aspects of achievement in business, sports, diplomacy, and real-life problem solving are harder to recognize and quantify, but clearly they are just as important.

If you think creativity is just for artists and scientists, then consider these facts:3

• Most Fortune 500 companies and many government agencies have hired a creativity consultant within the past year. Creativity has become an important factor in the survival of businesses.
• The number of business schools offering courses in creativity has doubled in the past five years.
• Former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown acknowledged that creativity and innovation are critical to the future of the U.K. economy.
• Forty-three books and 407,000 Web sites are devoted to creative parenting.
• A number of books discuss the importance of creativity in the field of sports, and the theme of the 2009 worldwide conference of the European Network of Academic Sports was “Creativity and Innovation in University Sport.”
• Creative athletes, such as Michael Jordan, Roger Bannister, Bill Russell, and—yes—Tiger Woods, often possess personality traits that are found in highly creative individuals in the arts and sciences.

Let’s look at a couple of examples of how creativity can serve you in areas of your life that have nothing to do with art, music, or science.

First, in the domain of business, the economic downturn of the past ...