Studying Creatively

A Creativity Toolkit to Get Your Studies Out of a Rut

Brian Clegg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134089352
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Are you stuck in a rut? Short of inspiration? Looking for a study guide that's a break from the norm?

This innovative book will give you the tools and techniques you need to work a bit of creative magic into every aspect of your studying.

Clegg's easy-to-read, entertaining book will show you:

• what the whole creativity business is about
• why you need to bother with it
• clever methods to stimulate your brain into action
• how to come up with a mass of ideas at a moment's notice

Mind stretches and mental workouts will enable you to take effective notes and to absorb and structure information in a way that can easily be recalled.

Studying Creatively, the study guide with a difference, will show you how to change your environment to make creative study more effective, it will help you work on your presentation skills - there's no point having great ideas if you can't put them across.

Good ideas are essential for any student who wants to do well. This invaluable guide, suitable for students from ages fifteen to twenty-one, empowers you with the tools you need to work creatively.

Chapter 1

Why creativity?

This opening chapter is here to give you some background to what the whole creativity business is about, and why you need to bother with it. If you are the sort of person who skips introductions to get to the real thing, that’s fine; I just ask that you hang on in with me for a couple of paragraphs before skipping to Chapter 2. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to go.

I have been teaching people about creativity for over ten years now – all the way up from junior school children to board members of big companies – and I’ve found that it helps a lot to get a feeling for what creativity is about, and why the techniques that help you be more creative work, before getting into the detail of what to do to be more creative in your studying. It’s partly because some creativity techniques can seem weird unless you know why you’re doing them, and partly because knowing what the techniques are for, and how they work, will help you know how and when to use the techniques you’re going to come across.

OK, now it’s up to you. Read on if you want to put those techniques in context (which I’d really recommend); skip to Chapter 2 for the fast track.

What’s the point?

One thing is for certain: there’s no point wasting your time learning how to be more creative if you aren’t going to do anything with it. This isn’t one of those boring academic ‘learning for the sake of it’ subjects; it’s a practical skill that’s going to be intensely useful in school or university, at work and in your everyday life. It’s also a skill that isn’t going to lose value over time. It will stick with you for ever.

Creativity lets you do two things: solve problems and come up with new ideas. I tend not to bother too much about the difference between these. You can be solving a problem that amounts to ‘I need a new idea’, or getting an idea on ‘how to solve my problem’. Some creativity experts spend ages agonizing over the difference between the two, or between creativity and innovation. Forget it. Life’s too short. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all the same thing. Creativity.

It’s easy to get stuck with the idea that creativity is about ‘the arts’. If you think like that, the closest that creativity gets to the real world is advertising (where some employees are actually referred to as ‘creatives’). But creativity is not all about writing literature and painting pictures (and advertising). It’s about having ideas, about changing things, about making things happen. And that comes in useful everywhere.

To start with – and I think most importantly – it’s a personal thing. Creativity is about doing something original, something that comes from you and no one else. There really is nothing that gives the same buzz as being creative. It could be one of those arty things, like writing something or taking a great photograph. But it could equally be thinking of a great new way to make money, or a clever new tactic on the football field, or some way to change your room so it’s a better place to be.

As well as helping with these personal issues, creativity is going to be incredibly valuable with your work, whether it’s schoolwork or the money-earning kind. It might involve finding a new way to do something (or an entirely new thing do). It might mean coping with a really irritating problem. It could be a way of saving money or beating the competition.

Creativity gurus like to say that creativity is about differentiation. This is just a way of saying that creativity helps you stand out from the crowd (but by using big words like ‘differentiation’, the guru can charge £300 an hour for telling people). Creativity is a way of making yourself different, or your company different, or what you are different, or what you sell different. And that can result in anything from cheering yourself up to surviving in a life-threatening situation.

If you want the single-phrase summary, you could do worse than say that creativity is what makes life worthwhile. How could anyone doubt there’s a point to it?

Can you do anything?

OK, we need creativity, but that doesn’t mean that there’s any reason to write a book (or to read one) about it. Breathing, for example, is also kind of essential for life, but a whole book on breathing would get dull pretty quickly. Imagine something like this:

The Student’s Guide to Breathing

By Brian Clegg

Breathe in. Breathe out. Keep doing it – not too quickly, not too slowly. Don’t bother to think about it: your body will look after it.

The End.

It doesn’t have the feel of a bestseller. The reason there’s not much of a book in breathing is that you don’t have a lot of choice, it’s just something that happens. If the same were true of creativity, then again the book would be short and not worth spending your money on. The ‘natural’ approach to being creative, the creativity equivalent of ‘just breathe’, is waiting for the big light bulb to go on over your head.

Aside: Metaphors

When I talk about a big light bulb going on over your head, I am speaking metaphorically. Unless you are a cartoon character, there is no big light bulb over your head; it just represents an idea arriving. Keep an eye out for metaphors; they’re very useful in creativity and we’ll come back to them later.

So, on flashes that big light bulb. You sat in your bedroom, or garage, or at your desk and waited . . . and if you were lucky, you eventually had an idea.

That’s great if you’ve got all the time in the world and nothing better to do than sit around waiting. But that doesn’t apply to most of us. So, for a long time people have been looking for ways to improve on the basic capabilities of a human brain when it comes to dreaming up ideas, and over the past 50 years a strange collection of people including psychologists, business people and advertising executives (individually – they tend not to talk to each other) have come up with some genuinely effective ways to get systematic about the business of creativity.

Aside: How long is a long time?

It’s true that 50 years is a long time, but people have been finding ways to improve on their brain’s basic capabilities much longer. Some of the memory techniques mentioned in this book go back to ancient Greek times, while Leonardo da Vinci had a way of dreaming up new ideas that involved drawing squiggles with his eyes shut, then looking at the squiggles and imagining what they could be. (No one said it was a good way, but then he was Leonardo, so his squiggles were worth taking a look at.)

Altogether, I’ve found five different ways you can improve on the creativity of the brains you begin with. They are:

• Culture – no, I’m still not talking about the arts. This is the culture of where you live and work (or go to school or university if you don’t consider that working). If you are somewhere that supports new ideas and helps you try them out, then you are more likely to be creative than if the typical response to a new idea is ‘keep quiet and get on with what you were supposed to be doing’.
• Techniques – these are clever little methods to stimulate your brain into action. As they’re probably the least ordinary of the five ways, I’ll come back to them separately in a moment.
• Environment – where you are and how you feel can make a lot of difference to how good your ideas are. It’s much easier to get good ideas when you are relaxed and comfortable (though not too relaxed and comfortable, or you’ll end up asleep).
• Practice – this is life’s way of telling you there’s no such thing as a free lunch. We all start off with different abilities, but most of them get better with practice, and creativity is just like playing tennis or driving a car in this respect. The more opportunity you get to try out techniques and to come up with new ideas, the easier it becomes to fire off a pile of ideas at a moment’s notice.
• Fun – there’s a strong link between creativity and fun. That’s not to say that as long as you’re having fun you are being creative; just having a great time with your friends doesn’t mean you are oozing creativity. But if you are being creative you are likely to be having fun, and if you are in a place where fun is frowned on, it can be hard to be creative.

By working on these five aspects, anyone can get more creative. Some folk will tell you that there are creative people and the rest. (And most of the world falls into the ‘the rest’ category, though, interestingly, people who have this theory almost always put themselves into the elite creative people group.) Don’t listen to these ‘the common rabble aren’t capable of creative thinking’ types. It’s true that some people find it easier than others to come up with really great ideas, but everyone is capable of fresh thinking, and everyone can get better at creativity with the right techniques, environment and plenty of practice.

Getting the technique

This book uses techniques a lot, so it’s worth getting an idea of what they are and why they work. There are some specialist mind techniques, like those we use to help remember things better, but most creativity techniques are ways of getting you to look at things differently and make new connections in your brain.

New connections are essentially what ideas are. Your brain is a huge network of interconnected links – new ideas come from setting up different connections, a bit like putting someone through on one of those mechanical telephone switchboards you sometimes see on old movies. (This is a metaphor too! The brain is a lot more complicated than this.) Generally we like to do things in a certain way. We’re comfortable with it. It’s what we know works. But it’s a bit like being in a tunnel. You don’t just get tunnel vision, you’re living in this tunnel. You can only go places that are inside the tunnel. The tunnel for your ideas is formed by all the assumptions you make about how things are in the world. That’s fine if you can come up with an idea that’s in your tunnel, but most of them won’t be. They’ll be out there, in the big wide world outside the tunnel. Techniques are pickaxes to break out of tunnel vision caused by your assumptions and lack of original thought.

You’ll sometimes hear people saying, ‘We need to think outside the box’. That’s just another way to say break out of the tunnel, but it has been mocked so often on TV shows that it’s best not to use it unless you are being ironic.

The strange thing about techniques is that they’re mechanical. You just follow a set of instructions – often very simple instructions – and, magically, new ideas are created. Some people find this very strange. How can anything as wonderful and human as creativity be mechanical? The point is, it’s not the technique that does the creating, it’s you. The mechanical part is just a matter of knocking some barriers down – then the brain kicks in and does the real work.

Creativity techniques are used a lot in teams, especially at work. Most of this book will be giving you ideas on how to be creative on your own, but a lot of the stuff in here will also work for teams or committees or groups of friends. There are a few techniques that are really only relevant to groups. Probably the best-known creativity technique is brainstorming, which is intended for a group of people. Where necessary we’ll bring group techniques in – but the main thing is to remember that ideas come to individual people. Groups are great at improving ideas and combining them to make new ones, but that first spark of originality has to come from someone. Make sure you get some thinking time alone, even if you are working with a team.

The brain, the whole brain, and nothing but the brain

Not only does an idea come from a single person, it comes from a single organ in the body. There’s no point trying to be creative with your liver; it won’t get you anywhere. This is brain work, pure and simple. Because of that, it helps to get to know a little bit about the brain, which we’ll do without getting into too much gruesome detail.

The brain is a complex device, and one that doesn’t come with a user manual. A very simplistic way of looking at the brain is to see it as a series of switches, rather like the bits in a computer. You have around 10 billion of these biological switches called neurons – in computer-speak, 10 giganeurons. That might not sound so much, but the comparison is based on an enormous error. The brain isn’t anything like a computer. One of the big differences between brains and computers is that, unlike computer bits, each neuron is capable of interaction with hundreds or thousands of others. The way you can combine 10 billion things together, each potentially linking to hundreds of thousands of others, is astronomically huge. We’re talking more configurations than there are atoms in the universe. Just to give an idea of how much connectivity there is in there, the dendrites that link the neurons in your brain are the equivalent of having around 93,000 miles of wiring in your head. That’s wiring that would stretch around the world four times.

It doesn’t do any harm in trying to use your brain more effectively to be aware of its limitations and give it a spot of pampering. One simple way to get better ideas is to be aware that your brain isn’t at its best every waking minute of the day. Everyone has times when they are better or worse with the brain (we’ll come back to this in more detail later on). Most of us aren’t too good at thinking effectively just after a heavy meal. The brain is a big consumer of blood, and when the stomach is making heavy demands on the circulatory system, the brain isn’t always at its sharpest.

Most people aren’t too bright when they are really tired, either – so last thing at night often isn’t best. (Incidentally, this is nothing to do with falling asleep. When you are half asleep you often have some of your best ideas. The brain is better at making new connections when it can operate slowly, drifting from place to place, so a daydreaming state is a good one for having ideas.)

There’s something else you should know about your brain: you’ve got two of them. A slight exaggeration, but not a huge one. You’ve seen pictures of the brain – it’s not unlike an enormous walnut in appearance. The two halves of the brain you see divided by a line down the middle are totally separate all the way down to the corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves linking the brain to the spinal cord right at its base. Broadly speaking, the two sides of the brain control the opposite sides of the body. The left side of your brain is responsible for your right eye, right hand, and so on. (Some animals have even greater functional separation. A dolphin, for example, can sleep on one side of the brain at a time while the other side keeps alert to make sure everything’s OK.)

However, one thing you can be sure of with the brain: just when you thought you understood it, it turns out be more complicated than you realized. For example, the idea of a left/right split in the brain is only partly true. Your right eye is also connected to the right side of the brain (though with fewer connections than go to the left). This cross-connection is used to compare the information from the two eyes, to help sort out distances in 3D vision. Some animals have much less cross-connection; their eyes act pretty well independently, and they don’t worry too much about how far away things are.

This left/right divide was for a long time thought to be responsible for two very different ways your brain works. The left-hand side was said to be responsible for logical work, handling lists and words and numbers, tak...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Why creativity?
• Chapter 2 Mind magic
• Chapter 3 An original approach
• Chapter 4 Mapping the facts
• Chapter 5 Memories are made of this
• Chapter 6 Read for speed
• Chapter 7 Chill out
• Chapter 8 Time and time again
• Chapter 9 Creativity zone
• Appendix Creativity resources