New people don't know all your thought patterns and old stories, so you'll have to revisit your existing inner monologues. The refreshing perspectives will help to surface new thinking and possibly a lightning bolt or two.
Books are wonderful for creating new thoughts and stimulating great ideas. For a long time, I didn't read much. When I added business books to my routine, it helped me learn more and expand my way of thinking.
But several years ago, I started again reading fiction and histories. These stories really got me out of my daily headspace and activated my idea generator. Even if you can't make the time for a novel, go hunt down a bookstore and spend an hour browsing. You'll find plenty of thought stimulation. Google is great when you know what you are looking for, but the best way to generate new ideas is with unexpected learning.
Take an hour each week and go on a web journey. Start with the I'm Feeling Lucky button and just take it from there. Try to pick the stranger and more obscure references as you surf and stretch your brain a bit.
An irritant to rational thinking? A creative idea can be any of these things. But to understand creativity and how you have ideas, it helps to take a somewhat more clinical perspective.
In terms of your brain, memories and creativity, let's look at what exactly happens when you have a creative idea. A notion is a piece of information stored away in your brain's memory.
It could be a bit of information you learned at school, it could be something you read in a book, it could be your reaction to something you have seen, smelled or tasted. Notions do not need to be factual or even true.
If you believe in Santa Claus, then this is a valid notion as far as you are concerned. If you believe that Picasso was a better artist than Dali, this is also a valid notion as far as you are concerned.
Whenever two or more notions come together to create a unique, all new notion in your mind, a creative idea is born. The notion of small sheets of note paper combined with the notion of slightly sticky glue became the creative idea of Post-It notes.
The notion of nitrous oxide also known as laughing gas and the notion of reducing pain during surgery became the creative idea of anaesthesia. Interestingly, although the effects of nitrous oxide were discovered by Sir Humphry Davy in a series of experiments in — it took another 40 years before someone combined this notion with the notion of dealing with pain.
Indeed, think about any creative idea or invention which inevitably has been inspired by creative ideas and you can deconstruct it into notions that were established at the time the idea or invention was born. Once two or more notions have created an all new notion, or creative idea, that new notion becomes a part of your repository of notions that can be constructed into more creative ideas.
For instance, once the idea of the Post-It had been realised, people quickly up with new ideas for using the notes: marking pages in a book, annotating documents without marring them and brainstorming to name but a few. Each of these new uses of Post-It notes were the result of a creative idea which was the result of the notion of a Post-It note being combined with other notions. This is the amazing power of the creative idea! Not only does it give us something new and exciting, but it provides a new building block for creative ideas.
Indeed, every invention, every innovation, every creative ideas we humans have ever had have been built upon the building blocks of previous ideas. And those goes all the way back to the cavemen and women combining such basic notions as banging rocks together to make a sharp stone and the notion of the potential usefulness of that sharp stone as a tool. A creative idea is the result of two or more notions coming together in the mind in order to create an all new notion; a creative idea, which in turn becomes a useful notion for future creative ideas.
Notions are stored in the average brain as memory and different kinds of memories are stored in different parts of the brain.
Moreover, it seems that similar memories are stored in proximity to each other. Certainly, magnetic resonance imaging MRI scans of people thinking seems to bear this out.
That said, science is only just beginning to understand how the brain forms, stores and accesses memories. As noted, we devise creative ideas as a means of finding a path to achieving a particular goal. A composer wishes to express thoughts in a song, a scientist seeks to explain a natural phenomenon, a designer seeks ways to improve a particular kind of product.
Incidentally, you can also consider creativity as a means of solving problems, but I prefer to work with goals. Anyway, the need to solve a problem is also a goal — so it's really the same thing. Even when a creative idea seems to come to you out of the blue, it is almost inevitably because it helps you achieve a goal.
You may not be consciously thinking about the goal, you may not even be terribly interested in achieving the relevant goal, but you need to be aware of the goal in order to recognise the creative idea. For instance, if you are relaxing in the bath and suddenly have a brilliant and creative idea for a new curry to cook for dinner one day, that idea enables you to achieve a goal: cook an interesting new meal for dinner.
You may not have been thinking of that goal. If you had no interest in food and only ever ate peanut butter and jam sandwiches prepared by your mother, the notions of combining various kinds of food in novel ways would not have happened in your brain.
If you take a person of average creativity and ask her to come up with ideas towards achieving a goal, she will probably focus her thinking on notions related to the nature of the goal. If, for instance, you have asked her to come up with creative ideas for using a shoebox, she will likely focus her thinking on boxes. This would probably inspire ideas about storing small things.
Part 3. Have an open mind. Being creative requires you to suspend judgment and take risks. Let your ideas flow, and only worry about editing them once you get them out. Write nonstop for a certain amount of time for instance, 10 minutes. Try mind mapping. It requires visual organization and logical organization, which engages your whole brain and encourages creativity.
Start with a piece of paper and pen or marker. Draw lines off of the center to create new shapes with related concepts.
Practice looking at things in new ways. One way to get your creative juices flowing is to challenge accepted ways of understanding things. You can do simple exercises to practice this, as a way of getting ready to think creatively about a problem or project.
For example, take an everyday object, like a paper clip, and think of ten new uses for it. However, you could also: Stick paperclips in the ends of corn so you can eat it off the cob Use a chain of paperclips as a necklace Use a paperclip to open a stubborn seal, such as on a medicine bottle Use a paperclip as an instrument to paint intricate designs on your fingernails using nail polish.
It can be used as a practice exercise to boost creativity or when you are working on a project. Try forming analogies. These require you to think about similarities between objects or concepts, often ones that are not related in an obvious way.
Did you know you can get expert answers for this article? Unlock expert answers by supporting wikiHow. Dan Klein. Support wikiHow by unlocking this expert answer. Yes No. Not Helpful 0 Helpful 1. Include your email address to get a message when this question is answered. Firstly, consider the memory bank. In the self-development classic The Magic of Thinking Big , David Schwartz writes about the conscious process of guiding thoughts in the right direction:. Withdraw only positive thoughts.
Let the others fade away. And your confidence, that feeling of being on top of the world, will zoom upward. His work centered on success and positive determination, but we can apply that methodology to creativity instead. Simply put? It means get your ideas into a recorded state. As many of them as realistically possible.
Doing this over time means your idea well becomes both part of your brain, and a physical extension of it. Prolific writer Ryan Holiday has kept a commonplace book for much of his life, which is one of the best examples of this method.
The purpose of the book is to record and organize these gems for later use in your life, in your business, in your writing, speaking or whatever it is that you do. These paper-based methods provide immediate tactile feedback to your memory recording. An ordinary person solves new problems every day just getting across the street You know, billion brain cells are involved in talking and thinking and we take that for granted.
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