Watch Yourself Think

Morten Friis-Olivarius is a neuroscientist who teaches at Copenhagen Business School. He’s conducted many studies on how the brain works when trying to accomplish creative solutions, and has a great TED talk on the subject (if you’re wondering at the low view count like I did, my hunch is that the sales pitch of his start-up at the end turned folks off). I appreciate his neuroscientific description of creativity:

“The underlying neural process of creativity is quite simple: it’s taking some things we already know and combining them in a new way. You have to realize that the brain is not capable of producing new material from scratch. We can only take what we have in our memory system and combine that in different fashions...”

What really blew me away is that knowing this fact — ie knowing how the brain is working when searching for creative solutions — dramatically impacts one’s creative output! Friis-Olivarius and co gave some novices a “creativity training” course without any instruction on the underlying neuroscience, and again offered a “creativity training” course plus some training in the neuroscience of what’s happening in the brain when undertaking creative work. Folks who received neuroscience training outperformed their non-neuro counterparts by almost 30%!

The TED talk mentions that the team replicated the findings with experts as well, who experienced a 71% increase in their divergent output after being trained in the neuroscience of creativity. (FWIW I couldn’t find a link to that research)

This phenomenon broadly jives with what my friend, neuroscientist Dr. Beau Lotto, says about one thing that makes humans special: while we may be subject to certain fixed patterns of thinking — or “seeing,” as he calls it — we also have the ability to “see ourselves see,” and deliberately choose new ways of seeing. In that ability to consider our own perceptions, we have the potential to choose trigger new pathways of thinking and association.

Which made me think: practically speaking, a simple hack for creative output is to “watch yourself think,” and remember that what’s happening neurologically is combining things in our memory. That very knowledge appears to unlock divergent potential.

Click here to subscribe to Paint & Pipette, the weekly digest of these daily posts.