Practical Implications of the Biology of Creativity

Creativity and the brain

This is the second article of a series on Creativity.  See the first article on creativity here.

We all know creativity is a right brain activity. What else do we know? There is extensive biological research on the topic of creativity, made more difficult because there is no single region of the brain housing creativity, like say, the pleasure center in the nucleus accumbens or hypothalmus(Hitti, n.d.). This finding seems reasonable since creative thinking is a process rather than a state or a destination.

The two halves of the brain have a massive connection, so which side of your brain is dominant tends to be over-emphasized.  It is possible to train oneself to enter a more creative mindset.

Following are the functions of the left and right brain:

Personal Habits for Creativity and Success:

1. Nurture to relax the mind (meditation, prayer, self-hypnosis) with a very slight hand on the tiller. Theta waves occur during periods of relaxation and light sleep. They enhance creativity or uncritical association, and are the reason we have so many ‘ha ha’ moments just as we think we’re waking up. It is said that Einstein emitted Theta waves most of the day while many of us do so only during meditation or between waking and sleeping.¹
2. Keep a journal, even if it’s short. Writing a daily personal diary has synergistic effects on your emotional and spiritual maturity on a great deal of levels. It also helps your creative side understand the bigger picture. A good place to begin is to write down the 3 best things that happened today, and the 3 most important things you did.
3. Adequate sleep aids creativity. Making novel associations is difficult when your mind is overtaxed and tired. Take a difficult test or try to read a complex book to see what I mean. The mind also uses sleep to assimilate memories.(redOrbit, n.d.)
4. The sub-conscious mind responds more helpfully if given clear but general directives as opposed to micro-managed orders. Tell or imagine to yourself the kind of person you wish to be just as you fall asleep. Your sub-conscious mind will work on it as a problem to be solved. Likewise, explicit direction on organizational change is less helpful than top level more general statements of intent, followed by an invitation for bottom-up ideas.

Right Left Brain cross section

Team Habits to Nurture Creativity

Creative mindsets approach and learn subjects in different ways than left brain or linear folks do. At the same time, we all can use both our left and right sides of our brain. Use these ideas to cater and nurture both:

1. Begin directives and speeches with a summary. Creativity requires the big picture to be truly effective. Allow people to understand how they fit in to the rest of the organization or the project. After all, it’s not a secret, and work isn’t a detective novel. The mushroom method of management (keep them in the dark and feed them sh**) is not only demoralizing, it stifles innovation.
2. Encourage movement and colors. The right side of the brain is neither linear nor verbal. Jogging it is aided by activity and color. Allow people to move during creative sessions (e.g., Nerf balls relieve stress and encourage right brain activity) and whenever possible, consider using colors to convey ideas and in presentations and scorecards. Inactivity breeds staleness. Consider any type of physical interruption a way to generate creative disruption and attitude adjustment. The popularity of calisthenics in Japanese management culture is not just to get the blood moving.
3. Use strengths of left brained people to establish lists and priorities. Linear activities like lists and setting priorities are an unnatural approach to creatives, and inspire emotional aversion, even if they are conceptually attractive. When I am brainstorming, I literally often become stymied at linear activities and find it more productive to ask a friend to record things for me. For managers, it is important to know that difficulty establishing priority or staying organized are not necessarily a sign of an unproductive or well adjusted Associate. In a team atmosphere, creatives are better off allowing others to do both. Personally, a creative can aid themselves by ‘walking’ through sequences or establishing a rich spatial geography to place list items so they can be remembered and appreciated. Your favorite large house with place settings in each different room is a common example. One of my friends uses their favorite farmer’s market to remember their To Do lists.
4. Illustrate concepts with pictures, diagrams, allegories and graphs. The left brain likes words and symbols. The right brain appreciates kinetics and real examples (right brained learners probably had trouble with phonics).
5. Inspire emotional involvement and fantasy roles in projects. The right side of the brain is the emotional side. Develop scenarios or explain projects from the subject’s perspective to encourage fantasy roles which the creative side appreciates.  SCAMPER (Substitute, combine, adapt, magnify/minify, put to other uses, eliminate, reuse) exercises have become popular.  And during innovation sessions, role play the situation from a variety of perspectives. Here are a few to get you started:
   1. Age
   2. Gender
   3. Member of varying professions
   4. Member of a different culture
   5. Criminal
   6. Famous person in history
6. Nurture a creative spirit. Preserve success stories by publishing them and celebrating them for the department or the group. Encourage informal gatherings where successes or mile stones are recounted, debated and encouraged. Celebrate failures if the approach or the attempt or the morale has a redeeming value.

How centered is your organization on left brain activities? Creatives and creativity can be nurtured. Build them into your organization’s habits and organization chart.

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1 Einstein donated his brain to research in his will, although in a stupefying course of events, most of it was somehow misplaced and lost.

Other Articles in this Series

Creativity

7 Ways to Stifle Creativity and Innovation

Organizational Implications of Creativity

My Personal Discoveries Exploring Creativity

References

Hitti, M. (n.d.). Your Brain on Creativity. WebMD. Retrieved August 23, 2009, from http://www.webmd.com/brain/news/20080229/your-brain-on-creativity.

redOrbit. (n.d.). Study: Sleep Essential for Creativity – General News – redOrbit. redOrbit. Retrieved August 23, 2009, from http://www.redorbit.com/news/general/42345/study_sleep_essential_for_creativity/.

Further Reading

Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (9780060928209): Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: BooksISBN: 0060928204 ISBN-13: 9780060928209

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity (9781591842590): Hugh MacLeod: Books

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (9781594481710): Daniel H. Pink: Books

 

Related perspectives

Creativity in Human Evolution and Prehistory (Theoretical Archaeology Group)

Evolution of Communicative Flexibility: Complexity, Creativity, and Adaptability in Human and Animal Communication (Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology)

The Spirit's Terrain: Creativity, Activism, and Transformation

UNIVERSAL CREATIVITY AND INDIVIDUATION OF THE BIOSPHERE: A CONSTRUCTIVISM EPIC