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How To Boost Your Creativity The Einstein Way-With Combinatory Play
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Combinatory Play
We’ve all experienced that flash of insight, that fleeting moment when a solution we’ve been grinding away at reveals itself in an unexpected place.
Einstein, for example, was known...
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How The Brain Works
The brain’s building blocks are neurons: nerve cells that receive and transmit signals along neural pathways. Certain pathways are forged at birth. Others can be manipulated by learning.&nbs...
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Comfort In Familiarity
Your brain is continually striving for predictability, and it can get pretty set in its ways. When a novelty appears, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) part of your brain is wired to ...
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Seeking Patterns
This will serve you well in creative think...
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Cross Train Your Brain
Try a new activity within your field or related to it; you’ll expand your neural connections and strengthen your brain overall.
If you’re a novelist, try your hand at poetry. If you...
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Do Some Other Mundane Activity
Doing something boring, like showering, doesn’t require substantial cognitive effort, so our brains are free to wander.
And a brain “at rest” isn’t really resting at all. Mind-wa...
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Sleep On It
If you’re feeling stuck on a problem, try going to bed. You just might have a more creative solution in the morning.
When we’re in REM, our brains are better able to integrate unassoci...
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Indulge Your Inner Copycat
Get inspired by someone else’s creations:
- If you’re suffering from writer’s block, buy a pack of word magnets and rearrange them until you come up with creative phrases on your fridge.
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If You Need A New Way Of Thinking
... use combinatory play to give your brain a boost:
- Participate in creative cross-training to expand your brain’s neural connections.
- Let your mind wander by doing something mun...
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The 'Eureka' moment
Eureka moments may seem unpredictable and unreplicable. But there are ways to coax these inspired ideas from their hiding places. One of the best is to take a break from thinking about a problem or dilemma.
They are linked to the story of Archimedes and the gold crown ( when he realized while taking a bath that he can use displaced water to assess the density of the king's crown and, therefore, its gold content).
Mental Break
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Creativity
While being creative isn't easy, nearly all great ideas follow a similar 5 step creative process.
The 5 Step Creative Process
- Gather new material directly related to your task as well as learning general material by becoming fascinated with a wide range of concepts.
- Thoroughly work over the materials in your mind. Examine what you have learned by looking at the facts from different angles and experimenting with fitting various ideas together.
- Step away from the problem. Next, you put the problem completely out of your mind and go do something else that excites you and energizes you.
- Let your idea return to you. After you have stopped thinking about it, your idea will come back to you with a flash of insight and renewed energy.
- Shape and develop your idea based on feedback. For any idea to succeed, you must release it out into the world, submit it to criticism, and adapt it as needed.
Creativity is learned
Some people are primed to be more creative than others.
However, nearly every person is born with some level of creative skill and the majority of our creative thinking abilities are trainable.
Labels are important
But they are also harmful if we use them incorrectly. When it comes to categories like science and art, we tend to presume mutual exclusivity.
Albert Einstein inspired a paradigm shift in modern physics as an artist, not as a scientist. His success was attributed to his creativity and the new way of looking at things.
Don’t wait for inspiration
Breakthroughs are seldom made through sudden inspiration. Insight is the result of action. Doing creative work is about setting a schedule and getting on with it. Eventually, the combination of your effort will energize the push towards a final result.
Albert Einstein worked at a Swiss patent office, a rather uninspiring place relative to his interest in physics. Between the hours he spent on the job, he also dedicated hours to scientific work. He was deliberate in his commitment to creation, which led to the formulation of the two fundamental theories in physics: general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Seeking connections between existing ideas
Creativity is not equivalent to originality. Creativity is just a new way of combining old ideas.
Albert Einstein saw invention as a product of "combinatory play." He would separate his existing ideas from language, so he could freely visualise and mix these known elements of information to arrive at some new logically connected concept.