Doing something intricate with your hands – a Rubik’s Cube, squeezing a ball, fiddling with dice – excites various parts of your brain and might actively change the way you are thinking.

Listening to music can have considerable effects on the physical architecture of the brain: it can facilitate a stronger connection between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

And having better connections between the analytical and creative sides of the brain can only make you a m...

The subject matter is irrelevant. What’s important is that you think about mundane things (your day, your job, etc) in a new, abstract way.

• Walking helps you to get away from your daily sources of stress, thus reducing anxiety in the short term.
• Walking improves the process of creating new analogies in your brain.

Some of us are better at making new connections between concepts. But this is in most cases the result of hard, deliberate work, not an accident of birth.