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The Science Behind Eureka Moments
The mind needs space
...not distractions. Activities like checking email and watching TV stop our background thinking and do not let the mind wander in places that make for creative insight.
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Key Ideas
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 to play violin whenever he was stuck on a tough problem and often spoke of how music influenced the way he thought about math and science.
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.
So when you’re stuck in a rut, your brain’s neurons could literally be stuck on a neural pathway you’ve carved out through your behavior. But you can get unstuck by choosing to make new connections.
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Creativity
While some people are born creative, it is possible to acquire this skill. The right conditions and the right training can make everyone creative, in their own unique way.
As we move from the past where the industrial economy and more recently the knowledge economy had world domination, we reach the conceptual age, where the innovation economy thrives.
Traits Of Creative People
In various studies, it is found that creative people tend to be more driven, impulsive, and self-confident.
They are less conventional and unorthodox in many aspects of life.
Openness to new ideas, curiosity and disagreeableness comes as common traits of creative individuals, as they are opposite of normal or popular, and like Steve Jobs, are a prickly personality.
Steps Of The Cognitive Process
Creativity can be learned as a cognitive skill using the following steps:
- Preparation: The basic rules, languages, and instructions in any skill.
- Incubation: When ideas wander in your brain's neural network, lost in the wild.
- Illumination: This is the Aha! Moment, the light bulb coming on.
- Verification: Where it is verified that the idea is real or just a random dream without legs.
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4 Stages of Creative Control
- Preparation: you’re learning everything you can about the problem.
- Incubation: you’re allowing your unconscious mind to work on the problem.
- Illumination: the solution comes to you. It doesn’t tend to happen while you’re sitting at your desk. It might be when you’ve just woken up.
- Verification: you ensure that the idea meets up to your standards. Does it solve the problems you identified during the Preparation stage?
Creative work categories
- Prioritize: The clearer your priorities, the more focused you can be on the task at hand.
- Generate: Build a creative habit. Make a daily deliverable, whether it’s 100-words a day, a 30-second song etc...
- Explore: When you Explore, you collect the raw materials for the insights you’ll have when you Generate.
- Research: To solve a creative problem, you have to learn whatever you can about that problem.
- Recharge: When you rest, you allow your unconscious mind to work on your creative problems.
- Polish: A great idea won’t work if you don’t execute it well.
- Administrate: make it all work, so you can keep doing what you’re doing.
Becoming a perpetual creativity machine
- Build a tiny creative habit: Find the time of day with the best creative energy and make your daily deliverable so small, you can’t stand to fail.
- Take time to Prioritize: Once you’ve established a habit, dedicate an hour a week to a “weekly review”.
- Rest with a purpose: Establish times during your day and your week when you’ll do something that Recharges you.