How’s this for mad science: Within the next 15 years, people could elect to have their brains “zapped” to boost creativity in the workplace or classroom.
Research shows that when people try to think more creatively, they almost always can -- and those effects are both significant and repeatable. Green points to an “age-old adage” in neuroscience that “cells that fire together, wire together.” The idea is that the more you use your brain to do something, the stronger the connections between the cells involved become.
But the key to this is dedicating more time in your day to actively thinking, which usually means unplugging from email, social media and more. That's the way to unlock “the digressive, slow, uncertain parts of ourselves that are key to our creativity," said Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention at The Atlantic's "Humanity + Tech" conference at MIT on Sept. 5, 2018.
Try implementing this idea in your everyday routine by avoiding bringing your phone to bed or to the bathroom. It's also a good idea to turn off notification settings for social media apps and email. Consider dedicating specific time in your day to thinking creatively -- and remind yourself to do so before any brainstorming session.
Take advantage of opportunities to periodically work in different areas of the office, sit with new colleagues or invite people from different departments to lunch. Although you might not have much control over your work environment, making any possible adjustments could translate to a significant creativity boost.
“You want your physical and social surroundings to change,” says Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. “If it’s the same old stuff on the walls and your desk -- and the same people you’re talking to -- that’s not necessarily good for creativity.”
“New ideas come from interconnections among old ideas,” says Epstein, who uses an exercise called “the experts game” to demonstrate this. In it, a few people in a group with extensive knowledge of an obscure topic give five-minute lectures. Then, after learning about topics such as how shoes are constructed or the history of Rolex watches, everyone comes up with at least three ideas for new products or services.
“It is really mind-boggling what people will come up with, and that’s based on 15 minutes of instruction they just received,” Epstein says. You can DIY this approach by asking friends or colleagues in different industries about what they do -- or signing up for a course on something completely unfamiliar to you via sites such as Khan Academy, Coursera or Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC).
There’s a good chance it won’t be immediately apparent how what you’re learning could be useful in the future, but the pieces of knowledge you’re collecting should come together naturally when you’re faced with a certain challenge or brainstorming ideas later on. “The more interesting and diverse the pieces, the more interesting the interconnections,” Epstein says.
You can stimulate yourself similarly at work by setting a time limit for a task or taking on an “ultimate challenge” in your industry, Epstein says. Think about the overarching issues and questions in your field (How do I end world hunger in one week? How can I invent a phone that doesn’t require a charger?) and practice brainstorming open-ended solutions.
The process -- based on functional MRI studies -- is headed up by Adam Green, director of the Georgetown Laboratory for Relational Cognition and president-elect of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity. Green’s team looked at blood flow as a measure of brain cell activity when people were doing creative tasks. The process pointed them to one region of the brain in particular (the frontopolar cortex), so they decided to test whether stimulating the area could make creative thinking easier.
“We zap people’s brains in a targeted way based on these fMRI studies,” Green says. The researchers hope to make creative neuroscience more available to the general public down the line.
If you don’t have a brain-stimulation tool and are looking to think outside the box, good news: We’ve got research-backed tips for upping your creativity outside the lab. Here’s how.
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