Lowering cognitive control
Computer drawing
Research that our Psychology of Creativity instructor, Evangelia G. Chrysikou, has done indicates that techniques
for boosting creative potential may involve breaking down established ways of
viewing the world or invoking unconscious thought processes.
One of the techniques, the Alternative-Uses
Task, encourages rethinking how people categorize objects by having them describe
as many other uses for common objects as they can in a short time period. This
helps overcome functional fixedness – the idea there is ‘one right way’ of
doing something – and puts people in a more open state of mind for
problem-solving.
In general, problems of functional
fixedness can be overcome by lowering cognitive control, removing restriction
on your thoughts and behavior. Another
way of doing this is to describe something in terms of its generic features
rather than its actual name or function, sometimes called generic parts
technique.
I tried something like this, an elephant drawing
competition, at my daughter‘s birthday
party about forty years ago. Without ever mentioning that they were drawing an
elephant, I gave the following instructions:
·
Draw a circle in the upper left
part of the paper
·
Draw eight vertical parallel
lines in the lower right part
·
Add two short curved lines and
one long curved line to the circle
·
Draw a little circle and a big
floppy circle on the first circle
·
Draw an oval that touches the
first circle and runs along the top of the parallel lines.
My favourite looked like the computer drawing, above, as I recall (remember that in the dark days before digital cameras, we
didn’t take picture of everything we saw). It won for ‘best use of colour’ and did
well in the ‘best legs’ category, but placed well down in the ‘looks like an
elephant’ part of the competition. Perhaps if there had been a ‘looks like a
moose’ category…
I will write five more blog posts about
creativity-enhancing research as well as my take on how the theories can be applied by artists.
