Watercolour and
crayon
©2016 Charlene
Brown
Another creativity-enhancing technique involves taking a break from
solving a problem and doing something else. It is important that this break takes
place after giving the problem some thought, so that the break provides an
incubation period for any ideas you may have begun to form.
I should mention
right now that the ‘break’ pictured here at the top of the Sea-to-Sky Gondola
took place during our annual Mothers Day weekend in Squamish. I had not given any thought at all to the ‘problem’
of taking an online Psychology of Creativity course which was to begin the day
after Mothers Day, and thus had no preparatory ideas to incubate. Anyway, misleading
painting title aside, when we returned home Sunday night, I found a lot of
preliminary reading and a long interactive lesson module in my email Inbox. Long
story short, I got through it in time for the first 10 am live computer session
Monday morning – even after the belated discovery that it was 10 am Eastern
time (7 am Pacific) but I digress. Back to the concept of incubating an idea...
A nap
that achieves REM sleep provides the ideal ‘incubation’ period. If the schedule
can’t include this, similar benefits can be achieved by doing some mind-numbing
(and mind-wandering-inducing) task during the break. This has been tested in a controlled
laboratory setting with boring computer tasks (like hitting the space bar
whenever a letter other than E appears on your screen) but most of
us have noticed that boring jobs encourage daydreaming. Isn’t it great that
scientists have shown this is a good thing!
