Enhancing Creativity VI

Preparing  the  mind for Creativity Enhancement
watercolour and Photoshop™
©2014 Charlene Brown

Evangelia Chrysikou, our Psychology of Creativity instructor, reminded us frequently of Louis Pasteur’s declaration that ‘chance favours the prepared mind,’ and encouraged us to keep this in mind while considering the myriad ways of enhancing creative thinking and creative ways of doing things.

Group brainstorming, for example, is only likely to be productive after participants have done some preparation in the form of individual study and solution-finding.  Similarly, the observation, presented earlier, of benefit being derived from an incubation period only after an initial period of concentration on a problem or project, illustrates the importance of preparedness.

Other ways to ‘prepare the mind’ are: 

·         Challenge yourself.

·         Seek activities outside your field of expertise.

·         Travel to a foreign country. 

·         Take a class. Like Psychology of Creativity.UAPs in Ancient Egypt                                                                

Enhancing Creativity V

Visualization techniques
acrylic
©1993 Charlene Brown

Research has shown that episodic specificity induction – training in recollecting details of past experiences – improves performance on memory and imagination tasks and enhances divergent thinking. The ability to recall detail can be increased by forming a mental image –visualizing – a past or historical event.

This painting is an exercise in historic visualization using Umm al nar tomb carvings  with an overlaying or superimposing technique. Overlaying one image on another adds a new dimension to a painting and produces evocative results, conducive to creative visualiztion.

 

 

 

Enhancing Creativity IV

Psychological distancing in Kyrgyzstan

computer collage

©2010 Charlene Brown

Applying psychological distance means thinking of a problem as being far away geographically and/or in the future… Is this why we produce those high-flying, all-powerful ‘To Do Tomorrow’ lists at the end of the day?

This technique makes people approach a problem or project in more abstract terms and has been shown to facilitate a more creative, less inhibited, approach. Seeing a problem from another person’s perspective may achieve psychological distance. Thinking of a problem situation as if it were unreal and unlikely can yield a ‘hypothetical’ answer. Or a graphic novel. 

 

Enhancing Creativity III

Incubating an idea
watercolour and crayon
©2016 Charlene Brown

Take a break from solving a problem and do 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 started at 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, but most of us are already aware that boring jobs encourage daydreaming. Isn’t it great that scientists have shown this is a good thing!

 

Enhancing Creativity II

Flexibility at the Ribat of Monastir
watercolour
©2006 Charlene Brown

In addition to idea generation, true creativity involves evaluating your options, according to a study printed in NeuroImage in 2011. This theory was tested by students from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver.

To distinguish between the generative and evaluative components of creativity and measure them separately as much as possible, they were asked to design illustrations for book covers on an fMRI-compatible drawing tablet while inside a brain scanner. They were to come up with ideas for their sketches for 30 seconds and then spend 20 seconds evaluating what they had sketched.

Activity in various areas of the brain was measured throughout the exercise. The results supported the hypothesis that the posterior (temporal and occipital) lobes of the brain are more associated with generative thinking and the prefrontal cortex is more associated with evaluative thinking. It also appeared that creativity involves a rapid shifting between these two processes ─ cognitive flexibility. 

Other researchers have developed mental exercises that could stimulate this cognitive flexibility – including performing common tasks in an unconventional manner.  I chose this painting of the Ribat, an Islamic fort, at Monastir, Tunisia to illustrate this point. 

The painting was compiled from two photos I took from the fort in the centre of the picture. The view on the left, above (looking north) was reversed so that the painting appears to be the view from the far distance, behind the Bourghiba Mausoleum looking south toward the fort. The view, on the right, above (looking south) to the Bourghiba residence remains (roughly) as photographed.

I often rearrange the components of a landscape to improve the composition of a painting, but a complete reversal like this is unusual.