- - Insight is often about coming up with another way of doing something. Think outside the box.
- - If you direct your attention inwardly then you are more likely to solve a problem with a flash of insight.
- - Practice Divergent Thinking as much as you can (How many uses for a brick?)
- - Creativity is slow and meandering. Practice slowing down your thinking sometimes, don't always be in a hurry to solve a problem.
- - Learn to improvise more, rather than always doing things the same way.
- - Try to turn off the 'gate-keeper' at the front of the brain sometimes. One of the main roles of this area is in conscious self-monitoring. Watching what you do and what you say. To improvise you have to take risks. To do that you have to turn off a little bit of the gate-keeper sometimes.
- - Unusual and unexpected experiences help you to think more flexibly and creative. Approach problems in a different way. Seek out unexpected experiences that challenge your habits in thinking.
- - Disrupting any routine boosts creativity. Changing routines changes your brain. Well travelled neural pathways are abandoned forcing new connections to be made between brain cells, and that means more new and original ideas.
- - Mind-wandering seems to facilitate the creative process. So if you need to come up with a creative solution to a problem it's best to do some simple task that allows the mind to wander. Thinking a little, having a break, then going back to the problem seems to facilitate creativity. If you're stumped, take a break and allow the unconscious processes to take a hold. Do something simple that occupies the mind a little bit but still allows the mind to wander. It's best not to be too focussed.
- - Transient hypo-frontality is a kind of temporary sleep mode when you are more open to creativity. It is something that we can easily induce by meditation, a long run, or a bath for instance. Ideas are allowed to flow more freely, some of these ideas in the subconscious are allowed to percolate into consciousness awareness more readily. We now know that this transient dip in frontal lobe activity is what helps you lose your inhibitions when you improvise.
Links (SILM® Knowledge Base):
Creative Brain; Insight (Open Access)
Creative Management Login
Creative Thinking Open access
Managing Creativity Login