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15 Sep 09

The Last Psychiatrist: The Best Way To Improve Your Creativity


  • Scientific American has an article An Easy Way To Increase Creativity,  which describes the recent paper about the effects of psychological distance on creativity.

    The SciAm article is worth reading.  Students were asked a series of brain teaser questions.  One group of students was told that the questions were invented at their university; the other group was told they were invented in a far away university.  Thinking that the test came from far away somehow raised the creativity of the subjects.  They answered more questions correctly.
  • Note carefully your answer.  Most likely, your first 6 or so answers are of one category of animal (e.g. farm), and the remaining ones are from another category of animal (e.g. zoo animals).

    Even dementia patients can name a lot of animals-- "cow, pig, horse, sheep, umm, cow, no wait, ummm...." but what the demented can't do well is switch to another category.  They get stuck in the same box, looking around in there for more answers.  They don't lack fluency, they lack flexibility.
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06 Aug 09

Salon People Feature | The 7 vices of highly creative people

  • Bobby and I are amazed. Having spent 10 years carving out lives
    as professional grad students, we've been oblivious to the rising
    tide of worker despair. I remember seeing a Covey infomercial
    several months back; it seemed harmless enough. Watching
    employees become automatons spouting Covey's catch phrases at
    every opportunity was the funniest thing I had seen on television
    in quite a while. But now, as the man in the corner begins
    weeping, Bobby and I realize that larger issues are at hand.
16 Mar 08

ChangeThis :: How To Be Creative


  • MacLeod, an advertising executive and popular blogger with a flair for the creative, gives his 26 tried-and-true tips for being truly creative. Each point illustrated by a cartoon drawn by the author himself.
12 Mar 08

The Scientific Indian : What are worthwhile problems: Feynman's moving letter

  • I have worked on innumerable problems that you would call humble, but which I enjoyed and felt very good about because I sometimes could partially succeed. For example, experiments on the coefficient of friction on highly polished surfaces, to try to learn something about how friction worked (failure). Or, how elastic properties of crystals depends on the forces between the atoms in them, or how to make electroplated metal stick to plastic objects (like radio knobs). Or, how neutrons diffuse out of Uranium. Or, the reflection of electromagnetic waves from films coating glass. The development of shock waves in explosions. The design of a neutron counter. Why some elements capture electrons from the L-orbits, but not the K-orbits. General theory of how to fold paper to make a certain type of child's toy (called flexagons). The energy levels in the light nuclei. The theory of turbulence (I have spent several years on it without success). Plus all the "grander" problems of quantum theory.
11 Mar 08

Odd Behavior And Creativity May Go Hand-in-hand

  • New research on individuals with schizotypal personalities – people
    characterized by odd behavior and language but who are not psychotic or
    schizophrenic – offers the first neurological evidence that they are more
    creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic individuals, and rely more
    heavily on the right sides of their brains than the general population to access
    their creativity.
15 Jan 08

discipline and punish

  • It's a very
    common error    : people imagine that programming is not a creative endeavor.
    Instead
    they believe that programming is a constructive endeavor, that it's
    something analagous to building a bike
    shed     and the challenge largely consists in capturing a set of "clearly
    defined, domain rules"
02 Mar 06

The 6 Myths Of Creativity | Printer-friendly version

  • These days, there's hardly a mission statement that doesn't herald it, or a CEO who doesn't laud it. And yet despite all of the attention that business creativity has won over the past few years, maddeningly little is known about day-to-day innovation in the workplace. Where do breakthrough ideas come from? What kind of work environment allows them to flourish? What can leaders do to sustain the stimulants to creativity -- and break through the barriers?
  • So it's critical for leaders to match people to projects not only on the basis of their experience but also in terms of where their interests lie. People are most creative when they care about their work and they're stretching their skills. If the challenge is far beyond their skill level, they tend to get frustrated; if it's far below their skill level, they tend to get bored. Leaders need to strike the right balance.
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