59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot (13 page)

   YOU JUST ME

The answer is “just between you and me.” Now that you have the general idea, try these three:

   SALE SALE SALE SALE

   
STAND

        I

   BRO KEN

The answers are “for sale,” “I understand,” and “broken in half.” In Smith’s experiment, if a puzzle was unsolved, the volunteers were told to relax for fifteen minutes and then try the puzzle again. More than a third of the puzzles were solved on the second attempt. While relaxing, the volunteers were not working on the puzzles consciously, but their unconscious thoughts devised new and helpful perspectives on the puzzles.

Recent work suggests that you don’t even need to spend as long as fifteen minutes away from a problem. Instead, you can achieve the same results with just a few moments’ respite.

Psychologists Ap Dijksterhuis and Teun Meurs at the University of Amsterdam carried out a series of fascinating experiments on creativity and the unconscious.
⁷

Their ideas about the nature of the unconscious mind and creativity are simple to understand. Imagine two men in a room. One of them is highly creative but very shy. The other is clever, not as creative, and far more domineering. Now
imagine going into the room and asking them to come up with ideas for a campaign to advertise a new type of chocolate bar. True to form, the loud but not especially creative man dominates the conversation. He does not allow his quieter counterpart to contribute, and the ideas produced are good but not very innovative.

Now let’s imagine a slightly different scenario. Again, you walk into the room and ask for campaign ideas. However, this time you distract the loud man by getting him to watch a film. Under these circumstances, the quiet man is able to make his voice heard, and you walk away with a completely different, and far more creative, set of ideas. In many ways, this is a good analogy for the relationship between your mind and creativity. The quiet guy represents your unconscious mind. It is capable of wonderful ideas, but they are often difficult to hear. The loud guy represents your conscious mind—clever, not as innovative, but difficult to get out of your head.

Dijksterhuis conducted a series of experiments to find out whether people might become more creative if their conscious minds were distracted. In perhaps the best known of these studies, volunteers were asked to devise new and creative names for pasta. To help them, the experimenters started by presenting five new names, all of which ended with the letter
i
and thus sounded like typical pasta possibilities. Some of the volunteers were then given three minutes to think before listing their ideas. In terms of the “two guys in the room” analogy, these volunteers were listening to the comments of the loud, and not especially creative, guy in their heads. Another group of volunteers was asked to forget about the pasta and instead spend three minutes performing a mentally challenging task—carefully tracking a dot as it moved around a computer screen and clicking the space bar whenever it changed color. In terms of the room analogy, this task was designed to
distract the loud guy and give the quiet man a chance to have his voice heard. Only after completing this difficult and attention-sapping task were the participants asked to list some new names for pasta.

The researchers developed a simple, no-nonsense, and ingenious way of deciding whether the pasta names suggested by volunteers should be categorized as creative or uncreative. They worked through all of the suggestions, carefully counting the number of times that a pasta name ending in
i
versus another letter was proposed. Since the five examples given at the start of the experiment all ended with
i
, they concluded that any suggestion also ending in
i
was evidence that people were simply following the crowd and being uncreative, whereas those names ending in another letter were more innovative.

The results were interesting. The volunteers who had been consciously thinking about the task produced more pasta names ending in
i
than did those who had been busy chasing a dot around a computer screen. In contrast, when the more unusual pasta names were examined, the dot-chasing volunteers produced almost twice as many suggestions as those in the other groups.

These startling findings yielded considerable insight into the relationship between creativity and the unconscious. Volunteers in the “follow the dot” condition felt as if all their attention and mental effort were fully engaged in tracking a dot as it moved around a computer screen. However, their unconscious mind was working on the problem at hand. Perhaps more important, it wasn’t just reproducing the same work as their conscious mind; it was thinking about things in a very different way. It was being innovative. It was making new connections. It was creating truly original ideas.

Many standard texts on creativity emphasize the value of relaxation. They tell people to take it easy and empty their mind of thoughts. The Dutch research suggests exactly the opposite. Genuine creativity can come from spending just a few moments occupying your conscious mind, thus preventing it from interfering with the important and innovative activity in your unconscious. Everyone can be more creative—it is just a matter of keeping the loud guy in your head busy and giving the quiet guy a chance to speak up.

IN 59 SECONDS

When you next want to come up with a creative solution to a problem, try the following technique and see what pops into your mind. If the word-search puzzle is not for you, try tackling a difficult crossword puzzle, Sudoku, or any other task that fully occupies your conscious mind.

A. What problem are you trying to solve?

B. Find the ten target words inside the grid. The words might run horizontally, vertically, or diagonally and be either forward or backward. There may also be an overlap between the words.

TARGET WORDS

SIXTY

SECONDS

CREATIVITY

BOOST

QUICK

RAPID

THINK

CHANGE

NEW

FRESH

C. Now, without thinking too much about it, jot down the various thoughts and possible solutions that come to you.

ANSWER

   
GETTING IN TOUCH WITH YOUR INNER GORILLA

A few years ago I wrote a book about creativity called
Did You Spot the Gorilla?
It outlined four techniques designed to help people think and behave in more flexible and unusual ways. Here are summaries of each of the techniques and some exercises designed to help you implement them.

Priming
. Prime your mind by working feverishly on a problem, but then give yourself a release of effort by doing something completely different. During the release period, feed your mind with new and diverse ideas by, for example, visiting a museum or an art gallery, paging through magazines or newspapers, going on a train or car journey, or randomly searching the Internet. But don’t push it. Simply immerse yourself in novel ideas and experiences, and leave it up to your brain to find connections and create seemingly serendipitous events.

Perspective
. Changing perspective helps produce novel solutions. Try imagining how a child, idiot, friend, artist, or accountant would approach the problem. Alternatively, think about two analogous situations by applying the “is like” rule (e.g., “Attracting more people to my business
is like
a street entertainer trying to attract a crowd”). How is the problem solved in these situations? Can this idea be applied to your problem? Finally, think about doing the exact opposite of every solution you have created so far.

Play
. When you are being too serious, your brain becomes constrained. Jump-start your creativity by having some fun. Take a break for fifteen minutes, watch a funny film, or digitally alter a photograph of your colleague so that he or she looks more like an owl.

Perceive
. When the world becomes too familiar, your brain reverts to automatic pilot and stops seeing what is right in front of your eyes. Try switching your mind to manual by becoming more curious about the world. Ask yourself an interesting question each week. How do elephants communicate over hundreds of miles? Why do people laugh? Why are bananas yellow? How cmoe yuor bairn is albe to udnertsnad tihs snetence eevn tghouh olny the frist and lsat ltetres of ecah wrod are crreoct? Invest some time and energy in trying to discover possible answers to the question, if only for the fun of it.

NATURE CALLS

In 1948 George de Mestral went for a stroll in the countryside in his native Switzerland. When he returned home he noticed that his clothing was covered in tiny burs. As he set about the annoying task of removing them one by one, he decided to figure out why they stuck to his clothing. Close examination revealed that the burs were covered with tiny hooks that easily attached themselves to the loops in fabric. Inspired by this simple concept, de Mestral wondered whether the same idea could be used to attach other surfaces together, a thought that eventually resulted in his inventing Velcro.

De Mestral’s story is frequently cited as evidence for one of the most important principles underlying creativity: the realization that an idea or technique from one situation can be applied to another. This principle certainly appears to account
for many famous examples of breakthrough thinking, including, for example, Frank Lloyd Wright’s finding inspiration for the design of a church roof by noticing the shape of his hands at prayer. However, there may have been another hidden but equally important factor at work.

A significant amount of research has examined the effects of the natural environment on people’s thinking and behavior. The work shows that even a small amount of plant life can have a surprisingly large impact on making the world a better place. The recovery rates of patients in hospitals are significantly improved when they are able to see trees from their ward windows,
⁸
and prisoners whose cell windows overlook farmlands and forests report fewer medical problems than others.
⁹
The effects are not just confined to prisoners and patients but extend to everyone. Other studies have examined the relationship between greenery and crime. In perhaps the most ingenious of these, researchers focused their attention on a large public-housing development in Chicago.
¹⁰
The development was especially interesting for two reasons. First, some sections contained a relatively large number of shrubs and trees, while other areas resembled the proverbial concrete jungle. Second, previous to the study the residents had been randomly assigned to apartments in the development, thus ensuring that any differences in crime rates in the two types of areas could not be the result of income, background, or any other such factors. The study yielded impressive results. The parts of the development that contained greenery were associated with 48 percent fewer property crimes and 52 percent fewer violent crimes than those that contained nothing but concrete. The researchers speculated that the greenery may have put people in a good mood and therefore made them less likely to commit crimes.